Parag Havaldar from Sony Pictures Imageworks : Performance driven character animation on a real production set (Thursday, November 5, 2009, Location:Levine 307 3:00pm-4:30pm)
At Sony Pictures Imageworks, we have used different modalities from motion capture
systems, multiple video cameras, electro oculography to extract motion of real actors and
retarget it on to digital characters. This has been utilized to capture and retarget motion of
bodies and facial expressions in a number of movies. These include stylized character
adaptations such as in Monster House as well as hyper real to real characters such as in
Beowulf, Watchmen, Alice in Wonderland (in production 2010 release). The talk will demonstrate
the types data acquisition on a production set, the research issues and problems in dealing with
signals and multiple sources, production orientated solutions for retargeting and finalized outputs
that made it to the screen..
Kim Sambrook + Mark Henderson (DMD09) from Zynga Information Session (Monday, October 26, 2009, Wu and Chen Auditorium 6:30pm).
Merry Ayres + Paul Barton from Electronic Arts Information Session (Tuesday, October 20, 2009, Heilmeier Hall 5pm).
Carol O' Sullivan (CIS Distinguished Lecture) - "Simulating and Evaluating Virtual Populace" (Tuesday, October 13, 2009, Wu Chen 3pm) Trinity College Dublin. Website.
When simulating virtual objects, scenes and animations, what ultimately matters is how they are perceived by the viewer , e.g., Does a human motion look natural? Does a crowd scene look varied? Does the simulation elicit the intended emotional response from the viewer? In this talk, I will first provide a brief overview on the perception of biological motion, i.e., the motion of living (or animate) beings, especially humans, and follow that with a discussion of recent work on evaluating natural human motion. I will then consider the case of large and heterogeneous groups or crowds of people, and discuss automatic methods of generating large numbers of varied characters. Fortunately, depending on the context, it is not the case that all types of variety are equally important. Sometimes quite simple methods for creating variations that do not over-burden the computing resources available can be as effective as, and perceptually equivalent to, far more resource-intensive approaches. I will present some recent research and development efforts in Trinity College Dublin and elsewhere that aim to create and evaluate variety for characters: in their bodies, faces, movements, behaviours and sounds.
Jeremy Bailenson (SIG Center Special Seminar) - "Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Reality" (Tuesday, October 6, 2009, SIG Center 1pm) . Project Website. Over time, our mode of remote communication has evolved from written letters to telephones, email, internet chat rooms, and videoconferences. Similarly, virtual environments promise to further change the nature of remote interaction. Virtual environments track verbal and nonverbal signals of multiple interactants and render those signals onto /avatars/, three-dimensional, digital representations of people in a shared digital space. In this talk, I describe a series of projects that explore the manners in which the use of avatars qualitatively changes the nature of remote communication. Unlike telephone conversations and videoconferences, avatars have the ability to systematically filter their physical appearance and behavioral actions in the eyes of their conversational partners, amplifying or suppressing features and nonverbal signals in real-time for strategic purposes. These transformations have a drastic impact on interactants' abilities to influence others in social and contexts. Implications for distance learning, video game use, and online identities will be discussed.
Tuesday, September 29th, 7:00pm, Heilmeier Hall, Towne Building Anita Stokes from Lucas Arts.
Summer 2009
Monday, June 15, 11:00am, Levine 307 Lucas Kovar - Industrial Light & Magic.
Practical Real-Time Character Animation for Video Games
:Character animation in video games must not only be pleasing
to the eye, but responsive to user input, flexible under changing
gameplay conditions, and computable under tight limits on time and
memory. In this talk I will discuss the synthesis techniques and
implementation strategies used to meet these requirements in the
animation engine developed internally for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
Spring 2009
Friday, April 3, 3:30pm, Rich Seminar Room (113 Jaffe Building):Alan Chalmers, Professor of Visualization, University of Warwick, will present a lecture on high fidelity virtual environments entitled, "Being Present in the Past" as part of the History of Art Department Colloquium Series.
Tuesday, March 31, 6:00pm, Berger Auditorium (Lower Level, Skirkanich Hall): Leaders in Motion Capture: Matt Madden of Giant Studios. Giant Studios is widely acknowledged to be the world leader in motion capture and Virtual Production, a groundbreaking production process that provides interactive control of environments, cameras, lighting, characters, and props within a 3D scene. Films that Mr. Madden has worked on include I Am Legend, Iron Man, and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and he is currently working as the Motion Capture Supervisor on James Cameron's Avatar. This event is co-sponsored with the Integrated Product Design program.
Monday, March 30, 6:00pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium (101 Levine Hall):Pixar presentation. Technical Director Paul Kanyuk, Technical Director Aaron Lo, and Senior Recruiter Alicia McCullagh discuss careers at Pixar.
Wednesday, March 25, 10:30am, Levine 512: GRASP/HMS Special Seminar: Danny Kaufman, Rutgers University and Visiting Scholar at the University of British Columbia, will present his lecture, ""Coupled Principles for Discrete Contact Mechanics."
Wednesday, March 18, 5:30pm, Rosenwald Gallery (Van Pelt Library, 6th Floor):Nathan Schreiber, DMD '03, will talk about his experience as a Comic Artist. Nathan created a weekly comic strip while at Penn, 'Terrell Quimby,' which won the 2001 National College Media Advisers award for Best College Cartoon Strip. He is currently working on Power Out, his first full-length graphic novel.
Tuesday, March 17, 7:00pm, Berger Auditorium: Evan Goldberg, DMD Alum and Patricia Beckmann, University Relations will present "Tech Talk: The Innovations of Walt Disney Animation Studios (Past, Present, and Future)."
Fall 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 6:00pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: The 31st Annual Computer Graphics Video Show. Join us for a screening of the best animation of 2008!
Thursday, November 20 - Wednesday, November 26: Jerry Tessendorf, Principal Graphics Scientist at Rhythm & Hues Studios, joins us to give four lectures in Production Volume Rendering:
Thursday, November 20, 3-5pm, Levine 307
Monday, November 24, 1:30-3pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium(during CIS 460)
Thursday, October 30, 6:30pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: Lauren Paone, Penn alum and software engineer for Electronic Arts, will give a tech talk about EA.
Monday, October 27, 6:00pm, Heilmeier Hall: Jon Shih, Production Department Technical Director, and Marilyn Friedman, Head of Outreach from DreamWorks Animation will give a tech talk and presentation about the company.
Tuesday, October 21, 3:00pm, Annenberg 109: Amy Baylor, Program Director, Human-Centered Computing Cluster (NSF), will present her lecture, "Anthropomorphic interface agents as persuasive technology."
Tuesday, October 7, 3:00pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: Paul Torrens, Director of the Geosimulation Laboratory at Arizona State University, presents his lecture, "Modeling Complex Urban Systems."
Tuesday, September 30, 6:30pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: John Calvert of the US Patent and Trademark office will be addressing everything you should know about the field of patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
Thursday, September 25, 7:30pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: representatives from Microsoft will give a tech talk about the company.
Thursday, September 25, 6:30pm, Berger Auditorium: Paul Kanyuk, DMD alum (2005) and TD at Pixar Animation Studios, will give a presentation about the company and hold a Q&A for students.
Thursday, September 18, 6:00pm, Berger Auditorium: Kim Davidson, President and CEO of Side Effects Software, and Ondrej Kos, Senior Developer with Side Effects, will present their lecture, "Rapid Houdini Prototyping for Research."
Wednesday, September 10, 5:00pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: Bill Chen, quantitative analyst, poker player and software designer from the Statistical Arbitrage Department at Susquehanna International Group, LLP (SIG), presents his talk, "Poker, Game Theory, and Trading."
Monday, April 14, 6pm, Berger Auditorium:David Luebke, research scientist at NVIDIA, will present his lecture, "The Democratization Of Parallel Computing."
Tuesday, April 8, 5:00pm, Levine 307: Diana Chang, DMD alumna and Technical Artist at Electronic Arts, will give a talk about working at EA and the life of a Technical Director in the gaming industry.
Thursday, March 27, 11am, Wu & Chen Auditorium:Jernej Barbic, Department of Computer Science, MIT, will present a haptics lecture entitled, " An algorithm for deformations, collision detection and contact between complex deforming geometry running at haptic rates."
Monday, February 25, 5pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium:Bjoern Hartmann, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, will present a lecture regarding observing, prototyping, and building interaction design tools: "Enlightened Trial and Error."
Thursday, February 21, 3pm, IRCS Conference Room:Robert Kenyon, Computer Science Department, University of Illinois at Chicago, will present his lecture, "Size-Constancy in the CAVE." This lecture will be held at IRCS, 3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A.
Monday, February 11, 5pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: Cary Phillips of Industrial Light and Magic will give a talk entitled "Computer Graphics and Visual Effects at Industrial Light and Magic and LucasArts."
Saturday, February 9, 12pm, Berger Auditorium: Paul Kanyuk from Pixar, Inc. will give a talk about his TD work on Cars and his crowds work on Ratatouille.
Wednesday, November 28, 6:00 pm, Berger Auditorium: The 30th Annual Computer Graphics Video Show featuring the 2007 ACM SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater. Join us for a screening of the best animation of 2007!
Tuesday, November 27, 3:00 pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium:Lars Nyland, Senior Architect from NVIDIA, will give a talk entitled "Ubiquitous Compute Acceleration" as part of the CIS department's Emerging Computational Architectures lecture series.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007, 3:00 pm, Wu & Chen auditorium:Sanjay Patel, Chief Architect at AGEIA Technologies, will give a talk entitled "Life, Death, and Video Games: Revisiting High-Performance Chip Architecture" as part of the CIS department's Emerging Computational Architectures lecture series.
Thursday, November 1, 2007, 7:00pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: Mark Botta, Lead Gameplay Programmer & Elio Rutigliano, Associate Producer from Crystal Dynamics, will discuss the game creation process from an engineering and production perspective. They will be conducting on-campus interviews the following day, Friday, November 2; please sign up for an interview through Career Services' PennLink website.
Monday, October 29, 2007, 5:00 pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: Jerry Tessendorf, Principal Graphics Scientist at Rhythm & Hues Studios, will discuss animation, visual effects, and design at the studios.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 8:00pm, Wu & Chen Auditorium: an encore screening of DMD senior Michael Highland's documentary, "As Real As Your Life."
Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 4:30 pm, Berger Auditorium (Skirkanich Hall): Tony DeRose, Chief Technology
Officer from Pixar, will present his lecture, "Research at Pixar Animation Studios."
Tuesday, October 23, 2007, 7:00pm, International House: film screening of DMD senior Michael Highland's film, "As Real As Your Life," a short documentary about video game addiction. The film will be shown preceding Werner Herzog's documentary, "Encounters at the End of the World." Admission is free, and tickets will be available outside the International House screening room at 6:30 pm.
