SIGGRAPH 2012 - Day 4

Sessions continued like normal, with me learning too much and inspiring me to try working with way too many of them... like normal. There was a theme that I kept hitting on this week, however, that requires some additional reflection.

My work in this industry thus far has been constrained to (relatively) small projects, mainly on episodic TV or direct to DVD movies. However, many of these sessions (not just the production sessions but also many talks and tech papers) reveal to me that the scope of these projects is at a completely different level than I am used to.

For example, I attended the ILM Battleship presentation on the 4th day in which there were a number of stats thrown around for a particularly heavy shot (the presenter said that he believed it to be the most complicated VFX shot, ever) including that it took 2-5 days per high resolution fluid sim (of which there were many), they cached approximately 20TB of simulation data, and it consumed nearly 23 years of sequential CPU time. Another was during the Disney Paperman presentation on the 5th day in which the director talked about how casually it seems like he was handed a few dozen animators who just happened to have some spare time.

These scales (of both tech and personel) are staggering since the majority of the work I have done in the industry has been limited to what can be accomplished in a few months by a handful of people, but I am very excited (although terrified) to hopefully be a part of these sorts of massive projects in the future.

I also greatly appreciate that the people who are involved in these projects still respect the work that us little guys do, as demonstrated by a number of the Pixar engineers when I discussed my work on The Borgias with them.