Invited Speakers

Joe Longson from Disney Animation Studios:
The Art and Science of Digital Animation

Senior Software Development Engineer from Disney's feature film Bolt, Joe Longson, will speak about the process and tools used to create 3D animated films for at Disney Animation Studios. Having worked on animated features such as Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt, Joe Longson is an industry insider on the process of making films and Disney Animation Studios. Joe Longson will give insights about what it takes to make a feature length animated movie, covering both how the front-end of a film is created (story, layout, and animation) and how the back-end works (lighting and special effects).

Brian Wyvill from the University of Victoria:
»It's clever, but is it Art?«

Rendering in the style of various artists has been a theme of NPR research, and some work in this area is presented. Instead of devising clever algorithms to imitate artists, Brian explores the use of recursion as a tool that empowers an artist to use the computer to do what computers can do better than humans. Some suggestions on how to interact with this tool are described along with some ideas for the future. This work has been done in a fractal free zone.

Brian Wyvill holds a Canada Research Chair in computer graphics at the University of Victoria. He has been involved in the area since the early 1970s. He has been interested in implicit modeling since the mid-1980s and has devised various polygonizers and other renderers as well as underlying data structures such as the BlobTree. He has also worked on a wide variety of artistic projects from scenes for the movie, Alien, through two short movies shown at the SIGGRAPH electronic theater, and is currently interested in the design of an implicit modeling system to build artistic models.

Jean-François St-Amour from Ubisoft:
Illustrative Rendering of Prince of Persia

When development on Prince Of Persia first started, the development team knew one thing – that they wanted the game to have a unique visual identity unlike any other game on the market. This talk will discuss the evolution of the look and fell of the game, over the three year development cycle, both from the creative and technological side. Special attention will be paid to the choice of NPR techniques for the game.

Jean-François is currently working as a Lead 3D Programmer at Ubisoft's Montreal studio. In his time at Ubisoft, he has worked on the graphics technology behind Assassin's Creed and the latest Prince of Persia title. Before working on next-gen hardware, Jean-Francois was working on mobile titles at Gameloft. He had a brief stint away from gaming, in Softimage's Rendering team, but he could not stay away for long. He has a Master's degree in Computer Graphics from the University of Montreal, where he worked on real-time soft shadow algorithms, as well as general purpose computation on graphics hardware.