A huge number of Talks have been announced, covering projects like Fire and Ash, Stranger Things 5, Toy Story 5, and more.
The secret weapon of SIGGRAPH — Talks — have been announced for 2026. These sessions are some of my favorite things to attend at the conference. This is because, in relation to VFX and animation, they tend to be focused, in-depth presentations on very specific aspects of a production. Sometimes they are the ONLY place where these aspects get discussed.
Here’s a run-down of sessions I’m looking forward to (and these are touch the surface of the Talks on offer):
The Art of Rendering Realism at LAIKA
– Part of Rendering and Materials
– Presenter: Mitch J. Prater, LAIKA
– Stop-motion cameras and lenses are an order of magnitude closer to their real-world subjects and the real-world materials they’re made from than is typical in live-action scale cinematography. This talk details the unique requirements of rendering realistic imagery at this scale so that it is indistinguishable from their real counterparts.
– Sunday, 19 July 2026, 9am-9.40am, Room 403 B
Assets in Motion (AIM) – Injecting life into a static and linear asset building process
– Part of Workflows it is
– Presenters: Hans Heymans, Chris Logan, Brian Cohen (Sony Pictures Imageworks)
– This talk introduces Assets in Motions (AIM) at Sony Pictures Imageworks. AIM is a strategic approach, designed to move character designs into well rounded production ready assets in a more cost effective and collaborative way.
– Sunday, 19 July 2026 9:20am – 9:40am, Petree D
Coloring Outside the Pipeline: Stylized Pastel Techniques in Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story 5
– Part of We Never Go Out of Style
– Creating Toy Story 5’s hand-drawn “Playtime” sequences ventured outside Pixar’s traditional pipeline via collaborative non-linear workflows spanning effects, shading, and compositing. The team developed pre-lit geometric pastel assets, stylized character treatments, and layered compositing approaches that transformed CG animation into ethereal pastel worlds visualizing childhood imagination.
– Presenters: Nate Skeen, Peter Demarest, Patrick Yu Wang, Ravindra Dwivedi, Dave Quirus, Max Gilbert, Laura Grieve, Alexander Alvarado (Pixar)
– Sunday, 19 July 2026 2:20pm – 2:40pm PDT, Room 515 A
Production-Ready Camera Tracking via LiDAR-Constrained Deep Optical Flow
– Part of Don’t Do it in Post
– Our system solves difficult VFX matchmoves by fusing LiDAR geometry with Deep Optical Flow. Unlike traditional corner-detection, it leverages dense geometric constraints to handle motion blur and dynamic occlusion. The system features automated actor masking and a novel re-anchoring architecture that eliminates drift, delivering accurate camera solves for production pipelines.
– Presenter: Srdjan Milosevic, Sony Pictures Imageworks
– Sunday, 19 July 2026 3:45pm – 4:05pm PDT, Room 403 B
Evolution of Anatomy at Framestore
– Part of Pull the Strings
– Framestore introduces the Anatomy Toolkit (FAT), replacing legacy deformer workflows with an end-to-end simulation platform. FAT automates constraint construction through geometric labeling and enables the convergence of Rigging and Creature FX workflows. This delivers anatomically accurate, high-fidelity muscle and tissue deformations with superior efficiency and simplified artist experience.
– Presenters: Christoph Genzwuerker, Alex Rothwell, Philippe Mongeau, Quentin Sanchez (Framestore)
– Monday, 20 July 2026 12:05pm – 12:25pm PDT, Room 515 A
Advancing Large-Scale Water Simulation in Avatar: Fire and Ash
– Part of Playing With Fire (and Water)
– In this talk we discuss the collection of improvements we have made to our in-house water system Pahi to deliver the unprecedented scale and complexity of Avatar: Fire and Ash.
– Presenters: Sean Flynn, Alexey Stomakhin, Joel Wretborn, Noh-hoon Lee, Job Guidos, Nicholas Illingworth, James Robinson, Ryan Bowden (Wētā FX)
– Tuesday, 21 July 2026 3:45pm – 4:05pm PDT, Room 403 B
Blurring the Line Between Real and Digital Water in Avatar: Fire and Ash
– Part of Playing With Fire (and Water)
– Avatar: Fire and Ash required geometric consistency between photographed and simulated water in chaotic tank environments over long frame sequences, with characters interacting directly with the surface. We describe a feature-driven approach for recovering temporally coherent water motion to support stable parametric modeling and simulation coupling.
– Presenters: Sam Cole, Nicholas Illingworth, Alexey Stomakhin, Sean Flynn (Wētā FX)
– Tuesday, 21 July 2026 4:05pm – 4:25pm PDT, Room 403 B
Thick Foam and Floating Debris in Avatar: Fire and Ash
– Part of Playing With Fire (and Water)
– In this talk we discuss advancements in foam and floating debris simulation made to our in-house water system, Pahi, to deliver close-up fidelity of those effects in Avatar: Fire and Ash.
– Presenters: Job Guidos, Joel Wretborn, Sean Flynn, Jason Lazaroff, Tanē MacDonald, Ari Ross (Wētā FX)
– Tuesday, 21 July 2026 4:25pm – 4:45pm PDT, Room 403 B
Creating the Elemental Vortex in Avatar: Fire and Ash
– Part of Playing With Fire (and Water)
– The Flux Devil, an elemental vortex in the climactic sequence of Avatar: Fire and Ash, is made of plasma, water and fire. To create an art-directable effect, while adhering to the laws of nature, we implemented specialized emission tools, warped gravity fields for buoyant updrafts and spatially varying Coriolis forces.
– Presenters: Nicholas Illingworth, Alexey Stomakhin, Murali Ramachari, James Robinson, John Edholm, Sam Cole (Wētā FX)
– Tuesday, 21 July 2026 4:45pm – 5:05pm PDT, Room 403 B
Stranger Things: Season 5 – Optimising Workflows Through Advanced Optical Flow And Automated Lighting
– Part of Pipeline Under the Hood
– We present Thistle (an optical flow pipeline) and Marama (an AI-driven automated lighting optimization framework)—two tools enabling scalable, consistent, and high-quality integration of CG characters into live-action plates under demanding production conditions. This presentation details their technical design, pipeline integration, and measured impact in large-scale VFX production.
– Presenters: Masahiro Teraoka, Indah Maretha (Wētā FX)
Full schedule here: https://s2026.conference-schedule.org/
