Progress Report #8 - FMX and Upcoming Conferences

May 8, 2018

Here is the report for April!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqrohc3G8U0

Sorry about the audio quality, shooting outside wasn't a great idea after all. Also, it took me some time to edit the video, so in fact, I am now already in Toronto, my talk is tomorrow ;)

Thank you so much for your continuing support! :)

Boris

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Alright, I'm going to be honest with you, I did not make a lot of progress on VGC Illustration the past few weeks. I mean, I continued to work on the Save and Undo features but they are still not finished yet. However, I have spent some time to organize myself for the next few months to come, which are going to be full of conferences where hopefully I can promote VGC a little bit.

So last week, I was at FMX in Stuttgart, and I'm going to give more details in a moment, and next week I'm going to be in Toronto at the Graphics Interface conference, where I'm going to be presenting my PhD work. Oh, and if you're curious, right now I'm visiting a few friends in New York City, which is basically on the way from France to Toronto. In June, there will be the Annecy Animated Film Festival in France, then in July, there will be the Symposium on Computer Animation in Paris. Alright, and finally in August, I'm going to be back in Canada for the SIGGRAPH conference, which is happening in Vancouver this year.

Alright, and just so you know, I used some of your donations to buy a new desktop computer because my old laptop was getting very very slow for video editing for instance.

Okay, so since I don't have cool features to show you this month, how about I just show some highlights of the FMX conference last week?

So, some of the talks are more on the technical side, for instance, I saw a very interesting talk by Jingwan Lu from Adobe showing, among other things, new ways to represent a color palette, which I think could be very useful for VGC as well! I saw Eitan Grinspun from Columbia University giving insight on hair-water simulation. And also, there was Simon Clavet from Ubisoft explaining how they are investigating machine learning for their future games.

But of course FMX is not just about technical talks! I saw many presentations from animated studios such as here studio aka based in London, Réka Bucsi presenting Solar Walk, and a sneak peak of the upcoming short Sonder, entirely rendered in the game engine Unity! There were also bigger studios, such as here Blue Sky presenting how it was in the early days. And I even got to see the Europe premiere of the upcoming Pixar short, Bao! Outside, there was a giant screen where I could watch short movies while having lunch. The first evening, I saw the Japanese movie "In This Corner of the World". And the next day, I watched the entirely hand-painted movie "Loving Vincent".

Oh, and more related to VGC, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was an entire session only dedicated to Open Source software. So for example, I git to learn about the possibility of an upcoming foundation to help coordinating the development of open source software for film production. And also, I got a chance to briefly talk with Ton Roosendaal, the founder of Blender! I also met David Mass, a teacher at Filmakademie, with whom we discussed recent advancement on 2D animation software.

Anyway, that's all for today, thanks for watching, and see you next time!