Gravity and Siggraph

By George Harding

If you've seen the movie Gravity, you know how detailed the opening scenes are, how frighteningly realistic.

"In each of Gravity's nerve-jangling space-walk sequences, only the heads inside the helmets are real. The spacesuits and all background elements-including the Hubble, the shuttle, and the International Space Station-are rendered entirely in photo-realistic CG."

That's a quote from the November issue of Popular Mechanics, which goes on to say that "the technology to make this film did not exist. … It forced us to invent our own tools."

The result is nothing short of amazing. See it in 3-D if you can, it's really worth the extra cost.

I attended Siggraph, which is a computer show about graphics hardware and software. Software and hardware is what made Gravity so amazing.

Siggraph has vendors from three areas: software to make television and movies look like real life; hardware required to use the software efficiently; and, companies that use the software and hardware.

The software has the capability to create images and actions that are very life-like. This means viewing angle, lighting, texture, color, shading and action. This is not your word processing type software, but a very complex, featurefull product. It is time-consuming to learn how to use effectively and comes at a significant price. Some examples are Maya, Houdini, Poser and Rhinocerous, names that you probably haven't heard before.

The hardware required to run the software is much faster than what you and I are used to. It is not available in any of the stores you usually shop in. In fact, one part of the software process, rendering, requires banks of high-capacity computers in order to accomplish the work in a reasonable time period. Some examples are Advance Micro Devices, BOXX Technologies, Hitachi Systems, Intel, Nvidia and Western Digital.

The companies that use the hardware and software are better known, such as Disney, Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Sony, Dreamworks and Warner Brothers. At Siggraph, each holds a session showing how they created certain scenes in recent movies.

There is much more at Siggraph, as well, including technical sessions, teaching sessions, display of computer-generated artwork, emerging technology, animation festival (a continuous showing of short animated movies of 2 to 10 minutes) and, of course, an exhibition hall for the vendors to show off their wares.

The Gravity movie is one of the most amazing results of using the software and hardware products I saw at Siggraph. You can see these results, too, at the movie Gravity.

Gravity movie by Warner Brothers

Siggraph Conference held annually     www.siggraph.org