A look at what to expect with VFX and animation sessions at the conference.
SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 in Hong Kong is taking place 15-18 December at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. There’s still time to register. befores & afters is looking forward to attending as a media partner once again this year!
We thought we’d give you a small preview of the kinds of VFX and animation-related sessions that will be at the event. Here we go:
Pixar is going IN-DEPTH on Elio
A huge turn-out from Pixar crew members for this one, with the following breaking down how Elio was made:
Jordan Rempel, Director of Photography
Renee Tam, Global Technology Supervisor
Sajan Skaria, Character Supervisor
Emron Grover, Tailoring & Simulation Supervisor
Claudia Chung Sanii, VFX Supervisor
David Luoh, Sets Supervisor
The phenomenon that is Ne Zha 2
Base Media founder and CEO Chris Bremble will be discussing his studio’s work on the huge, huge hit Ne Zha 2, including major fluid sims, crowds and destruction. Coming soon: a podcast with Bremble on befores & afters!
Storytelling across cultures
Director Raman Hui, who directed Monster Hunt and also got his start at PDI, will compare approaches to working across cultures and engaging diverse audiences through storytelling.
Scott Ross reflects on VFX
Scott Ross is a former general manager of Industrial Light and Magic and a co-founder of Digital Domain. His book UPSTART looks back at his eras at ILM and DD, and he’ll have a lot to say about the current state of the industry.
Something different: Technical Communications
The Technical Papers at SIGGRAPH Asia are of course a huge drawcard. But there’s also the Technical Communications that offer insights into many areas with a short paper and a presentation. One of these is from Marza Animation Planet’s Brent Forrest called ‘ShapeMeshing: Design-guided Procedural Conversion of 2D animation to 3D’. ShapeMeshing is “a reproducible pipeline that converts animated 2D vector drawings into clean, stylized 3D meshes without manual sculpting.”
Another is called ‘Digital Bi-Pack: Recording Live-Action under Two Near-Simultaneous Lighting Conditions’. Here’s the description: Synchronizing lights with a 360-degree global shutter camera enables capturing two lighting conditions almost simultaneously, supporting visual effects like relighting, matting, and separating reflectance components between frames. The research comes from Eyeline Studios (Paul Debevec, Mingming He, David George, Avani Joshi, and Xueming Yu).
A further Technical Communication, this time from OTOY, is ‘RotoShop: Automatic Dataset Rotoscoping via Differentiable Splining’ from OTOY’s Sirak Ghebremusse. Here’s the description: RotoShop aims to significantly reduce the costs of segmentation labelling by efficiently vectorizing mask sequences produced by computer vision models into temporarily consistent splines suitable for handoff to rotoscoping artists.
How to get a SIGGRAPH Asia ticket
This is just a small taste of what will be at SIGGRAPH Asia — other stand-out sessions include the Computer Animation Festival and Real-time Live!. If you’re heading to Hong Kong, please get in touch to say hi.
