Nerds

I think R&D and production engineering got some ideas and
inspiration and talked to some promising candidates.  I know Hugo
collected over 110 business cards.   Once, I watched Hugo sort of
interview a guy on the spot.  The guy was going on about voxelizing
meshes and whatnot and Hugo said, "Let me test you, give me one
Open GL call."  It seemed to really trip the guy up for a moment,
he could not give an answer that satisfied Hugo.

I do like to nerd out as much as my limited technical background
allows. ILM amped up their rigid body sim to calculate 3 million
bodies for Transformers 2.   The previous record was 11,000 for
Indy.  Hilmar Koch, and old friend from the early Blue Sky years,
was on the panel for Star Trek.  He supervised the black hole effects.

The Maya booth has a presentation from Sony about the cloth system
they use for "Cloudy".  They could generate maps which highlighted
the worst pinching areas.  It looked like they could automatically
open up those areas, but I think this can take something away from
the pose.

There was also a lot of talk about using the GPU to speed things up.
At the Electronic Theater, someone showed a real time demo of
3000 high res characters in a highly detailed environment, reacting
to changes on the fly.  They reduced some of the load with LOD
distance algorithms.