5 VFX-related talks to check out at SIGGRAPH Asia 2021

Pixar, DNEG, Weta Digital, Digital Domain and more.

This year, SIGGRAPH Asia is a hybrid event. That means it’s happening both in Tokyo and online. I thought I’d list just five of the VFX-related talks that will happen between 14-17 December, 2021 and be available ‘on-demand’. In fact, you can ALREADY register for SIGGRAPH Asia and watch on-demand talks. Right now.

Meanwhile, here’s those 5 talks to look out for during the event.

Talk 1: The Visual Effects of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation
Tuesday, December 14, 10am – 11am JST

Combining contributions from both the VFX supervision team for this show (Chris MacLean and Mike Enriquez) and the production designer (Rory Cheyne), this presentation will cover the design and execution of the elaborate series which is streaming on AppleTV+.

Talk 2: The VFX of Dune
Tuesday, December 14, 11am – 12pm JST

Members of DNEG’s visual effects team — Brian Connor, Tristan Myles and Robyn Luckham — will discuss the making of this incredible film. I believe it may well be one of the first public VFX presentations on Dune.

Talk 3: Dynamic Neural Face Morphing for Visual Effects
Tuesday, December 14, 2pm – 2:30pm JST

This comes from Digital Domain, which has really ramped up its already large digital human effort in recent years. Here they present a machine learning approach, successfully used in production, for face morphing in videos which blends different aspects of the training identities.

Talk 4: Shang Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings, The Third Act
Wednesday, December 15, 2pm – 3pm JST

It’s hard to communicate how massive this final sequence is in Shang-Chi, and Weta Digital’s VFX and anim supe will discuss the marvels of how it was made.

Talk 5: Procedural People in Pixar’s Presto: New Workflows for Interactive Crowds
Friday, December 17, 10:30am – 12:30pm JST

This is part of Real-Time Live!, one of my fave parts of the SIGGRAPH conferences. Here’s the blurb: Pixar’s Presto Crowd Framework (Pcf) has taken interactive crowd scalability to new heights by harnessing the power of Presto’s scalable execution framework for procedurally rigged crowds. We’ll demonstrate how to rig and animate a stadium size crowd while maintaining interactive frame rates and live control.