The Importance Sampling for Production Rendering course was interesting, but a lot of it was review. I hadn't noticed that the first presenter in the course was also the author of the GPU-Based Importance Sampling from GPU Gems 3 that I use in VGP352. The bits about multiple important sampling and the bits about resampled importance sampling for shadows from the second presenter were new to me. There was a question from the audience about the Lafortune BRDF. Matt's response echoed what I say in VGP352 every year. He says that the Lafortune BRDF is not used at IMD beause it is "too uncontrollable for many artists."
I don't really know anything about REYES, so most of Micropolygon Ray Tracing With Defocus and Motion Blur was lost on me. The hyper-trapezoid BVH was interesting, though. Real-Time Lens Blur Effects and Focus Control was similarly a loss. The foreground occlusion image may find a place in VGP352 when I talk about depth-of-field effects. OptiX: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine was mostly an advertisement for Nvidia's ray tracing engine. There were a couple interesting bits about their compiler architecture, but meh.
To this point, I wish I would have gone to the An Introduction to 3D Spatial Interaction With Videogame Motion Controllers session instead.
That changed with Reducing Shading on GPUs using Quad-Fragment Merging. One of the opening tidbits will annoy keithp to be sure. "...one of the better ideas of real-time rendering [is] multisample anti-aliasing." In any case, their method of merging quads (2x2 pixel blocks processed by the fragment shading hardware) is fairly straight forward, but still clever. They track facing and connectivity for covered pixels in each quad. Multiple quads that have connected triangles with the same facing are merged. This can save a lot of processing.
Much to my joy, the Making of TRON: Legacy session got moved to Tuesday evening... when it didn't conflict with anything that I wanted to attend! w00t! Yes folks, that is the line...
EIGHT MINUTES of footage from the movie. A new trailer (I want one of those lightcycle throw pillows from 0:12 in the trailer). Full on awesome.
A couple interesting bits:
Daft Punk is doing the music, and they have a cameo.
Some of the concept drawings from the original movie that couldn't be done on computers at the time was used. For example, the original lightcycles had the rider on the outside. There was no way the computers of 1982 could render that, so the design was changed.
It was filmed in 3D, but, in the words of the director, there's no "spear poking you in the eye" business.
In the Q-and-A session I asked a semi-smart ass question. That's how I roll. "My biggest disappointment with the film industry came when I was 8 and the original TRON wasn't nominated for an Oscar because it "cheated" [by using computers]. Come January, is it going to be lightcycles or broomsticks? TRON or Harry Potter?" Yes, I know the Oscars are in March. I was nervous. Unfortunately, their answer was way, way too serious. "Ultimately that's up to you, but we think our work will stand on it's own." meh.
UPDATE: One thing I forgot before, there was an off-hand mention by the director that some effort was going into doing a "re-imagination" of The Black Hole. That was such a creepy movie! A re-make could be awesome... or horrible.