Immerse yourself in the world's most innovative and stimulating interactive real-time animation and graphics. As part of the Computer Animation Festival, an international jury selected submissions from several areas, including games, animation, performance, and visualization. Real-Time Live! is the premiere showcase for the latest trends and techniques for pushing the boundaries of interactive visuals.
Currently in the video game industry, the holy grail of rendering is achieving ultra realistic visual quality while maintaining a consistent 60 frames per second. However, the cost of doing so means having half the time to construct an image when compared to simply running at 30 fps. Most 30 fps games roughly split up their rendering time in half, standard scene and alpha rendering, and all the other glamorous post processing effects and shadows. This inevitably makes it extremely difficult for game studios to achieve high quality visual images with post processing and dynamic shadows while maintaining a consistent 60 frames per second. Video games that run at 30 fps suffer from very noticeable motion "flickering" artifacts due to fast movements of objects and/or the camera. One common technique to help remedy this flickering artifact is to introduce motion blur. In one way this technique helps smooth out the perceived motion of objects, but is only able to compensate properly relative to the virtual camera. In other words, the game does not know where the user's eyes are focused to and tracking, so in practice in interactive applications, the images tend to be more blurry all the time even in areas where the user's eye is tracking an object's motion and expecting it to be sharp. Running an application at 60 fps on a 60 hertz display eliminates multiple expositions of a single frame to the eye, reducing "flickering" artifacts and increasing sharpness of the moving objects under the eye tracking conditions. Motion blur only needs to be added to compensate for motions in the image that move faster then the eye can track. Figure 1 shows the difference in motion from a 30 fps rendering image, 30 fps with motion blur, and the 60 fps respectively on a 60 hertz display. Film typically has an easier work around to this problem because of the nature of the entertainment medium not being user interactive. The presentation of shots, usage of depth of field, and limiting the use of fast motions around the focal point are common techniques that are used because the user's eye can be guided to focus on certain parts of the image. Each shot is tuned specifically assuming the user's eye is focusing on certain material, thus avoiding the problem completely. The proposed solution is a novel technique that combines the best of both high quality rendering at 30 fps with the natural motion of objects refreshing at 60 fps, introducing very minimal overhead in terms of memory and performance. The basic concept is to approximate the middle frame between what has previously rendered and what is currently being constructed and present it as the new "predicted" image exactly in the middle of rendering at a 30 fps rate, thus empowering a product to still "feel" as if it is refreshing at 60. Televisions use a similar trick to achieve refresh rates near 120 hertz. However, for video games, more information is present regarding the frames construction, such as depth and velocity, and creating the predicted frame can be significantly simplified. This proposed technique is useful for all real-time user interactive applications to help guarantee that a very high quality of rendering is achieved, by allowing more time to construct a frame, but still refresh at a higher rate such as 60 frames per second. Additionally, further techniques are considered such as rendering more static / slow moving parts of the scene at an even lower refresh rate, such as 15 fps, because some tests have shown that the predicted images are "good enough" approximations of the slower moving data from the user's perspective. This would thereby increase the time an application would have to construct a frame, and still maintain 60 frames per second. Also, always maintaining 60 fps by automatically presenting more predicted frames during the instances that the game slows down. This would additionally balance visual quality of fast moving objects with refresh rate consistency.
Welcome to the SIGGRAPH 2010 Computer Animation Festival, the international event that continues to be the premier place where creativity and innovation meets technology and industry. For 2010, we are proud to present a unique mix of independent creations and works by prominent production houses and studios, a mix of personal visions and mainstream computer animations and visual effects. Our distinguished jury reviewed hundreds of entries and assembled a selection of works with the highest value of originality, craft, storytelling, experimentation, and/or technology. The jury voted on submissions strictly within categories, which proved to be a good system for comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. We formalized 10 submission categories: Computer Animation Shorts, Music Videos, TV and Web Commercials, Visualizations and Simulations, Student Projects, Animated Feature Films, Visual Effects for Short Films and TV Programs, Visual Effects for Live-Action Feature Films, Real-Time Animation, and Miscellaneous. And for the first time in SIGGRAPH history, we required that all projects must be submitted online in final resolution, even works in high-definition digital format. No tapes, no hard disks, just the good old internet. Also for 2010, we are reinstating the Electronic Theater, the tribal SIGGRAPH experience that presents an identical program three nights in a row. It includes most of the jury selections. We have assembled a few Special Screenings that we know you will enjoy: TV Commercials and Cinematics, Long Shorts, and Student Projects. We're presenting an impressive collection of cutting-edge and visionary Production Sessions that complement the festival screenings. And we hope that you enjoy the new Animation Clinic, where industry leaders and masters review student projects and offer creative, production, technical, and career advice. Last but not least: the Live Real-Time Demos will surely contribute to making the SIGGRAPH 2010 Computer Animation Festival a memorable experience. Don't miss them!
In this course, senior members of ILM and Lucasarts describe the motivation, experiences, and lessons learned in integrating film and game technologies at the Lucas companies. The presentation starts with a quick overview of the two companies, their new combined facility in the Presidio, and some of their goals and challenges for building a unified base of technology. The discussion then turns to Zeno - the shared digital studio software framework - and the speakers present a series of case studies on topics such as level editing, effects authoring, animation blending, rendering, likeness capture, and mocap. The session closes with a diagnosis of what worked and what didn't, plus discussion of some of the cultural, procedural, and communication hurdles encountered along the way.
It has been a long journey from the days of multicolored sprites on tiled block backgrounds to the immersive 3D environments of modern games. What used to be a job for a single game creator is now a multifaceted production involving staff from every creative discipline. The next generation of console and home computer hardware is going to bring a revolutionary leap in available computing power; a teraflop (trillion floating-point operations per second) or more will be on tap from commodity hardware. This leap in power will bring with it a leap in expectations, both on the part of the consumer and the creative professional.
