12. My Conference Is Bigger Than Your Conference
The annual gathering of the computer graphics community was called Siggraph. It was a big event: 50,000 attendees at its peak. Scientists, engineers, programmers, artists, professors and students, hardware and software vendors, and countless others.
For me, it was Christmas, New Years, and my birthday all rolled into one. It was a technical conference, and industry trade show, an art exhibit, all wrapped up in a carnival atmosphere, showcasing all that was new and exciting in the world of computer graphics.
Siggraph (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics) is a “special interest” group of the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM). Other SIG’s include Sigchi (Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction), and Sigplan (Special Interest Group on Programming Languages). There are 38 Sig’s listed on the ACM web site, and most — if not all — hold annual conferences.
But Siggraph was different, especially in the 80’s and 90's. Like the other SIG conferences, Siggraph was a highly technical academic conference, and the conference proceedings were pure gold to us graphics software developers. It was different because it was also a trade show. Where a typical academic conference may attract one or two hundred participants, Siggraph pulled them in by the tens of thousands.
Before the days of the Internet and 24-hour news updates, Siggraph was full of surprises. New hardware, software, techniques. New product and industry announcements, sneak peeks at new technology in hotel suites if you had an invitation. Vendor user groups and parties.
As a small startup, it was our chance to demo our software, make an impression, get noticed, gather sales leads, and check out the competition. It was also a huge outlay, traveling from Canada, hotels, shipping equipment, and paying the exorbitant exhibitor fees. The time before the show was crunch time. Squeezing in last minute features, recompiling the software the morning before the show, double-checking that the demos were working properly.
My first Siggraph was 1986 in Dallas. I was the proverbial kid in the candy store. Over the years, I went to 24 Siggraphs in a row.
Design & Code
This is the listing for the image above. I used the 3d noise gradient from the previous posting to deviate the particles moving up along the Y axis from the ground plane.
I’m not happy about the noise interface being hardwired into dynamics-animator, nor do I like *gravity* being a global variable. The latter is left over from the Lisp lessons I mentioned earlier.
I’d like to implement both gravity and noise (as well as other forces) into force-field classes which dynamics-animator would reference. Sounds like a fun project to tackle next. Fire up the REPL.
