SIGGRAPH 2015 LA – Complete Photo Galleries
Here is our complete Siggraph 2015 photo gallery, with notes. All these photos were taken by associate editor, Akiko Ashley, who was on the show floor for three days. Be sure to read her in-depth feature report here on all the big news from Los Angeles.
This final gallery report wraps up our coverage of this year’s events.
01 – Erik Tran, senior animator of Simpsons using a MacBook Pro and Toon Boom. (photo: Akiko Ashely. All rights reserved.).
Erik Tran is showing off Toon Boom’s popular animator software packages, of which Harmony, its 2D animation package, is considered a market leader in this category. The other popular tool they have is Storyboard Pro, for story boarding work, naturally. Customers include Fox, Disney, CN, Dreamworks and others. Harmony comes in three levels, Harmony Essentials, Harmony Advanced and Harmony Premium. All their products work on Mac as well as Windows.
02 – ESRI was showing CityEngine at SIGGRAPH 2015. (photo: Akiko Ashley)
Esri’s CityEngine was a big draw at Siggraph 2015 and the tool is growing in importance across a range of industries, with architecture and urban design being one of the largest. We provide more information on CityEngine here.
04 – Framestore recruitment at SIGGRAPH Job Fair. (photo: Akiko Ashley)
Framestore booth show above at the Siggraph 2015 Job Fair.
04 – NVIDIA physically based rendering booth at Siggraph 2015. (photo: Akiko Ashley.).
Akiko Ashley felt NVIDIA’s new rendering software API technology—a new suite called DesignWorks—was the show-stopper of Siggraph this year. The physically-based rendering technology uses iRay technology in combination with its Quadro graphics cards. Ms. Ashley covers the details here.
05 – Will Willis from OTOY at their booth.(photo: Akiko Ashley)
OTOY seems to be using Siggraph each year for major announcements and this year was no different. Will Willis of OTOY, and some of his colleagues in the background, are shown in the photo above. OTOY showed the first-ever, room-sized Light Field in VR at Siggraph. In addition to that they had updates to Octane Render and several other items new at the show. Our full report is here.
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We continue our photo gallery below with many more images.
07 – Pixar’s famous tea pots shown below. (photo: Akiko Ashley).
Walt Disney’s Pixar division was at Siggraph again and here we see a gallery of their famous tea pot collection.
08 – Epson presentation this time and again another case of a Mac laptop leading a presentation at Siggraph.(photo: Akiko Ashley).
Epson was giving a presentation of Moverio at Siggraph, which Mashable described as Google Glass on steriods. This is AR tech, that is augmented reality glasses which we should probably be keeping in eye on…no pun intended.
09 – Academy Award winning visual effects designer and fine artist Kevin Mack and his wife Snow. (photo: Akiko Ashley).
Academy award winning visual effects (VFX) designer and fine artist, Kevin Mack, and his wife Snow, at Siggraph 2015.
10 – The back of the Unity booth was kind of cool.(photo: Akiko Ashley.)
Unity 5 is the focus at Unity Technologies and the company is getting ready for its big Unite 2015 Boston user conference coming later next month (September 21-23).
Unity is the game engine involved in a neat software that straddles both the game production world and the world of professional golf course design (some say golf course architecture) that Architosh is working on as a feature story coming up soon, we hope! What we are seeing with Unity is that the program is more diverse for pro uses than we originally believed and we are keen to stay on top of such developments.
11 – AMD’s booth was hot with action at Siggraph 2015, showcasing its latest hardware and software technology for computer graphics. (photo: Akiko Ashley).
AMD’s latest graphics card wonder machine is the R9 Fury X GPU, which features HBM (high-bandwidth memory) something AMD pioneered. HBM offers 3x the bandwidth per watt over GDDR5 memory, along with a 4096-bit memory interface. These cards are also liquid cooled. The Radeon R9 380 and 390 can deliver top gameplay on 4K monitors and support DirectX 12. Apparently, AMD also had one of the new Mac Pros in its booth as well, demoing some pro apps.
12 – Pixar Arts and Science Fair at Siggraph 2015. (photo: Akiko Ashley.)
Pixar’s Arts and Sciences Fair at Siggraph is always well attended, as can bee seen here.
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We continue with our last page of images in this gallery.
13 – PipelineFX’s was showing its new Qube! render farm technology. (photo: Akiko Ashley).
PipelineFX is the maker of Qube!, the rendering farm software solution that is widely used across top VFX houses and graphics shops, including leading architectural CGI firms and other 3D pros. Their technology runs on both Macs and Windows and they have extensive iOS app capabilities. A fairly Apple-centric we think given their years of graphic choices on their website (i.e.: they show their apps running on Apple hardware a lot) as well as their early iOS app development.
14 – While Apple’s Macs were popular at SIGGRAPH 2015 booths they were almost entirely mobiles and the new Mac Pro was only spotted in just a few booths, such as this one. (photo: Akiko Ashley).
This picture says a thousand words when it comes to Apple’s new Mac Pro from 2014. The revolutionary design has been a controversy in the 3D graphics community as many 3D professionals would like to work on OS X more or less full time, making it their standard bench operating system. We can easily see the popularity of the Mac platform from all the demos running off of MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
However, Akiko Ashley tallied up counts of PC workstations versus Macs on the show floor and the numbers were not pretty for the Apple Mac Pro. While Apple laptops are everywhere, and even the iMac was used as a demo machine for many booths (Shotgun was all iMacs) the true pro workstation class Darth Vader Mac was nearly invisible at Siggraph 2015. Architosh will have more to say on this matter soon, but perhaps Apple will beat us to the punch with some positive news on this machine?
15 – At Chaos Group’s booth we see a V-Ray presentation. The next versions of V-Ray are highly anticipated and the next versions for SketchUp will have dramatic new UI improvements. (photo: Akiko Ashley).
The Chaos Group had a very busy booth at Siggraph 2015, with plenty of interesting good news coming from them about V-Ray. They announced V-Ray for Nuke in particular at the show. When we last saw the Chaos Group folks at the AIA National architects show in Atlanta in the late spring, they gave us a peak at the upcoming UI changes coming to the next versions of V-Ray for SketchUp. Lots of promising good stuff on the horizon….
16 – Maxon’s new release of Cinema 4D was the hot ticket for the German software company. (photo: Akiko Ashley).
Mason released a milestone update with their new Cinema 4D software package, one of the big five complete 3D modeling, rendering and animation software packages on the professional market. Cinema 4D competes primarily with Maya, 3ds Max, LightWave and Modo. Our news coverage of the new version is here.
18 – The Wacom tablet show in this image is quite large…is this Rhino in Rhino? Doesn’t look like it. (photo: Akiko Ashley).
Our last image is of the Wacom folks with their what looks like their Wacom Cintiq pen and touch display. The Cintiq touch displays are their flagship technology and enable the user to use a touch pen to work common graphics and design applications. Models come in 27, 22 and 13 inch sizes and are full touch-based, high-quality displays. You can learn more here.