After a first Siggraph US last summer I will renew the experience by attending this year’s edition, and complete it with Digipro, a side-event of which I heard a lot of good things. As every year the program is full of incredible talks and speakers and the choice is promising to be difficult.
Digipro
I don’t really know yet what to expect from Digipro but from what I heard this event is more focused on production work and tools with a mix of technical talks and case studies, where Siggraph’s conferences and production panels tends to be more mainstream.
As for the program it will be a first busy day with a Keynote from Jason Smith – VFX Supervisor at ILM, case studies of the procedural environment in The Jungle Book and a presentation of Gaffer by my colleagues from Image Engine, among other promising talks!
Siggraph: the headache of preparing the perfect schedule.
Siggraph Production Sessions, which are in-depth presentations by a pannel of VFX supervisors of the work done by their team on the biggest blockbusters of the year, are usually my favorite category of talk at Siggraph. This year Captain America: Civil War, The Jungle Book and Star Wars: The Force Awakens should be the most popular “Live Action/VFX” sessions.
The “Talks” program will also provides a lot of interesting content, including “Dancing Trees” a series of talks about how the team at Disney, Pixar and MPC respectively created their environments in Zootopia, Good Dinosaur and The Jungle Book. Square Enix will also be there presenting a lot of sessions about the Final Fantasy XV video-game, which might be interesting to see after having worked the past 6 months on their new Kingsglaive Full-CG movie at Image Engine!
Obviously this only represents a very tiny part of what the Siggraph has to offer, I’m also looking for some big announcement in the Exhibition Hall – with Isotropix which should finally release their new version of Clarisse – and all the side-events and famous Siggraph’s parties!
The full program is available here: s2016.siggraph.org/programs
See you there!
