In this talk, Joe van den Heuvel (Valve) describes the non-player character locomotion system developed for the VR game Half-Life: Alyx. Their solution uses a stride retargeting system, footstep prediction, and a custom motion matching system to animate humanoid and non-humanoid characters as they navigate tight, dense virtual environments in real time.Originally presented at SIGGRAPH 2021.

It is theorized that a black hole will leave a "shadow" on a background of hot gas. Unfortunately, due to its small size, traditional imaging approaches require an Earth-sized radio telescope.

In this talk, Katie Bouman (Caltech) discuss techniques that her team have developed to photograph a black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of telescopes scattered across the globe. Imaging a black hole’s structure with this computational telescope required them to reconstruct images from sparse measurements, heavily corrupted by atmospheric error.

Over the past three years, Blue Sky Studios built a USD-centric layer on top of its next generation pipeline framework, Conduit. This transition involved mapping the legacy Blue Sky workflows into USD constructs. In addition, direct artist feedback during the delivery of six short films provided insights that informed the evolution of the Conduit backend to support these modernized workflows.

Using a commercial terrain engine [Englert 2012], this presentation shows how to model the complex surface of asteroid (101955) Bennu [Science 1999] with a hybrid approach that combines digital elevation models with static and dynamic displacement. Then we show how to adapt tri-planar material mapping (TRIMAP) to the curvature of planetary bodies, in order to effectively avoid all inherent texturing artefacts.

This talk presents a procedural block-based approach for USD pipelines that minimizes up-front USD knowledge requirements while ensuring users can still leverage the power of native USD. Building on USD and Conduit, we define fundamental workflow principles and philosophies on artist-interaction that guide our modular Houdini-based toolsets. Finally, the authors discuss the successes and challenges in scaling these workflows into production.