One ponytailed programmer moaned as he entered the show floor, "Look at all the Beautiful People."
At Siggraph '97, all roads lead toward Hollywood. As the computer-graphics industry mega-conference has landed back in LA, it's easy to see the impact the film industry is having on computer graphics, from the Electronic Theater animation festival to the splashy hardware booths on the showroom floor.
"Siggraph used to be 20 computer-graphic programmers getting together," observed Joel Bloom, a visual-effects producer for Digital Muse and producer of the upcoming documentary Computer Illusions. "Now look at this - it's ridiculous. The industry is falling into the whole Hollywood thing."
That Hollywood influence is most obvious in the Electronic Theater, which compiled 55 short animated films into a 2-hour extravaganza of effects. While some fascinating films came from the science community - rendering of space debris, for example, or of the DNA replication process - and several short independent pieces stole the show, a third of the show was made up of big-studio productions for commercial use.
Digital Domain, ILM, Disney, Sony Imageworks, Pixar, and PDI all put forth their work. Included were excerpts from Men in Black, The Fifth Element, and Hercules, plus commercials for General Motors, MTV, and Coca Cola, and shorts from Toy Story and upcoming Hollywood features such as Titanic and An American Werewolf in Paris.
But while Electronic Theater showcases the final animated products, Siggraph's exhibits reveal the competitive nuts and bolts that are bringing in the box-office bucks.
As the demand for special effects and animation grows in Hollywood, the hardware and software companies are fighting to make alliances with effects studios to gain a toehold - or vise grip, as the case may be - on that growing market.
The platform battle - reigning champion Silicon Graphics vs. the rapidly emerging Microsoft NT - is evident in the hardware booths, which are the gaudiest on the floor. Although many digital-effects shops will use multiple platforms for different purposes, others will ally with just one, as DreamWorks did with NT.
"Look at a big shop of 250 designers - if they go to NT, all their suppliers will follow," noted a business development executive for Digital. In order to push its own NT-based workstation, Digital has erected a two-story monstrosity complete with dancing girls. Intel's booth is also immense - complete with pink-lamé-suited "chipmaker" dancers from the Intel commercials.
But SGI is holding its own, and company spokespeople insist they haven't lost market share to the encroaching NT platform. All hardware booths, along with their allied software products, showcase giant video displays of the latest Hollywood blockbusters their products helped create: SGI and its software ally Alias Wavefront hold their own with effects for Men in Black, Contact, and George of the Jungle.
"This is mostly an entertainment show," says Ujesh Desai, a Silicon Graphics PR associate. "Our entertainment market grew 14 percent last year, and 60 percent was for our 02 model at the entry level."
Meanwhile, the computer-graphic geek-types that spawned Siggraph years ago line up three deep at recruiting booths for PDI, Pixar, and Sony Imageworks, hoping that Hollywood will also feed them.
