ACM SIGGRAPH Tech Talks

ACM SIGGRAPH Tech Talks are live or recorded sessions on case studies and profession-related discussions on current, emergent, and/or domain broadening topics in computer graphics and interactive techniques. Focused on keeping our global community of practitioners at the forefront of continuing, interdisciplinary, and transferable technical skills development, the ACM SIGGRAPH Tech Talks will cover topics across various industries where computer graphics and interactive techniques are applied.

ACM SIGGRAPH members and non-members are welcome to attend our series of talks by expert industry professionals, distinguished ACM SIGGRAPH award laureates, and visionary researchers exploring applicable innovations in computer graphics and interactive techniques in industry. 

Past recordings of practitioner-relevant presentations from the conferences are archived on this site as ACM SIGGRAPH Tech Talks. The ACM SIGGRAPH Practitioner Development Committee is currently working to make previous recordings that the organisation has permission rights to provide available on both this site and ACM SIGGRAPH YouTube. Advice and feedback is always appreciated with an open ear.

SIGGRAPH Tech Talk: The Right Foot in the Wrong Place: Character Locomotion in Half-Life: Alyx

Production

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

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.

Featured Speakers

In this talk, Joe van den Heuvel (Valve) describes the non-player character locomotion system developed for the VR game Half-Life: Alyx.

SIGGRAPH Frontiers: Imaging a Black Hole with The Event Horizon Telescope

Space

Wednesday, May 11, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
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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.

Featured Speakers

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.

SIGGRAPH Tech Talk: A Pipeline Retrospective on USD & Conduit

Production

Wednesday, May 11, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
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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.

Featured Speakers

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.

SIGGRAPH Tech Talk: Modeling Asteroid (101955) Bennu as a Real-time Terrain

Space

Thursday, May 12, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

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.

Featured Speakers

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.

SIGGRAPH Tech Talk: Procedural Block-Based USD Workflows in Conduit

Production

Thursday, May 12, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

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.

Featured Speakers

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.

SIGGRAPH Tech Talk: War for the Planet of the Apes

Production

Saturday, May 14, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

Featured Speakers

Join Weta Visual Effects Supervisor Anders Langlands as he discusses the body and facial performance capture used to create the film's stunning VFX.

SIGGRAPH Frontiers: How Computer Graphics Expertise Will Further the State of the Art in Machine Learning

Skills

Monday, May 16, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

First impressions

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Second impressions

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“User engagement and experience has become a major focus for any web-based service in recent years”

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A perfect fit

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Quality

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Featured Speakers

Martin Wicke (Director/Principle Engineer, Google) will discuss what insights experts in computer graphics can bring to the field of machine learning.

SIGGRAPH Tech Talk: Bringing Coco's Skeletons to Life

Production

Monday, May 16, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

Featured Speakers

Join Guilherme Jacinto, a Directing Animator at Disney Pixar, as he shares insight into how the skeletons of "Coco" came to life.

SIGGRAPH Tech Talk: Metric Telepresence

Mixed Reality

Monday, May 16, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

Featured Speakers

In this talk, Yaser Sheik from Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) Pittsburgh will discuss their early steps towards achieving metric telepresence: realtime social interactions in AR/VR with avatars that look like you, move like you, and sound like you.

Advances in Real Time Rendering 2021: Experimenting With Concurrent Binary Trees for Large-scale Terrain Rendering

Gaming

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

In this talk, we share results of our novel technique using concurrent binary trees for large-scale terrain rendering. First, we will review the foundations of concurrent binary trees and provide intuition about their benefits for computing adaptive tessellations for large-scale terrain geometries. Next, the presentation will share the results of the original 2020 paper, followed by the deep dive into latest efforts to integrate the original technique into the Unity game engine. The speakers will share further optimizations found over the original implementation and showcase early integration results.

Featured Speakers

In this talk, we share results of our novel technique using concurrent binary trees for large-scale terrain rendering.

Advances in Real Time Rendering 2021: Improved Spatial Upscaling through FidelityFX Super Resolution for Real-Time Game Engines

Gaming

Wednesday, August 3, 2022

10:00AM - 12:00NN PST

ACM SIGGRAPH Village: West Hall 501, Los Angeles Convention Center

More details on the session
Find us on the SIGGRAPH 2023 schedule

A two-part talk, illustrated with diagrams, images, and performance numbers. First part dives into the details and inner workings of AMD's FSR1 scaling algorithm. With a focus on teaching the optimization principles used in its design, and to leave the viewer with some creative thoughts on image processing. Second part covers integration into a modern physically-based deferred and forward rendering pipeline.

Featured Speakers

A two-part talk, illustrated with diagrams, images, and performance numbers.