Quote Originally Posted by Redrobes View Post
What have you seen thats been particularly inspiring this year at SIGGRAPH ?
There was a whole lot of good stuff this year. Not too much of it directly applied to what I do for a living, though.

I'm not much an artist so the art / animation parts of the conference didn't do a whole lot for me. The late Thrusday showing of Clone Wars was sorta fun, though (even if the movie wasn't particularly good).

The classes were excellent, with the Line Drawings from 3D models and Beyond Programmable Shading ones being my favorites. The line drawing class was a review of past papers but well done. The Beyond Programmable Shading classes covered the theory of the major vendors' 3D architectures/libraries with practical examples at the afternoon session.

Of the papers, I liked Multiscale Texture Synthesis ( http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/mts/ ) for obvious reasons. After that was Finding Paths through the World's Photos ( http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/findingpaths/ ). Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness ( http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tommer/beautification2008/ ) was also quite entertaining.
Single Image Dehazing ( http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~raananf/pr...fog/index.html ) and High-Quality Motion Deblurring from a Single Image ( http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~leojia/p...siggraph08.pdf ) have great potential for what I need to do at work.
The new tech demo of Origami Optics ( http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/attendees/newtech/1.php ) was interesting but I'm not sure how applicable it was except in the context of high-end, high-priced systems.

Everywhere you turned at SIGGRAPH there was something interesting and/or useful for something or other.