VIEW Conference 2007: Day four with Beowulf, Game Design and Ken Perlin
After having flight back to Rome and having taught a nice class on Digital Illumination at the Tor Vergata University here I am back at reporting the wonderful experience of VIEW Conference 8 in Turin which just ended.
Following the thread of 3D digital characters, Parag Havaldar, Lead Research and Development Engineer of Sony Picture ImageWorks presented the whole character pipeline at his animation studio. We had the privilege of having a exclusive preview of some sequences from the upcoming film “Beowulf” of director Robert Zemeckis, entirely CGI with heavy use of performance capture. Parag explained pros and cons of this innovative technology, “just another form of animation” he said by re-stating that the work of traditional animators is here to stay. It was interesting to get the technical details and statistics about a process that keeps on improving movie by movie. I could not resist to ask the question “will we have soon the perfect virtual actor?”, Parag replied “why? Don’t we have it right now?
I lost some sessions and I should have not. For instance I had absolutely to follow Eklund since I always thought that there must be a noble cause for computer graphics and videogames:
A freelance writer and game designer, Ken Eklund’s passion is to help games realize their potential to affect people artistically and to promote the public good. He has helped develop the design and narrative of games as commercial entertainment, for universities and foundations, and for clients in the private sector. In early 2007 Ken created and produced the groundbreaking online collaboration World Without Oil. A vivid, realistic “pre-enactment” of the next global oil crisis, World Without Oil is the first alternate reality game to focus the world’s collective intelligence and imagination on a real world problem: dependence on oil. Stefanie Olsen of CNET summarized the game’s unique approach this way: “If you want to change the future, play with it first.”
While preparing myself for, maybe, one of the most exciting event of my professional life I got bits and pieces of the session by Jorgen Tharaldsen, Product Director in Funcom, European producer of popular Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs). With passion dripping from the stage Mr Tharaldsen inundated the audience with data, information, diagrams about the possibilities of videogames. What really hit me was the conclusion where the speaker were delivering so much provoking information by reading aloud lots and lots of very effective slides. I do really liked the ending where a writing on the screen said something like “there are no boundaries”.
I finally arrived at one of the most hot sessions of the entire event. At least for me. I have been developing procedural shaders for texturing in LightWave 3D from 1997 to 2002 and I spent thousands of hours using one of the most popular and innovating algorithms of the entire computer graphics research field. The name of this pattern generator is Perlin Noise. Can you imagine how I felt when I met Ken Perlin in person? After having survived to a small heart attack I got introduced to Prof. Perlin: I told him I used his research to develop shaders I would sell and he, in the first of a series of blazing shots, replied “then you owe me money!”
8)
What weird faith: meeting the creator and being the moderator of his session. Never I would have thought I could ever sit on the stage together with a person like him. Ken Perlin, the receiver of an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques (among his various awards and titles) gave one of the best and most entertaining presentation. I was quite puzzled in the beginning since my poor knowledge of Perlin’s latest research stuck me at the old dear noise while Ken (I have his permission) moved forward to apply his researched tool to interactive storytelling. “Do we want our toy dinosaurs back?” Ok, fame hit his head, I thought. But when I started to see funny characters interacting with stories, environments and to each other in delightful minimalist settings I started to realize the power and the innovation of digital characters which “have something to tell you”. Prof Perlin said that characters as the ones in the popular videogame “The Sims” are just dolls and players would make everything to them and with them because they are not related to them while we need to create interactive applications where characters have things to say to players so they could well deserve a life (still in their virtual world). I was quite amazed to find so interesting these topics after having fought for a bit the feeling of being let down by the “missing noise” (the procedural one, of course). I then realized that noise is just a tool and it stays at the base of every single interactive demonstration Perlin showed to an amazed audience. Just a tool to make believable characters.
Ken clarified that he is not interested in reproducing soul or in reproducing actual human thoughts and behaviors through artificial intelligence, he is just interested in interactive fiction where characters behave as they have a brain and a heart. This happened while, on the screen, stylized interactive characters were telling stories (told and untold) by creating relationships or reacting to environments. The irony which pervaded Prof. Perlin’s talk really gave a freshness and a vivid tone to a stimulating and provoking contribution to the future of entertainment.
Ben fatto Maestro!
That was the first part the day. Let me share with you before I complete the second part. Ah! I am preparing a selection of the thousands of photographs I took at VIEW Conference to illustrate the articles.
Until then:
VIEW Conference
Ciao.
Max
