RenderWonk

This year the ‘SIGGRAPH Encore’ access to full video of presentations was pretty slick, with most courses, papers and sketches available (for a fee) within 24 hours at the conference itself.

These are great even for people who attended the conference (due to all the overlapping sessions it’s impossible to see everything you’re interested in), but for people who couldn’t attend at all these are a godsend. You get whatever was on the presenter’s screen (slides, demos, etc.) with audio, so this is almost as good as being in the room.

These are also available as pay downloads at the SIGGRAPH Encore website . Probably the best deal is the entire conference: courses, papers & sketches for $200. Note however, that some presentations are missing, mostly Hollywood stuff (undoubtedly for copyright reasons).

Note also that if you are an ACM or SIGGRAPH member, 2003, 2004 and 2005 video is available for free (streaming only) at a different site. If you have an ACM digital library subscription, the 2006 videos are available there as well as the older ones. Perhaps the 2007 video will eventually become available to members or subscribers as well.

After the jump, I list what’s not there for people who are trying to decide whether to order this:

All courses, papers and sketches and Educator’s sessions are available except for the following:

Courses not on SIGGRAPH Encore

•  Anyone Can Cook: Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen
• Introduction to SIGGRAPH and Computer Graphics
• High-Quality Rendering Using Ray Tracing and Photon Mapping
• From “Shrek” to “Shrek the Third”: Evolution of CG Characters in the “Shrek” Films
• “Surf’s Up”: The Making of an Animated Documentary
• Sorting in Space: Multidimensional, Spatial, and Metric Data Structures for Computer Graphics Applications
• LucasArts and ILM: A Case Study in Film and Game Convergence
• The Morphology of Digital Creatures
• Strands and Hair: Modeling, Animation, and Rendering

Papers not on SIGGRAPH Encore

•  Active Learning for Real-Time Motion Controllers
• The Lightspeed Automatic Interactive Lighting Preview System
• Harmonic Coordinates for Character Articulation
• Key Point Subspace Acceleration and Soft Caching
• Color Images Visible Under UV Light
• Stochastic Simplification for Aggregate Detail
• Gradient Domain Editing of Deforming Mesh Sequences

Sketches not on SIGGRAPH Encore

•  Effects for the Birth of Sandman
• Rendering Tons of Sand
• How to Build a 60-Foot Man of Moving Sand
• Levelsets in Production: “Spider-Man 3″
• Artistic Direction of Foliage
• Dynamic Execution Tracing of Physical Simulations
• Blobtacular: Surfacing Particle Systems in “Pirates of the Caribbean 3″
• Driving Motion Control by Motion Capture Using CG
• Musculo-Skeletal Shape Skinning
• Fantastic Four: Stretching The Limits
• Chop It Up!: Animation-Driven Modeling, Simulation, and Shading in the Kitchen
• Virtual Tailoring for “Ratatouille”: Clothing the Fattest Man in the World
• Articulating The Appeal
• 500 Million and Counting: Hair Rendering on “Ratatouille”
• Fast, Soft Reflections Using Radiance Caches
• Effective Toon-Style Rendering Control Using Scalar Fields
• Light Shower: A Poor Man’s Light Stage Built With an Off-the-Shelf Umbrella and Projector
• Acting With Contact: Interactive Cartoon Collision & Response
• Rivers of Rodents: An Animation-Centric Crowds Pipeline for “Ratatouille”
• Extracting and Parametrizing Temporally Coherent Surfaces From Particles
• An Effects Recipe for Rolling a Dough, Cracking an Egg, and Pouring a Sauce
• Simulating Whitewater Rapids in “Ratatouille”
• Rat-Sized Water Effects in “Ratatouille”
• Improving Real-Time Motion
• A Texture-Synthesis Approach to Elastica Inpainting
• Stabilizing Video While Keeping Resolution and Capturing Intention
• End of the World Waterfall Setup for “Pirates of the Caribbean 3″
• Wave Displacement Effects for “Surf’s Up”
• “Surf’s Up” Beach Break
• Making Waves for “Surf’s Up”
• 300’s Liquid Battlefield: Fluid Simulation Spartan Style

Educator’s sessions not on SIGGRAPH Encore

• Active Learning to Interactive Design: The Rise of Web Rich Media to Engage Art Dialogue
• Interactive Multimedia Oral Language Instruction for At-Risk Students
• Play to Learn II: Designing Educational Games for Museums
• Integrating Digital Art Practice and Art History Studies