First, a quick refresher. What is SIGGRAPH? SIGGRAPH is a conference devoted to the exploration and endorsement of new technologies in the computer graphics industry. The name stands for Special Interest Group for Computer GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques. The conference itself is run by a group called ACM SIGGRAPH. This year the event was hosted in L.A. from July 30th to August 3rd. Next year's is planned a little closer to home in Vancouver. If you're wanting to go, mark your calendars for August 12th to the 16th.
With that little bit of information, it's easy to say "Oh, that's neat." And keep moving on. But you don't want to overlook this conference. It's the biggest deal there is in the world of CG. This year more than 16,000 people attended (according to Wikipedia), and you can bet that out of those 16,000 you would have found the industry's leaders. And only some of them were at booths or giving talks.
Blender was there giving a talk on Cosmo's Laundromat and the Open Source Pipeline they used for the development. Disney animator and legend Floyd Norman was there. In fact he was the Key Note, where he talked about his career and gave advice to young animators. More about his Key Note talk can be found at http://blog.siggraph.org/2017/08/disney-legend-floyd-norman.html/. Nvidia was there with VR trained robots, and Popular Mechanics brought their deep learning robot. UploadVR was discussing the VR theatre, and to top it off, Medium announced the first ever brain-computer interface for VR. And that's only a small sampling of the talks that were available.
As you can see, SIGGRAPH has a lot to offer. And like I said, the industry leaders are all there, so the time in-between talks, and after hours events are the other big reason to go. During these times, you won't just be at the conference, you will be bumping elbows with these leaders. It's your opportunity to talk to people from Pixar, Digital Domain, Nvidia, or Blender. You might find yourself shaking hands with the established giants, or the future ones. You might find yourself exchanging business cards as a dreamer, or in deep conversation with someone you only dreamed of meeting.
Even if you attended SIGGRAPH, there's no way to have seen everything. There's just too much amazing stuff going on all at the same time. So it's time to knuckle down and catch up on what you missed out on. I've got a lot more reading ahead of me, and I'm willing to bet you do too. Here's a great place to start: http://blog.siggraph.org/2017/08/siggraph-2017-news-you-need-to-know.html/
--Charlie Griffin
Stick with me, and we'll get wise together.
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