This was my first trip to SIGGRAPH and, quite frankly, I was a bit under-whelmed. The show seemed to mirror the current perception of a downward trend in the industry. Everyone I spoke with remarked on how the crowds were much smaller than in the past, and I noticed that there were quite a few empty spaces on the exhibit floor. Nevertheless, there were events of note.

Alias|Wavefront consistently drew a huge crowd at the Maya booth, but that might have been because its booth, along with the SGI booth, were both located next to the entrance. SoftImage had, in my opinion, the coolest setup, but Newtek’s announcement of Lightwave 7 stole everyone’s thunder.

While Alias|Wavefront didn’t have anything new to announce with Maya 4 officially shipping a couple of months ago, they had several impressive demonstrations, including one on Final Fantasy. They also demonstrated a new fluid dynamic simulation system that might be released for 4.5. There is also going to be a release of Mental Ray for Maya but I am not sure how seamless the integration is going to be.

SoftImage had a surprise announcement of a new version (version 4.0), in addition to XSI 2.0. The new XSI includes a fur and hair render feature through Mental Ray. I sat in on an XSI class and found that while it had several powerful features, such as its non-linear animation system, a couple of its other features seemed oddly deficient (i.e. its particle system.)

Newtek’s booth seemed to have the most enthusiastic audience, and I was sorry to have missed Meni’s talk. He showed some scene’s from his new short, the Freak, which I really wanted to see. It’s hard to believe the Lightwave is already at version 7.

PMG’s Project Messiah also had quite a gathering. From what I saw it was very powerful, but I don’t think it’s quite ready for prime time -- the application had to be rebooted during a demonstration. Nevertheless, I am extremely interested in it and I’ll be watching releases of it closely. Messiah:render is a full-featured global illumination render, based on the Arnold rendering engine that is to be released shortly. They are also going to support rendering for Maya, SoftImage, and Studio Max.

Discreet’s announcement of Combustion 2.0 was well received. Combustion is a compositing tool that now features a schematic view that before was only found in high-end packages such as Nothing Real’s Shake. Both of these packages offer a workflow that is much faster than Adobe AfterEffects.

Rendering engines were the main new products. Exluna, a company founded by BMRT’s (Blue Moon Rendering Tool’s) author, showcased it’s new Renderman compliant renderer, Entropy. Entropy features a GUI for 3D Studio Max and supports ray-tracing and Global Illumination for about a quarter of the price of Renderman. Another renderer that I got a chance to check out was the Brazil Rendering System from Sputterfish. Brazil fits in seamlessly with 3D Studio Max and looked relatively easy to use. They are hoping to have a release for Maya sometime later this year..

While I was checking out Brazil, I got a chance to sit in with the Major Damage Crew while Joe Alter was giving a custom demo of Shave and A Haircut. I had caught Joe’s demo at the very small and hastily arranged Maya user’s group on Sunday, and was very interested in his product. Shave is impressive to say the least and Joe is committed to making his product work with Maya.

I also spent some time checking out a cloth simulation for 3D Studio Max. Kelseus Cloth seemed easy to use and it was also very fast at solving. Kelseus Cloth also responds to Gravity and Wind in Max. Also this is a first release and they hope to add new features to it soon.

On the hardware side, nVidia’s demonstration of the real-time version of Final Fantasy was fascinating, and I was impressed with their Quadro 2 Go. I am also looking forward their release of the nForce motherboard. I’m in the market for a new computer and I’m curious to see how their mobo stacks up.

One of the booths that had the longest line was the 3q booth. If you could stand the 2 hour minimum wait (I didn’t even think about it), they would capture a 3D image of you and apply to a game model that is compatible with Quake III, Halflife, and Unreal Tournament. The image was burned to a CD that you could take with you.

Muscle and skin simulations were the main focus in most of the seminars. ILM, PDI, and Rhythm and Hues had their own in-house muscle deformation system. I got a few ideas of how to attempt this in Maya, but I don’t know how fast it would be. The set-up on these systems seems to be fairly labor intensive. Most of them mimic the actual muscles attached to a skeleton and a fair degree of physiology seemed to be involved. Also, as the system had a hard time of solving certain actions, there were situations where the animators had to watch what poses they were putting the skeleton into. I also caught Mike Comet’s presentation on how they used Maya on the 3-2-1 Penguins video series. They just released a number of the scripts they used on the Highend3D website

ILM hosted a session on how they destroyed all the planes in Pearl Harbor. They created their own dynamic system that had ties into the Maya API. One of the cool things they showed was a dynamic simulation of a paper airplane flying around in the Maya interface. They also used a Fluid Dynamics system to simulate much of the smoke in that movie.

I also attended some of the Maya Master Classes. Frankly, I don’t think they were quite worth the price overall, but I did pick up some tips on modeling using Sub-Ds, and Jason Scheifler’s class on creating a rigging pipe-line was excellent.

I went to the AWGUA party and the Rhythm and Hues party. Both were held at the Mayan Theater located not too far from the Convention Center. The presentations at the AWGUA party were pretty cool, with Square’s overview of the making of Final Fantasy the most impressive. I bailed on the Rhythm and Hues party before the band started playing. I just couldn’t take the $5 beers, even though I am a big rock-a-billy fan. (Editor's note: To know Kris, is to know this would be true).

On Friday, I received a tour of DreamWorks and, happily, a free lunch. DreamWorks seems like a pretty cool place to work, and they are readying to release their next movie Spirit. Some to the concept art work for it was amazing.

Overall, I had a good time and got some good contacts out of SIGGRAPH 2001. I am looking forward to next year when it is scheduled to be held in San Antonio, Texas. Just remember to prepare for the heat.