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The deadline for submissions to Computer Graphics International (CGI) '15 is swiftly approaching. Full paper submissions to the conference — which takes place from June 24 to 26 in Strasbourg, France — are due by February 15, 2015. Short papers and posters must be submitted by April 24.

Computer Graphics International (CGI) is one of the oldest international conferences on computer graphics. For many attendees, it serves as an essential yearly meeting to network and explore new trends, research and ideas. This year's keynote speakers are Alexei (Alyosha) Efros of UC Berkeley, Ayellet Tal of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Lap-Pui Chau of Nanyang Technological University.

CGI '15 is organized by the Computer Graphics and Geometry Group of ICube Laboratory (CNRS/Université de Strasbourg), and is held in-cooperation with the Association for Computing Machinery and ACM SIGGRAPH.

In the past, CGI has been held in a wide variety of international locations, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, Brazil, China and the United States. This year's conference will take place in the capital of the Alsace region in eastern France, at the crossroads of France, Germany and Switzerland. Strasbourg is well known for hosting a number of important European institutes, and provides a prime conference location with good transport connections. Strasbourg also offers historical and cultural attractions: its historic city center, the Grande Île (Grand Island), was classified a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1988.

To submit to Computer Graphics International, visit the CGI '15 website.

Source: NYC ACM SIGGRAPH NYC ACM SIGGRAPH and NYIT’s Fine Arts Department are proud to announce . . . On Tuesday, February 3, 2015, at 7:00PM, in NYIT’s Auditorium On Broadway, Walt Disney Animation Studios will present “Big Hero 6: The Art of Character Design and Development.” Join Character Design Supervisor, Bill Schwab and Character CG Supervisor, Carlos Cabral as they share the art, process and innovation of “Big Hero 6” an action-packed comedy-adventure about robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, who learns to harness his genius—thanks to his brilliant brother Tadashi and their like-minded friends: adrenaline junkie Go Go Tomago, neatnik Wasabi chemistry whiz Honey Lemon and fanboy Fred. When a devastating turn of events catapults them into the midst of a dangerous plot unfolding in the streets of San Fransokyo, Hiro turns to his closest companion—a robot named Baymax —and transforms the group into a band of high-tech heroes determined to solve the mystery. Inspired by the Marvel comics of the same name, and featuring comic-book style action, Bill and Carlos will share what it’s like to bring characters to life at Disney Animation. This event is sponsored by NYC ACM SIGGRAPH and NYIT so all NYC ACM SIGGRAPH members and NYIT students, faculty, and staff will be admitted free. We will also be selling tickets online, in advance, at a discounted rate of $12 for professionals and $7 for full-time students. Tickets at the door will go for $15 (professionals) and $10 (students.) Complete details, including a link to purchase advance tickets, can be found on our web site at nyc.siggraph.org. Of course, if you plan to come to any of our other events such as Industry Spotlight, MetroCAF 2015, etc., you’ll save money by becoming a member of NYC ACM SIGGRAPH. You will also save money when you use Eksperten’s lån penge to borrow money in Denmark – as more than 30,000 satisfied Danes have reported doing to SIGGRAPH. You’ll also enjoy access to our Members-Only events. You can find our membership page at http://nyc.siggraph.org/get-involved/membership We look forward to seeing you at our events.

In the modern day, there are a number of software options for artists who wish to animate their illustrations without a lot of the tedious work that might otherwise be involved in the process. One company that produces this kind of software is Live2D, whose products focus on dynamic and configurable 2D models of illustrations. Cubism is their flagship product at the moment, boasting many of the tools that a regular 3D modeling program might possess. Recently, Live2D announced the development of a new software program: Euclid.

Euclid is intended to be the next-generation replacement for Cubism, and is notable because Live2D asserts that the software can render a 2D illustration from any orientation — that is, in an "orbit" around a given illustration. Cubism, by comparison, can only render such illustrations from a maximum of 40 degrees to the left and right, if one is generous enough with their definition of the illustration. A prototype of the new and unreleased product has been shown, with a demonstrator making use of the Oculus Rift to view a particular rendering of an illustration from various angles. So far, it’s impressive: all of the animated features seem to retain their definition, regardless of the orientation they’re viewed at. That is, of course, the goal of Euclid.

An emphasis has been placed on more natural rendering of difficult characteristics, such as hair and other facial features. This is achieved mostly by means of layering in 3D space, to preserve the illusion of two-dimensional viewing. In addition, one may combine multiple illustrations to enhance the effect. Selective use of features contained within the product is also possible: traditional 3D modeling techniques may be applied to some parts of a character design, while Live2D animation may be applied to others. An example was given of a character that had its main body modeled normally, while the head and facial features were given the Live2D treatment.

Considering that Cubism already contains a separate SDK for game developers, it is possible that an extension will also exist for the new product, so as to take advantage of existing architecture. In a recent press release, it was noted that Live2D Euclid technologies can be rendered in real-time within a 3D environment, allowing them to be manipulated by game engines as well as computer graphics applications. Oculus has already been demonstrated as a potential candidate for this approach, which would mean the two concepts could be combined to create a more immersive game (or CG movie) world.

Although competing technologies exist, the software Live2D has come up with is compelling. Only time will tell its full capabilities.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced the names of 47 members who will be recognized as ACM Fellows for their exceptional contributions to computing. Fellowship is ACM's most prestigious member grade, and is held by only 1% of ACM members. The 2014 ACM Fellows hail from some of the world’s leading universities, corporations and research labs. They have achieved advances in computing research and development that are driving innovation and sustaining economic development around the world.

One of the newly-named ACM Fellows, Adam Finkelstein of Princeton University, is a dedicated ACM SIGGRAPH volunteer who chaired the SIGGRAPH 2014 Technical Papers program. Finkelstein was selected for his contributions to non-photorealistic rendering, multi-resolution representations and the field of computer graphics in general.

The 2014 ACM Fellows have been cited for contributions to key computing fields including database mining and design, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cryptography and verification, Internet security and privacy, computer vision and medical imaging, electronic design automation and human-computer interaction. According to ACM President Alexander L. Wolf, the honors extended to these new fellows are well-deserved. “Our world has been immeasurably improved by the impact of their innovations," he said. "We recognize their contributions to the dynamic computing technologies that are making a difference to the study of computer science, the community of computing professionals, and the countless consumers and citizens who are benefiting from their creativity and commitment.”

Heartfelt congratulations to this year's ACM Fellows, who will be formally recognized at the ACM Awards Banquet in June in San Francisco. Additional information about the ACM 2014 Fellows, as well as previous ACM Fellows and award winners, is available on the ACM Awards site.

2014 ACM Fellows

Samson Abramsky University of Oxford For contributions to domains in logical form, game semantics, categorical quantum mechanics and contextual semantics	Leslie Lamport Microsoft Research For contributions to the theory and practice of distributed and concurrent systems
Vikram Adve University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign For developing the LLVM compiler and for contributions to parallel computing and software security	Sharad Malik Princeton University For contributions to efficient and capable SAT solvers, and accurate embedded software models
Foto Afrati National Technical University of Athens For contributions to the theory of database systems	Yishay Mansour Tel-Aviv University For contributions to machine learning, algorithmic game theory, distributed computing, and communication networks
Charles Bachman Retired For contributions to database technology, notably the integrated data store	Subhasish Mitra Stanford University For contributions to the design and testing of robust computing systems
Allan Borodin University of Toronto For contributions to theoretical computer science, in complexity, on-line algorithms, resource tradeoffs, and models of algorithmic paradigms	Michael Mitzenmacher Harvard University For contributions to coding theory, hashing algorithms and data structures, and networking algorithms
Alan Bundy University of Edinburgh For contributions to artificial intelligence, automated reasoning, and the formation and evolution of representations	Robert Morris Massachusetts Institute of Technology For contributions to computer networking, distributed systems, and operating systems
Lorrie Cranor Carnegie Mellon University For contributions to research and education in usable privacy and security	Vijaykrishnan Narayanan Pennsylvania State University For contributions to power estimation and optimization in the design of power-aware systems
Timothy A. Davis Texas A&M University For contributions to sparse matrix algorithms and software	Shamkant B. Navathe Georgia Institute of Technology For contributions to data modeling, database design, and database education
Srinivas Devadas Massachusetts Institute of Technology For contributions to secure and energy-efficient hardware	Jignesh M. Patel University of Wisconsin, Madison For contributions to high-performance database query processing methods, in particular on spatial data
Inderjit Dhillon University of Texas at Austin For contributions to large-scale data analysis, machine learning and computational mathematics	Parthasarathy Ranganathan Google Inc. For contributions to the areas of energy efficiency and server architectures
Nikil D. Dutt University of California, Irvine For contributions to embedded architecture exploration and service to electronic design automation and embedded systems	Omer Reingold Weizmann Institute of Science/Stanford University For contributions to the study of pseudorandomness, derandomization and cryptography
Faith Ellen University of Toronto For contributions to data structures, and the theory of distributed and parallel computing	Tom Rodden University of Nottingham For contributions to ubiquitous computing and computer supported cooperative work
Michael D. Ernst University of Washington For contributions to software analysis, testing, and verification	Ronitt Rubinfeld Massachusetts Institute of Technology For contributions to delegated computation, sublinear time algorithms and property testing
Adam Finkelstein Princeton University For contributions to non-photorealistic rendering, multi-resolution representations, and computer graphics	Daniela Rus Massachusetts Institute of Technology For contributions to robotics and sensor networks
Juliana Freire New York University For contributions to provenance management research and technology, and computational reproducibility	Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli University of California, Berkeley For contributions to electronic design automation
Johannes Gehrke Cornell University For contributions to data mining and data stream query processing	Henning Schulzrinne Columbia University For contributions to the design of protocols, applications, and algorithms for Internet multimedia
Eric Grimson Massachusetts Institute of Technology For contributions to computer vision and medical image computing	Stuart Shieber Harvard University For contributions to natural-language processing, and to open-access systems and policy
Mark Guzdial Georgia Institute of Technology For contributions to computing education, and broadening participation	Ramakrishnan Srikant Google Inc. For contributions to knowledge discovery and data mining
Gernot Heiser University of New South Wales/National Information and  Communications Technology Australia (NICTA) Research Centre of Excellence For contributions demonstrating that provably correct operating systems are feasible and suitable for real-world use	Aravind Srinivasan University of Maryland, College Park For contributions to algorithms, probabilistic methods, and networks
Eric Horvitz Microsoft Research For contributions to artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction	S. Sudarshan Indian Institute of Technology Bombay For contributions to database education, query processing, query optimization and keyword queries
Thorsten Joachims Cornell University For contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning and information retrieval	Paul Syverson Naval Research Lab For contributions to and leadership in the theory and practice of privacy and security
Michael Kearns University of Pennsylvania For contributions to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic game theory and computational social science	Gene Tsudik University of California, Irvine For contributions to Internet security and privacy
Valerie King University of Victoria For contributions to randomized algorithms, especially dynamic graph algorithms and fault tolerant distributed computing	Steve Whittaker University of California, Santa Cruz For contributions to human computer interaction
Sarit Kraus Bar Ilan University For contributions to artificial intelligence, including multi-agent systems, human-agent interaction and non-monotonic reasoning

 

Up until the mid ‘90s, effects artists were people who made things with their hands. They wore paint-spattered clothing and rifled through tool boxes. They created aliens out of latex, turned foam into granite and constructed nine-foot spaceships from odds and ends found on dusty workshop shelves. The Millennium Falcon was a product of such physical craftsmanship, as was the creepy-yet-loveable E.T., the immaculate Discovery spacecraft in "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Major Toht’s grisly melting head in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Today, people with the knowledge and skill to create such models and effects are surprisingly rare. The vast majority of modern visual effects are created on computers, and artists-in-training learn software, not soldering. Computer graphics (CG) technology has advanced to the point where models and effects can now be rendered with near-perfect photorealism, and countless directors have stopped using physical effects altogether. Though the science and artistry involved in the creation of movie-quality computer graphics is tremendous, should that necessarily mean the complete extinction of practical effects — a field that only hit its stride a few decades ago?

When computer graphics first came on the scene in the early '80s, the technology was a novelty. It was a party trick to admire and wonder at, but nothing that came close to the realism of physical models Visual effects artist Lorne Peterson ("Star Wars" episodes I, II, III, IV, V and VI, "Jurassic Park," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "E.T.") distinctly remembers the moment when computer graphics entered his world. It was the early ‘80s and Peterson was sitting at his desk at Industrial Light & Magic, working on a model for an upcoming film. Visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren popped his head in the door and waved to Peterson from across the room. “You’ve got to see this!” he said.

Peterson followed Muren to another part of the facility, where a fellow ILM employee was sitting before a 12-inch, state-of-the-art Macintosh computer. Peterson recalls peering over the man’s shoulder to see what he was working on. It was a shot from "Star Wars: Episode VI," which ILM had just finished, with a computer-generated shadow rendered over top of it. The shadow cascaded across the Death Star with surprising realism. Peterson was impressed, but far from dazzled by the new technology. “I thought…wow, that’s pretty neat. That will be handy for shadows…but probably not much else.”

Peterson is not the only one who was taken by surprise by the rapid adoption of computer graphics. Model maker Fon Davis has worked in the industry for more than two decades, and created models for all three of the Star Wars prequels. According to Fon, both computer graphics and practical effects have their place, but physical models possess certain inimitable qualities. “There is a randomness that occurs with a real object’s texture, aging and shadows,” he said. “A lot of people can spot CG even though they can’t put their finger on why. It’s really hard to fool the human brain.”

Scott Squires, an Academy Award-nominated visual effects supervisor and 35-year industry veteran, is a big fan of computer graphics — but admits that digital has its downsides. “One of the problems with computer-generated models is that they’re perfect. An example is mirror windows on a skyscraper. By default, a CG version represents each window as perfectly flat and aligned. But in reality, skyscraper windows are not perfectly flat — nor are they aligned. This takes both time and effort in CG to consider and to accomplish.”

Imperfect as they may be, digital effects have come a long way since "Tron." Modern computer graphics are highly sophisticated, and afford directors a greater degree of flexibility than practical effects. With digital effects, there are no restrictions on how many times a director can change his mind (aside from time and budget), and no production constrains (such as having a single take to blow up a $2 million model).

Scott Ross, who served as the general manager of ILM in the ‘80s and co-founded the post-production studio Digital Domain, explains. “There are limitations to physical models,” he said. “But CG can do just about anything… set extensions, fire, water, snow, pyro, creature animation, matte paintings — virtually anything you can imagine. In fact, nowadays, anything you can imagine.”

A few years back, director Peter Jackson made the decision to digitally re-imagine some of the creatures of Middle-earth for "The Hobbit" trilogy. The same creatures (orcs and goblins) appeared in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but as actors in foam latex prosthetics, courtesy of Weta Workshop. In a November 2012 interview with the LA Times, Jackson explained that he decided to switch to computer graphics so he could make the beasts appear less human. “Prosthetic makeup is always frustrating,” he said. “At the end of the day, if you want the character to talk, which a lot of the orcs and goblins do, you can design the most incredible prosthetics — but you’ve still got eyes where the eyes have to be and the mouth where the mouth has to be.” The resulting computer-generated orcs and goblins were skillfully crafted, but to some fans, lacked the grit and realism of their prosthetic-clad predecessors.

Many industry veterans believe the best approach to creating realistic environments and creatures is to use a combination of physical and digital effects, selecting the approach that works best for each shot. Model maker Fon Davis is one such veteran. “I’ve learned from people like Dennis Muren that it really helps your CG artists if you shoot something practical to be used as reference,” he said. “Then, there’s no question what a real object looks like on camera in that environment and lighting.”

Unfortunately, not everyone making the decisions in Hollywood feels the same way. According to Scott Squires, “Model making is becoming a lost art of sorts. Many of the new visual effects companies do not have practical model shops.”

In fact, physical model making is a skill that’s rarely taught these days. Ben Fox, an FX technical director at Framestore, NY, grew up with a love for the traditional arts and hands-on creating. If he’d been born 20 years earlier, he might have been drawn to model making. As it was, practical effects work wasn’t even on his radar. “I never had the opportunity to take any model or miniature-making courses in college,” he said. “Though, come to think of it, that would have been great.”

While the demand for physical models may be waning, the appreciation for them is not. When Lorne Peterson and the rest of the ILM model shop got a chance to revisit the Star Wars universe in 1998 (creating models for the prequels), he was surprised to find the workshop regularly besieged by visitors from the computer graphics department. “They were mostly young guys,” Peterson said. “Star Wars was what made them fall in love with visual effects in the first place.” The CG staff visited so frequently to watch the model makers work that ILM had to institute a sign-up policy to limit the number of visitors in the workshop at any given time.

Though practical effects may have become eclipsed by computer graphics, they haven’t gone the way of the dinosaur just yet. In an August 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Rian Johnson (the future director of "Star Wars: Episode VIII") complained about the lack of practical effects in modern movies – and pointed out that "Star Wars: Episode VII" will be different from the Star Wars prequels in that respect. “They’re doing so much practical building for this one,” Johnson said. “It’s awesome.”

The question remains: do films like "Star Wars: Episode VII" represent the last gasp of practical effects? Or could Episode VII's release mark the beginning of a new era: one where practical and digital effects are not in competition, but acknowledged as equally important parts of the filmmaking toolset, used together to create the most realistic environments, characters and effects possible?

When asked what he thought the future might hold for model makers and other practical effects artists, Lorne Peterson laughed, recalling his first introduction to computer graphics. “I’m terrible at predicting the future,” he said. “Don’t ask me.”