I’m doing that thing where one try’s to do a million things at once, like some kind of human blender taking the tiniest of chunks out of each task as I pass by. So, work is getting done, but is this the most efficient I can be? Probably not. Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick obligatory getting excited for SIGGRAPH 2013 post.

Getting to SIGGRAPH has been a lifelong dream of mine ever since this time last year when I first heard about it. Yeah, call me green but being utterly obsessed with CGI (and a life-long pure blooded technophile) I have developed enough knowledge to get myself all excited about new software, tools and techniques, even if I don’t always understand the finer details. Well, replace “don’t always” with “a little bit frequently”. Also, I’m a window drooler. Yep, I can’t afford to even consider 99% of the software and hardware in these shows.

SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival

So, suffice to say I won’t even be getting to SIGGRAPH, unless by some awesome luck I get rich quick. In which case I’ll see you in Hong Kong. Ok, that’s enough rambling. The primary reason I started this post was to share the very spiffy SIGGRAPH 2013 Computer Animation Festival preview video, but alas it is presented in a custom player I can’t embed here. Of course, you can follow the link to feast your eyes. I did manage to find last years, which in my humble opinion, doesn’t have the same omphf, but still exciting all the same.

Real-Time Live

Also looking like it will be an absolute nerdy blast is the Real-Time Live presentations.
Real-time technologies are developing and emerging at a spectacular rate and giving us visual feedback that once would have been thought impossible. State of the art graphics, animation, dynamics, radiosity, huge poly counts – all these things are going real-time in a big way. Can you feel an interactive RT revolution coming? Perhaps in the near future these technologies will be the exact sort of thing that will be testing our new super-fast broadband infrastructures we’re building.

LightWave: Join The Rebellion

And finally, SIGGRAPH is one of those dates that all the 3D graphics software nuts get very excited. It is that time when many of the modelling, animation, and rendering players unveil the next salvo of upgrades. Of course, a key focus, for me, will be on finding out what NewTek/LightWave are up to. It’s something! We want to know now, but we’ll have to wait for an announcement made later this month at the Anaheim, California convention. The below promo poster was uploaded to the LightWave FB page on the 29th of June. LightWave 12? 11.6? Something huge and exciting? If I can get some new modelling tools I’ll be happy enough.