News

The ACM SIGGRAPH election window is now open and will remain open until August 15, 2018.  There are two races being held, one for Treasurer and the other for Director At Large in which the top two candidate will be elected.  Those elected will be starting their terms September 1, 2018. 

Each candidate has created a position paper based on their vision of what they hope to accomplish in their term of office.  The candidates were also asked to do an ACM SIGGRAPH Member profile.  Please read about their positions, position statements and member profile. These documents will be useful for making an informed decision.  Learn about the candidates and cast your vote!

Treasurer Candidates

• Brad Lawrence
  • Position Paper
  • Member Profile
• David Spoelstra
  • Position Paper
  • Member Profile

Director At Large Candidates

• Mashhuda Glencross
  • Position Paper
  • Member Profile
• Evan Hirsch
  • Position Paper
  • Member Profile
• Terrance Masson
  • Position Paper
  • Member Profile
• Paul Strauss
  • Position Paper

Members of ACM SIGGRAPH who are in good standing as of June 1, 2018 have been sent voting information in an email message or letter from Election Services Corporation (ESC). If ACM does not have an email address on file, members will receive voting information via postal mail. Members also have the option of requesting a paper ballot. If you have not received an email from ESC, please contact them at acmsighelp@electionservicescorp.com or toll-free at 1-866-720-4357.

Make an Impression

To provide more young presenters with a platform for sharing innovative ideas and gaining valuable exposure, SIGGRAPH 2018 is introducing the first ever Thesis Fast Forward program. Doctoral students in the final stage of their Ph.D. studies, or Ph.D. degree holders within a year of graduation, are encouraged to submit to this event. The central element of the submission will be a three-minute video presentation by the candidate, explaining the central theme of their thesis, using no more than two supporting slides. The intent is to make the presentation accessible to a non-expert audience, representative of the typical cross-section of SIGGRAPH attendees.

Based on the video submissions and, as a secondary criterion on the provided abstracts, a jury will select up to 12 candidates who will be asked to perform three-minute oral presentations live at a special session at SIGGRAPH 2018. A panel of experts will provide immediate commentary after each live presentation and select a best performance. The live presentations will be judged solely on the content of the live three-minute presentation.

All selected candidates will be awarded an upgradeable Select Conference registration (upon commitment to participate in the live event). Submissions are open through Thursday, 28 June 2018. Finalists for the live event will be notified on Tuesday, 3 July 2018.

https://s2018.siggraph.org/conference/conference-overview/thesis-fast-forward/

Thesis Fast Forward Committee:

• Eftychios Sifakis, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• M. Alex. O. Vasilescu, Associate Director, UCLA Computer Graphics and Vision Lab

Submission Guidelines

The core component of a submission is a presentation video with duration no more than 3 minutes. In this video, the applicants should summarize the key components of their thesis, its merit and potential impact. Up to two presentation slides can be used as an optional backdrop to the presenter, who must be clearly visible in the video. The submission video should be provided via a web link (a link to a video on media sharing website such as YouTube is recommended to avoid encoding issues, but a direct URL to a video file is also acceptable).

The material to be submitted on the EasyChair Website should be a single PDF file, with the following contents:

• A cover page, listing the applicant's name, affiliation, tentative or final dissertation title, and the actual (in the past) or future anticipated date of PhD degree conferral. This date should be no earlier than 1 September 2017, and no later than 31 August 2019.
  The cover page should also list the link to the video submission itself as mentioned earlier.

• An optional addendum of up to two pages can be used to include an extended abstract, in the SIGGRAPH publication format, providing additional context or technical details on the applicant's dissertation work. Not including this extra material will not, in any way, disqualify the applicant from selection, as the video submission is fundamentally the basis on which the selection will be made.

Submission Website : https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=siggraphtff18

By Ian Failes. Republished with permission from Spark CG Society.

You know you’re in a Star Wars film when one of the first big action set-pieces is a thrilling chase scene. Such is the beginning of Solo, where Han (Alden Ehrenreich) and his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) make a getaway aboard a stolen speeder amid the industrial streets of Corellia.

To realize the chase, Solo’s filmmakers elected to film as much of the sequence practically as possible with an actual vehicle on wheels and real sets. The filming was informed by previs from The Third Floor and from stuntvis by the film’s stunts team. Industrial Light & Magic, led by the team in Vancouver, then populated the Corellian environment and crafted CG vehicles and effects for the final shots.

Watch a behind the scenes featurette on Solo.

“They were real speeders with 550 horsepower engines that were switchable front and rear-wheel drive that the stunt guys could actually drive around at full speed around an abandoned power plant,” explains visual effects supervisor Rob Bredow. “Of course, in every shot we had to do digital extensions to fill out the rest of the environment, because it was many miles of roadway that we were shooting on and there was just no way to practically dress all that set.”

At one point, Han guides the speeder down an alley and weaves in and out of obstacles, including other characters, while the speeder chasing him just powers through everything. “Those were real practical bits that were in the roadway, and in some cases we enhanced explosions or we added an extra trooper on a speeder digitally,” says Bredow. “And of course we finished out the rest of the environment at ILM, but those interactions you’re seeing are real world interactions, or at least they are as a starting point.”

Speeder artwork by Jack Dudman and Vincent Jenkins.

To get the right hovering motion of the speeders, ILM tested scenes with reference footage of very fast cars. States Bredow: “I actually did some paint-outs for this. I just painted out the wheels of those, and got a sense of like what kind of suspension, what kind of car, what kind of elevation off the ground felt most satisfying.”

The special effects team, led by Dominic Tuohy, made a speeder with adjustable suspension that reacted to different actions like banking or going off a jump to give that slight hover feel. Then the stunts team also previsualized much of the action in the form of stuntvis.

Corellia’s industrial landscape.

Just about every shot of the speeders where a practical vehicle was used involved digital wheel removal. Several times, too, the entire speeder might be CG due to lighting decisions or if a more dynamic piece of action was required. “The great thing with the real speeders doing the real stunts,” notes Bredow, “was that it was a real stunt as a starting point, to try to make it feel like a real muscle car race.”

Certainly, visual effects artists played a major role in making the sequence possible, but Bredow says the consistent plan was to base everything on, ‘what if they had been able to film this chase for real?’ “Sometimes even on the side of set we’d be roughly painting out the wheels, just so we could imagine what it was going to look like with the wheels gone and make sure we had the right feel of the dynamics of the vehicle. I think it’s possible if we had animated those speeders without using this reference, we might have had the speeders dipped into a corner like an airplane turns, but instead, of course, the real speeders bank towards the outside, lean towards the outside like a car does.”

The dashboard of Han’s stolen speeder. UI designs were handled by Blind.

“That ended up being way more satisfying,” adds Bredow, “perhaps because we’re just all used to seeing cars, and this was a muscle car sequence. This was a real gritty race, and to have the animation be driven in that way ended up feeling the most satisfying.”

All images © Lucasfilm 2018. All Rights Reserved.