We are excited to join SIGGRAPH for the 2021 virtual conference. It has long been an annual highlight in our calendar, whether in person or online, so we are looking forward to connecting with everyone and sharing what we have been working on.
A group of our top researchers, artists, engineers and leadership will be presenting during the conference, so we hope you will join us for their sessions live or check out their research papers on demand. Each talk will include exclusive insights into our latest technical and artistic achievements.
Our presentations will span the breadth of VFX, from a deep dive into Godzilla vs. Kong to a Marvel Studios panel breaking down the VFX in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Meerkat featuring in the Electronic Theater Directors' Special Session, and our CEO Prem Akkaraju joining Eric Iverson from Amazon Web Services for his keynote address.
Our research team are presenting three technical papers, “Spectral Imaging in Production”, “Simulating Cloth Using Bilinear Elements”, and “Learning Active Quasistatic Physics-based Models from Data”, which will be available on demand from Monday 2nd August to Friday 29th October.
Whether you are there to learn, to teach, or to find like-minded people—we hope to connect with you.
We will continue to update this page with the latest information about our schedule.
To get in touch for anything SIGGRAPH related, our contacts are as follows:
Media enquiries: publicity@wetafx.co.nz
Job opportunities: recruitment@wetafx.co.nz
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SIGGRAPH 2021 will run virtually from Monday 9th August to Friday 13th Aug 2021:
- Conference: Monday 9th to Friday 13th August
- Exhibition: Tuesday 10th to Thursday 12th August
Access on-demand with Select Registration Types:
- Tuesday 2nd August to Friday 29th October
See the full programme or register here.
TALKS AND APPEARANCES
Monday 9th August
Production Session: Hollow Earth and Revisiting Kong
- 2:00pm-3:00pm PDT
- Weta Digital presenter: Kevin Smith
- VFX Supervisor for Godzilla vs. Kong, Kevin Smith, will discuss how Weta Digital worked hand-in-hand with filmmakers to visualise Kong's story moments and the film's epic landscapes, from utilising film techniques that are over fifty years old, to new innovations that made Kong more human.
Q&A: Hollow Earth and Revisiting Kong
- Weta Digital panellist: Kevin Smith
- A moderated Q&A with a follow-up discussion from the Production Session presentation. Hollow Earth and Revisiting Kong.
Tuesday 10th August
WetaM: Reimagining VFX Production in the Cloud (presented by Autodesk Vision Series)
- 10:00am-10:30am PDT
- Weta Digital panellist: Prem Akkaraju
- Weta Digital's Prem Akkaraju and Autodesk's Diana Colella discuss the future of cloud production and offer a behind-the-scenes look at the partnership between Weta Digital and Autodesk.
The Making of Marvel Studios’ WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki
- 2:00pm-3:00pm PDT
- Weta Digital panellist: Charlie Tait
- Join Marvel Studios in presenting their first ever episodic streaming series. The teams that worked on WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki will take SIGGRAPH audiences through their VFX journeys as they discuss some of their shows' most innovative visual effects.
- Weta Digital’s VFX Supervisor for The Falcon and the Winter Solider, Charlie Tait, will share insights into our work, including the first episode’s explosive opening canyon fight scene.
Wednesday 11th August
Presented by Amazon Web Services: Through the Looking Glass: The Next Reality for Content Production
- 8:00am-9:00am PDT
- Weta Digital panellist: Prem Akkaraju
- There is an increasingly high demand for content creation in the industry. Creative professionals are being asked to produce content at higher resolutions and with far more complexity, and audiences everywhere are demanding more of it. Creative studios are looking for new ways to accelerate their content creation pipelines, hire the best talent, and provide flexibility for their teams in order to accelerate content production. Join AWS and special guests from Amazon Studios, Company 3, Epic Games, Netflix, and Weta Digital to learn how cloud technology is helping professionals in creative industries around the world tackle today’s challenges and meet the increased demand for high-fidelity content.
Birds of a Feather: USD, Hydra and OpenSubdiv: Pixar's Open Source Meetup
- 2:00pm-4:00pm PDT
- Join Pixar's discussion with the developers and users of Universal Scene Description (USD), Hydra and OpenSubdiv, along with our very own Sander van der Steen and other vendors and practitioners who will showcase the work done in the past year and the plans ahead.
Thursday 12th August
Computer Animation Festival: Electronic Theater Directors’ Special Session
- 2:30pm-3:30pm PDT
- Weta Digital panellist: Keith Miller
- Hear about the making of some of this year's incredible Electronic Theater selections. Panelists include: Pixar Animation Studios' Aphton Corbin ("Twenty Something"), Pôle 3D's Hugo Caby ("Migrants"), Weta Digital's Keith Miller ("Meerkat"), and ESMA's Maxime Le Chapelain ("I'm a Pebble").
RESEARCH PAPERS ON-DEMAND:
Course: Spectral Imaging in Production
- Weta Digital presenters: Andrea Weidlich, Thomas Mansencal and Anders Langlands
- The course discusses spectral data as a more natural way of capturing light interaction and its usage in a modern movie production pipeline. Various topics will be discussed, ranging from virtual production to data handling over rendering and experiences we made with spectral data in a production environment.
- Prerequisites: The audience is expected to have a basic knowledge about light transport and path tracing as well as having a minimal understanding of lights and camera response.
- Intended Audience: We imagine the audience to be of a wide range of different disciplines, from industry researchers focusing on light transport to practitioners from the video game and VFX fields as well as film enthusiasts in general.
Talk: Simulating Cloth Using Bilinear Elements
- Weta Digital presenters: Eston Schweickart and Xiao Zhai
- We propose a method to simulate cloth dynamics on quadrilateral meshes directly, drawing on the well-studied Koiter thin sheet model to define consistent elastic energies for linear and bilinear elements. The algorithm elides the need for artifact-prone geometric mapping and has computation times similar to its fully triangular counterpart.
Technical paper: Learning active quasistatic physics-based models from data
- Weta Digital presenters: Gergely Klár and Eftychios Sifakis
- We design a differentiable quasistatic simulator to learn a low-dimensional control space for active models, reconstruct training poses, generalise to unseen poses, and enable further physics-based edits on the output.