Siggraph 08 Monday

I'm in Los Angeles this week attending Siggraph so I decided to post my comments on the show each day here on my blog. I arrived in LA around noon after an uneventful flight (the best kind). I was hoping to get over to the show in time to catch Ed Catmul's talk, but travel time, hotel check-in, etc, prevented that so I missed the first talk I was planning to attend. Once I got my credentials, I met up with a friend, Josh Stratton, and we talked about the week and the sessions we were each planning to attend.

Next I headed to a session on real-time rendering hosted by ATi/AMD. I won't go into too much detail, since you can download the talks online, but I will say that I was pretty impressed with the effects that the guys at Blizzard talked about. You can grab all the talk notes here:

http://ati.amd.com/developer/techreports.html

After the session was over, I headed down to the Shrine Theater to attend the Autodesk User Group meeting. It was a good show with Autodesk showing off some of the new features that they're adding to the latest versions of their various software packages. I was especially impressed by the additions that they showed off in the new Mudbox software, and I also enjoyed see all of the stereoscopic footage that they showed - clips from lots of recent movies in 3D. They also showed a bunch of new tools that they're adding to Maya and Toxic to make it easier to work with and tune stereo movie footage. Neat stuff!