International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

This was a ton of fun.

And I'm definitely going to hit you up for some of those links you were talking about from SIGGRAPH.

Yes, absolutely.

And that's the episode.

There's already been a lot of good lessons from some of what we've seen in the past across, yeah, the companies you've named already, Ferryman Collective and Tender Claws, uh, the Meta movie, of course, being another big one.

I was fortunate to be on a panel at SIGGRAPH with Jason Moore and Steven Buchko and, uh, Mandy Canales, and we had a, a really productive conversation about exactly what you're asking here.

It's a scale question, of course.

Like, you need to find a way to bring in enough people who can all have an excellent experience and pay for that experience and feel like it was worth it, and then want to come back.

So yeah, it's exciting.

exciting.At SIGGRAPH this year, I had someone ask me, and remember, I'm not an artist or a visual effects professional in any way.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Someone asked me-

I think, yeah, yeah, 100%.

And like, I don't know, but I'm just gonna side tangent this for a sec.

At SIGGRAPH this year, it seemed like a lot of when people talked about AI, they were talking about just prompting something and generating some videos.

Mm.

me.

And so this all started, I'm at Comic-Con right now and I was at SIGGRAPH yesterday.

Like my background is in video games and this is a real background.

This is not a Skype background.

I mean, I live in Orange County, but this is San Diego.

So I'm here for Comic-Con right now, which is great to see that it's as busy as it used to be.

Whereas SIGGRAPH, on the other hand, which I was just in LA a couple of days ago, was like a ghost town.

It was so small compared to what it used to be.

It was followed by a pause where essentially NVIDIA rethought its marketing process in the wake of this massive backlash.

The reintroduction of DLSS 5 began with a SIGGRAPH presentation exhibiting how the technology works, the three neural rendering models on offer and how developers can tune the effects to best suit their artistic vision.

And this was followed by closed doors presentations at Gamescom 2026 with a wide array of press and a follow-up virtual presentation for those like me who couldn't make it.

So basically, the key aim throughout since this reintroduction has been to emphasize developer input and even validation of the technology.

better this is the open source creative podcast a podcast where i ramble on about creativity process and open source software i'm jason van gumster your host and driver on the road to creative freedom this week i'm talking with i'm gonna mess up his name i i can't i can't not mess up his name uh tristan theroux from Alma Linux.

And I had the pleasure of meeting Tristan at SIGGRAPH this past year.

And we had a good conversation about all sorts of cool things and basically invited him on the show.

And now I get to share him with you guys.

Yeah, I'm with the Amazon XOS Foundation.

I am the SIG lead for the media and entertainment SIG.

We've been active for two years now and was an initiative that launched actually from SIGGRAPH.

I'm also a sysadmin of my day work.

NVIDIA tried to introduce nerfs and ray tracing, but they were too slow and expensive.

But in 2024, a paper came out at SIGGRAPH that talked about Gaussian splats, and these are a way of rendering a scene that isn't precise, breaking everything down into triangles and then pasting a picture on it, which is what texturing is.

Instead, they are individual, not pixels and not voxels, they're not volumetric, but they contain enough information about how they look and they are variable in size.

So if you have a boring flat wall, this is not a flat wall, but that poster over there is flat, then you can do a pretty big Gaussian splat and you only have to, explain to the renderer, how does it look from this angle? How does it look from this angle? So the other thing about Gaussian splats is they contain not just the color, they contain a color at every angle of view.

How are you? Good to see you and always good to see you.

Yes, it was fun to catch up at SIGGRAPH in LA recently, actually.

That's when we last caught up.

So, how did your conference go?

The human part, which makes us love art, is what now we're trying to figure out.

What is that on top of it? Let's see what these new kids on the blog do.

I really mean that by the change in the feeling in the room at a SIGGRAPH or elsewhere that people are like, okay, yes, we hated this a year ago.

We're coming to terms with it now.