I already miss SIGGRAPH.

Job Fair:

I spent about an hour or so of the morning of the last day at the job fair. There were surprisingly a lot of game companies there than there were animation studios, at least from my impression of it. Some of them that were there and had a chance to get around to were Vivendi, Radical, Blizzard, Sega, Monolith, Sony Online, Midway, and Microsoft Game Studios. Activision, which now has publishing rights to Guitar Hero, was there too but I didn’t get around to seeing them.

The majority of the game companies at the job fair are located in the States, and I asked them if they would consider hiring someone like myself from Canada. Most of the responses that I got from the “smaller” firms like Vivendi, Blizzard, and Monolith aren’t too keen on hiring someone from outside the US because of the issues and hassles of getting a work VISA in the US. The other companies like Sega and Microsoft have no problem hiring people from both countries. One of the reps at Sega even told me that there’s a handful of Canadians there right now. Unlike most of the companies, Radical is located in Canada so there is no issues with them.

After having spoken with the companies who don’t hire outside of the US, it did disappoint me a little bit but that’s not really an obstacle for me. There are quite a few game studios in Canada in addition to Microsoft and Sega that I could apply too once I’m done with school. All I need is just to get my foot in the door and I’m set.

The last shift:
Worked the last shift at the store which ended when SIGGRAPH ended at 6pm. The store was almost emptied out by the attendees and I wanted to get a shirt for myself but they were all gone…

No Guerrilla Studios:
Because of my shift, I didn’t get any chance to step in to the Guerrilla Studios. Which is too bad because there was a chance to create a physical miniature model of any of your own models from a file. They were also making custom dog tags which would’ve been cool to have.

Swag for student volunteers (SVs):
Just for volunteering, all students got a free academic copy of SoftImage’s XSI 3D modelling/animating tool! We also got a 2-disc CDROM of the SIGGRAPH 2007 Conference Select, which has electronic copies of papers and some other documentation stuff from this year’s conference. SV awards were handed out to a few, and many students were on the “fabulous list” and were given prizes. I saw a lot of copies Corel PainterX and PaintShop Pro Photo XI, which I think most SVs got but being a hardcore programmer, I decided to get these two books instead:

Next year?
I’m already thinking about volunteering again for next year… we’ll see. It’s been a blast. Thanks to the Team Leaders and Student Volunteer commitee for making it all happen!

I thought I had a shift today but it somehow disappeared – less work for me, yay. I went to the Mobile3D course in the afternoon and the talk wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be. They were talking about M3G and how to use it – things which I can easily learn from reading docs online. I’m beginning to think that the technical courses that I went to weren’t worth it because:

• They give a good overview and they’ll also go into very technical details which at this point wouldn’t sink in since I haven’t started using them yet
• They tend to be long and there’s so much more to see at SIGGRAPH than listening to a lecture”.

The Exhibition Hall opened today, which was really cool too. The Exhibition Hall reminds me of all the E3 pics in the gaming mags, minus the booth babes… although I think I did see one or two of them. I didn’t get a chance to go to every booth there though, only half way.

The Emerging Technologies area was also interesting where different groups of people show cased their latest prototyped devices. Microsoft was there with their Surface device and I got a chance to play with it. It’s pretty nifty even though it’s V1.0.

Also, I think I lost my USB SD card reader.

But here’s a good news: I won a copy of The Sims 2 Deluxe from the EA booth during a Q/A session.

Day 5:

Worked at the store and animation theater shifts, both of which were easier than what I expected. The store had all the M sized t-shirts sold out, which sucked because I wanted to get one myself. Theater was great since I got to watch most of the 3D animated films submitted to SIGGRAPH. Also went to the Electronic Theater which was also similar to the animation theater but had different clips.

One really cool thing I liked at the beginning of the Electronic theater was that they had some old folks in the gaming business (I think) play some vector graphics-based games like Asteroids, and Star Wars. They mentioned something about using lasers and running it via emulation on a 1Ghz machine.

Tomorrow:
Visit the job fair, hand my resume to a few game companies, and visit the Guerrilla studios. I’m also going to be working at the store again.

7:30am – 12pm: worked registration shift again. A line up during opening but after that people came in a steady stream of groups of 3-4. Not as busy as I thought. The extra line up fences were redundant.

1:30pm – 3pm: Featured speaker from EA direction Glenn Entis. Talked about the past and current trends of games and where things are heading (I think). Compared real time graphics in games to CG back in the 80s and said how it was day and night. Today it’s so realistic that’s it’s hard to tell without looking closely. Now that graphics no longer was the “WOW” factor back in the day, people focused on character animation and expression. Today he says it’s about user content, like the Sims games where people would spend hours making their own models instead of using what the developers provide.

3ish to 5:30: Quaternions. Interesting visualization in the first half hour but I was already half a sleep that everything went in one ear and out the other. I left early just because I only wanted to konw the basics, and not the advanced stuff. I’d rather read a textbook than listen to the talk, not that this professor was bad. He was the most animate math professor I’ve seen. (I don’t recall any math professors who teach like him at U of T…)

6pm to 12pm: FJORG work shift. This was the best shift ever. Didn’t do much, but we got some entertainment. There was a Kung fu-Wushu group that came at 8pm to distract all the animators from trying to finish their work. I took a video of it and I may post it (later…).

(Gun’s and Roses’ Sweet Child of Mine playing outside in downtown SD @ 1am right now, nice!!!!)

First day was so fun, I met so many people, starting with my hostel mates which I just happen to ran into as soon as I got into downtown on a trolly. A trolly is SD’s version of a street car in Toronto. All I did was go to orientation later in the afternoon and met some other student volunteers (SVs). Everyone is so friendly and psyched about SIGGRAPH just as much as I am. It’s almost like frosh week back in first year, except 100x better. Everyone’s there for the same reason and have similar interests, whether it’s computer animation, rigging, modeling, graphics programming, and all that jazz. It’s soooooo awesome.

Here’s a pic of the hostel I’m staying at (it looks hippie-ish):

And the orientation office white board:

Day two today was even more of a blast. I had a shift at registration – greeted nice folks and help them out using the computer. There were a couple of ticked off attendees but I don’t blame them since they went around in circles just to try and register but most of us got them help to sort things out.

Then there was an interview/demo reel review session that was really cool too. Lots of useful tips on resumes and reels. I probably will post more details later. Then after that I went to a 20th celebration of this Japanese artist (I don’t have his name on me ATM, will update later…) and they had free sake for everyone!

Then were was a CG part at the Mariot hotel right beside the convention centre. I meet a bunch of interesting people who’re working, but not quite “there” yet but it was still interesting to see what they were up to. I busted out my laptop to show a demo of Chariot of Fire to this guy… it was pretty cool. He seemed to like it (I hope). Then I wanted to use my laptop to see other people’s demo reels but I didn’t have Quicktime installed… and I was shunned upon LOL. We did end up finding someone who happened to have a Mac and asked him to use it to show people’s demo reels. All was fun and awesomeness until…… I accidently spilled beer on the back of the guy’s MacBook… and the end. I still feel bad about it. But aside from that, Day 2 was even more fun than day 1. The week hasn’t even started yet and I can’t imagine how exciting it’s going to be once the show starts kicking. Stay tuned. Time for bed.

Having not flown on a place in over twenty years, I was so giddy on the first flight. Rising and landing on the plane reminded me of those “theatre simulators” at amusement parks like Canada’s Wonderland. The view outside the window is awesome and right now I think we’ve above the clouds – something which I haven’t really seen with my own eyes before.

It’s probably been over 30 hours that I’ve been without sleep…

That schedule doesn’t include Saturday which me and David will be flying down to SD. Our flight leaves at 6:25am from Pearson airport Terminal 1, so we’ll be heading there at around 4am or so. Saturday will be orientation day and we’ll have to check in at 3pm PST or so. Our flight arrives at 10am… but I don’t know if it’s EST or PST however since the itinerary didn’t make it clear.

I did end up getting housing accomodations at a hotel after all! But that means I’m scheduled to work 30 hours instead of the original 25. This makes things a little bit more complicated for me now:

• I already paid $163 for the hostel and it’s too late for me to back out now.
• There are two full day courses that I want to attend but I’ll might have to miss a few hours because of my shifts.

I’m probably gonna bite the $163 loss and go for the hotel instead of the hostel.

Most of my shifts right now are at the registration desk and the store, so I’ll be talking (a lot) to the attendees. FJORG! is a competition where a team of three CG animators have only 32 hours to create a 15 second animation clip. I have a 6 hour shift on Monday night for this event in addition to my morning shift which starts at 7:30am. Monday is obviously going to be the most intense day – gotta remember to pack some energy drinks and bars. I’m looking forward to see what the teams will come up with.

There are three courses that I want to attend at the conference that are game dev related, obviously. First one is on Sunday from 8:30am to 5:30pm which is an Intro to DirectX10. Second one is called Mobile 3D Ecosystem and it’s basically about developing 3D applications on mobile platforms and also runs from 8:30am to 5:30pm on Tuesday. On both days I have two shifts which I’m hoping to find someone to swap with so that I don’t have any conflicts during those times. The third course that I want to go to is much shorter and it’s called Visualizing Quaternions. This will be a math-y course that’s useful because it let’s you do rotations in 3D space, which I encountered while working on Chariot of Fire. (From my understanding, quaternions are a four tuple and it provides a nice way of representing rotations in 3 dimensions. One of it’s advantages is that it’s more efficient in terms of space than using matrix rotations because a quaternion only requires 4 variables, where as a rotation matrix requires 9.)

Since the Canadian dollar is almost equivalent to the US dollar now, I gotta do some shopping while I’m down there too. I probably will do that on one of the nights I’m free. There’s also gonna be a few parties going on too and I haven’t even looked at that yet. So many things to do, so little time.

On the application form they asked a lot of questions relating to your interpersonal skills rather than your interest in computer graphics. For those who are considering to volunteer in the future, here are some of the short answer questions (max 200 words) they asked on this year’s form:

• Describe your cross-cultural and interpersonal skills and experiences.
• Provide a recent real-life example of how you have handled stressful situations (especially those involving people).
• Explain one goal you set for yourself in the past year and how you achieved it.

And finally they had a creative thinking question. There were three topics to choose from. One of which was:

• Finish this story: Nothing seemed unusual when I looked around the room until I noticed…

I don’t remember what the other two were unfortunately. You also need one reference from anyone that’s within the graphics industry or from a professor/teacher you know at your school. If you seriously want to volunteer but don’t know any prof in your school, then it’s time to consider making relationships with some of them.

Since I didn’t get any travel assistance or housing, I’m going to have to pay for everything out of my own pocket. I’ll be staying at a hostel which is much cheaper than staying at a hotel. My costs so far has been:

• Plane ticket: $615
• Hostel (6 nights): $28 x 6 = $168
• Travel insurance (inc. baggage, medical, cancellations): $60

So that’s comes up to about $850. Quite an expensive volunteer position I must say.

As part of the package this year, they’re giving all student volunteers a year’s membership to ACMSIGGRAPH – yay! I don’t know if I’ll be using it a lot but hey it’s more “free” stuff.

Oh, and here was my answer to the creative question:

… I noticed a couple of rats ran out of a corner and across the side of the dark room. I was standing in the middle of the room quietly thinking until I was frightened by the rats and jumped back. As I did, my back hit a heavy old wooden clothes hanger. It toppled over and made a loud bang as it hit the wooden floor. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself down then looked over to where the clothes hanger had fallen and saw something which looked like a door handle. I went closer and sure enough it was a trap door. Being curious as I always am, I opened the door and was greeted by the stench of wood. I went down with my flashlight in hand and was surprised to stacks of books everywhere. There was one particular large stack of books that caught my attention. The first book on it was called Graphic Gems II; and underneath it was Graphic Gems IV. The entire stack was the collection of the Graphic Gems series! So this was where father kept his graphics books; I feel like the King of the treasure hunters.