fxpodcast #255: SIGGRAPH 2013 – Monday Report

In this special fxpodcast from SIGGRAPH 2013, Mike Seymour and Jeff Heusser have reports from several of the conference sessions and an exclusive announcement from Pixar and The Foundry about Katana and RenderMan.

– Monday is the first real full day of SIGGRAPH, but the trade show had not opened yet. here is this year’s Teapot from RenderMan and Pixar…and it is one of the best in years.

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Come back tomorrow for more coverage of the show floor, or follow us on twitter – both Mike and Jeff are posting from the show:  @mikeseymour, @neonmarg and via @fxguidenews.


 

The Foundry is now shipping Katana with RenderMan included. Mike interviews Simon Robinson, chief scientist and one of the co-founders of The Foundry, Chris Ford, business director for RenderMan at Pixar and Chris Kenessey, chief sales and marketing officer at The Foundry, about this announcement. Although Katana will remain render agnostic, already Katana and RenderMan saw heavy use on Pixar’s short The Blue Umbrella. Listen to the audio for details on licensing and costs.

A scene from The Blue Umbrella.
A scene from The Blue Umbrella.

Animation director and fxphd prof. Lucas Martell discusses the keynote session at SIGGRAPH which saw nine animation heavy-hitters discussing the industry. These were Ron Clements, Pete Docter, Eric Goldberg, Kevin Lima, Mike Mitchell, Chris Sanders, Henry Selick, David Silverman, Kirk Wise.

Sony Pictures Imageworks CTO Rob Bredow offers some thoughts on open source software in the VFX and animation industries. Mike Seymour chaired an open source panel at SIGGRAPH on Sunday, where tools such as Alembic, OpenVDB, Blender, OpenSubdiv and others were discussed along with the trend towards open source contributions from major VFX and animation companies.

Mike and Jeff also talk about several of the SIGGRAPH sessions they were able to see, including an Effects Omelette focusing on Dneg’s city building and fluid sim work for Man of Steel, Pixar Canada’s Partysaurus Rex bubbles, and DreamWorks Animation’s use of Houdini in Rise of the Guardians.

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