SIGGRAPH 2014 is now over for another year, but our coverage is certainly not. This week we’ll have a full SIGGRAPH wrap-up in our special fxguidetv coverage of the event featuring interviews on Isotropix’s Clarisse iFX, Nukeygara’s, Massive, Solid Angle’s Arnold, Next Limit’s Maxwell Render, Houdini Indie, OTOY’s holographic video, Dolby’s new monitor, news from the Job Fair and an interview with ILM on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Next year SIGGRAPH will move to LA, but don’t forget the upcoming SIGGRAPH Asia conference to be held in Shenzhen, China. Meanwhile, enjoy our final reports from the Vancouver conference below.
From the Job Fair
A busy place to be at SIGGRAPH this year was at the Job Fair, with Vancouver fast becoming a central VFX location. Many studios were there, including ILM, Pixar, Dneg, Framestore, MPC, Method Studios, Digital Domain, Imageworks, Image Engine, Animal Logic and Rising Sun Pictures.
Many of the studios held recruitment parties, too, at their own locations, in a ‘Studio Crawl’, or at pubs and clubs around the city.
Soon on fxguidetv we’ll have a look at Image Engine and Animal Logic, plus over at fxphd.com we’ll go more in depth into what the studios are looking for in new employees.
Presentations from The Foundry
As always, The Foundry had a strong presence at SIGGRAPH and live-streamed direct from the showroom floor. You can watch that by logging into the site here.
Imagineer Systems’ new mocha releases
While walking the Exhibition floor, fxguide got a demo of the new mocha releases from Imagineer Systems – mocha Plus and mocha Pro 4.0. Plus allows uses to take control of mocha’s powerful planar tracking and masking tools, along with their 3D camera solver and lens correction tools inside After Effects, while mocha Pro 4.0 is Imagineer’s flagship product with new tools for stereo 3D, customizable keyboard shortcuts, Adobe Premiere support and python scripting.
“We think of mocha Pro 4.0 as our effects facility release,” says Imagineer’s CMO Ross Shain. “To really integrate it into a facility we’ve added that python scripting. We’ve also added the stereo 3D support so you can use planar tracking on both eyes. There are methods out there for stereo tracking in roto, but we’re doing something a little different which is that it actually tracks both eyes and the parralax difference between both eyes. So artists can do stereo, tracking, solving on un-corrected footage, and that workflow supports NUKE and After Effects. There’s also a lot of new customizable keyboard shortcuts so you can make your NUKE profile to your mocha profile. We’ve got improved NUKE and AE exports, and the big thing for editorial is the support for Premiere.”
Shain says they beta tested the update with companies such as Iloura, Park Road Post and Legend3D. You can find out more about the new release in the video below, and also at the website.
Walt Disney Animation Studios’ new short Feast
Director Patrick Osborne showcased his short, Feast, which will play in front of the feature Big Hero 6 opening in November this year. The film is told from a dog’s POV and is a CG/hand-drawn hybrid with a unique animated style. fxguide’s John Montgomery caught up with Osborne after his presentation and we’ll have that full interview on the site in November.
Autodesk at SIGGRAPH
During the conference, Autodesk’s Marcus Nordenstam, inventor of Naiad and now Product Manager of Maya FX, presented his thoughts on visual effects – see the video below. You can also watch a bunch of other Autodesk presentations at their website.
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