CHICAGO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — July 30, 2018 — SIGGRAPH 2018, the world’s leading annual interdisciplinary educational event showcasing the latest in computer graphics and interactive techniques, has announced news about featured games and Real-Time Live! programming. The 45th SIGGRAPH conference will take place 12–16 August at the Vancouver Convention Centre. To register for the conference, visit s2018.SIGGRAPH.org.

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Image from "Book of the Dead" © 2018 Unity Technologies

Games programming at SIGGRAPH spans many areas of the conference, including Courses, Talks, Technical Papers, Real-Time Live!, Panels, the Computer Animation Festival, Appy Hour, Virtual, Augmented & Mixed Reality presentations, Business Symposium, the Studio, and, of course, the Exhibition. In collaboration with the conference committee and reviewers, SIGGRAPH 2018 Games Focus Area Chair Natalya Tatarchuk has worked to help spotlight creators, visionaries, and pioneers within the games industry from the world’s leading studios. Recent achievements from the games industry will be presented in sessions and demos on novel production-proven game rendering techniques, real-time character rendering, asset pipelines, character animation, new solutions for game navigation, advances in hardware and software, game art production challenges and accomplishments, lessons in building emotional stories for game narratives and visual experience, and much more.

With more than 30 sessions, some of the highlights of the Games Focus Area include:

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games Part 1 and 2 ( Courses)

Natalya Tatarchuk, Unity Technologies

This two-part, intermediate-level Course brings state-of-the-art and production-proven rendering techniques for fast, interactive rendering of complex and engaging virtual worlds of video games. The daylong immersion will include speakers involved in the making of innovative games from companies like Ubisoft, Sledgehammer Games, Activision, Lucasfilm, NVIDIA, Unity Technologies, and Epic Games.

The Past, Present and Future of the Video Game Cinematic ( Panels)

Franck Balson, Blur Studio; Phillip Hillenbrand, Blizzard Entertainment; Thomas Vu, Riot Games; Matthew Ward, Bungie; Jakub Jabłoński, Platige Image; and, Alex S. Rabb, Digic Pictures

Top creatives in video game cinematics will discuss the processes and technology that makes their work possible, along with the creative and economic context that underpins this work. They will reveal the “who,” "what," and “why” of cinematics, shedding light on a genre that is often applauded but rarely analyzed.

Technical Art of Sea of Thieves ( Talks)

Valentine Kozin, Rare Ltd, Microsoft

This session will present a dive into a selection of visual techniques and tools developed throughout the production of "Sea of Thieves," ranging from ocean surface rendering and volumetric clouds to Kraken tentacle simulations and dynamic systems of GPU-calculated ropes and pulleys.

Moss: Finding the Emotional Connection ( Talks)

Chris Alderson, Polyarc

In the exciting space of VR, entertainment is more immersive than ever before. Alderson will shed light on Polyarc’s way of thinking during the production of Moss, while keeping in mind the possibilities and constraints that VR has to offer. On top of art direction, he will touch on how all aspects of Moss’ creation contributed to the emotional connection players will experience within the world of Moss and with Quill, Moss’ tiny hero protagonist.

Vacation Simulator ( Immersive Pavilion – Vrcade)

Lincoln Davis, Corinne Scrivens, Rusty Scrivens, and Brendan Walker, Polyarch

Vacation Simulator is the new original virtual reality game from Owlchemy Labs. First you JOBBED, now you VACATION. Visit Vacation Island and experience RECREATION, optimal RELAXATION, and classic human pastimes like SUNBURN. Vacation Island offers all this and more so that you can discover the lost art of TIME OFF.

“Within the next five years, we will see tremendous leaps in the fidelity of games’ content fidelity being represented across computer graphics,” noted Tatarchuk. “As the hardware continues to evolve, we are seeing orders of magnitude improvements in the complexity of game content for AAA games and tremendous creativity in the game rendering algorithms. At the same time, we see innovation in how VR and AR games are using the constraints of super-low-latency games on those platforms to build strong emotional connections with the players. Across the industries, Real-time production and experiences are slowly beginning to dominate the conversation, as creators of both films and games learn from one another. This year, though, the major inflections happening in GPU-driven pipelines, real-time ray-tracing, and the use of machine learning in content generation and real-time-pipelines have me really excited about the programming we are bringing to attendees in Vancouver.”