Past SIGGRAPH Technical Papers Presenters Recognized by the Academy

Paul Debevec

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its scientific and technical achievements award recipients who will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation this year.  According to Paul Debevec, Vice-President of ACM SIGGRAPH from the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, several of these awards recognize computer graphics innovations originally published or presented at SIGGRAPH conferences.

“It’s wonderful to see some of SIGGRAPH’s brightest researchers being honored for contributions which have impacted the motion picture industry,” says Debevec – who also is a 2010 sci-tech award winner.  “In many cases this recognition follows years of difficult and complex work.”

Here are the details on the SIGGRAPH Technical Paper presenters who will be recognized: 

To Thomas Lokovic and Eric Veach for their influential research and publication of the fundamental concepts of deep shadowing technology.  The technique was first presented at SIGGRAPH 2000. 

Providing a functional and efficient model for the storage of deep opacity information, this technology was widely adopted as the foundation of early deep compositing pipelines.

http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/deepshadows/

To Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan for their formalization and reference implementation of the concepts behind physically based rendering, as shared in their book “Physically Based Rendering.”  The book explains, formalizes, synthesizes, and implements over one hundred articles from the SIGGRAPH technical papers program including several articles by the book’s authors.

Physically based rendering has transformed computer graphics lighting by more accurately simulating materials and lights, allowing digital artists to focus on cinematography rather than the intricacies of rendering. First published in 2004, “Physically Based Rendering” is both a textbook and a complete source-code implementation that has provided a widely adopted practical roadmap for most physically based shading and lighting systems used in film production.

http://www.pbrt.org/

                                  

SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING AWARD (ACADEMY PLAQUE)

To Eric Veach for his foundational research on efficient Monte Carlo path tracing for image synthesis.   Key pillars of this work appeared art SIGGRAPH 95, “Optimally combining sampling techniques for Monte Carlo rendering”, and SIGGRAPH 97, “Metropolis light transport” (both co-authored by Leonidas Guibas.). 

Physically based rendering has transformed computer graphics lighting by more accurately simulating materials and lights, allowing digital artists to focus on cinematography rather than the intricacies of rendering. In his 1997 Ph.D. thesis and related publications, Veach formalized the principles of Monte Carlo path tracing and introduced essential optimization techniques, such as multiple importance sampling, which make physically based rendering computationally feasible.

http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/combine/

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/metro/

For more details on all of these awards, click here.

Jon Peddie Research Releases Analysis on Computer Graphics Industry

**The CG market will exceed $150 billion in 2013
**Industry has had 16.5% growth for past 28 years

The computer graphics industry has been a growth industry since it was established the late 1970s. Weathering the storms of the recession of 2009, the CG industry is back on track and showing new invigorated vitality and potential.

The computer graphics hardware market was worth $59 billion in 2009 and should exceed $63 billion in 2010.

In 2009 the CG software market was worth $11 billion (not counting services, maintenance and other aspects) and should grow to $11.6 billion in 2010 as the industry shakes off the remaining effects of the recession and starts replacing software tools.

As a result of the pull back due to the recession, more people will be buying computer graphics software programs and we will see the development of traditional segments like CAD/CAM expand as new design approaches in automotive, aerospace, and architecture are brought forth. Visualization, a market that has been almost dormant for the past few years is poised now for great expansion due to exciting and lower cost technologies.

Software for making movies, computer games, high-style products, and simulations of products and activities too expensive or too dangerous to test in reality is exploiting the features of today’s CG software. The result will be s amazing realism and real time capabilities in the next generation of films and designs.

The demand for programmers, artists, scientists, and designers has picked up again and firms are actively looking for people who can use and exploit these new programs and their associated hardware accelerators. The economic recession has caused a slow down but it’s going to look like a small bump in the road by 2013.

We are seeing new opportunities growing out of more mainstream applications for the web and consumer applications. The web is growing as a distribution medium for graphics content which in turn encourages people to pick up the tools, learn then, create content for pleasure, and even look for jobs in the field. What used to be a very closed society of experts is opening up.

Given these trends, we see the rate of growth continuing to grow.

Analysis provided to SIGGRAPH by Jon Peddie Research