What an unexpected honor! In May, I was approached by Frank Foster, the current President of the SIGGRAPH Pioneers Group, to see if I would take over the post he has filled for the last five years. SIGGRAPH is the world’s leading organization devoted to the art and science of Computer Graphics, and I have attended the SIGGRAPH conference almost every year since 1983. I have been active in the local chapters in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Denver, and was invited to be on the Jury of the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater in 2006, but this is the first time I will be involved at such a high level of the international SIGGRAPH organization.
The Pioneers Group is reserved only for those CGI artists and developers who have been involved for at least 20 years, though many Pioneers have been working more than twice that time. The group includes many brilliant developers who, in the 1960’s and 1970’s created rendering and animating techniques currently used every day by artists around the world to create ever more realistic computer-generated imagery.
This year is incredibly special for SIGGRAPH Pioneers.
The Pioneers Reception always features a keynote talk by a historically significant Pioneer, and this year I will be introducing Dr. Jim Blinn, one of the true giants of the CGI industry! (Insiders will recognize the joke – Blinn is tall enough to literally tower over the crowd!) Blinn created his first images with a computer back in 1968, so this year he will be presenting his personal 50-year retrospective on the history of computer graphics! Blinn worked with Carl Sagan to develop animation for the original Cosmos series, and was a fixture at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena for decades. To visualize the Voyager spacecraft mission, Blinn developed the first-ever use of UV Mapping to apply a flat image of Jupiter to a CGI sphere and render the gas giant planet as a three-dimensional object. Blinn also developed the technique of Bump Mapping, a lighting trick to easily add complexity of surface detail to CGI objects, and he is the developer of the Blinn Shader still used (with his name!) to add glossiness and reflectivity to CGI objects in much the same way as real shiny objects react to light.
SIGGRAPH is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on GRAPHics, and this years’ conference will take place in Vancouver, BC Canada August 12-17. The Pioneers reception will be Tuesday evening Aug 14 at 6:00pm.