The buzz surrounding Gaffer was pretty solid at Siggraph this year, thanks in part to our Gaffer paper, published and presented at DigiPro.
If you’re unfamiliar with DigiPro, its a co-located symposium that takes place the day before Siggraph. The presentations focus on production proven technology, providing a space for long-form papers about actual production challenges (rather than pure research). Image Engine has presented at DigiPro in the past, about our Cortex based rendering pipeline, but this was the first paper about Gaffer itself.
As usual, DigiPro sold out fast, and we presented to a packed house.
There’s a full breakdown of the event on FXGuide. The overall audience reaction to Gaffer was very positive. Quite a few people found us during the lunch break to congratulate and express an interest in Gaffer, both as a framework and as a lighting application.
We’ve also re-recorded our DigiPro presentation a few weeks after the event and made it available on Vimeo.
John and Andrew also hosted an informal Birds of a Feather meeting at Siggraph a few days later. No presentation for this one, just an hour long Q & A session for anyone who wanted to learn more. Much to our surprise, it was nearly a packed house too!
We fielded a ton of great questions over the hour, from a wide array of developers representing an impressive cross-section of VFX and Animation studios. We were quite pleased not only with attendance of the event, but also with the quality of questions being asked. It was clear to us that these were the right questions, and a handful of developers even stayed after the BOF ended for an additional 45 minutes of questions!
All week at Siggraph people were tracking us down in the convention center (or at the evening parties) expressing an interest in Gaffer and planning to make use of it. So hopefully we’ll start to see a few new contributors getting involved in Gaffer development soon!