p
a g e | 1 | 2 | 3LA ACM SIGGRAPH 2002-2003 Executive Council
Chair:
Alan Botvinick
Associate
Chair:
Claudia Sumner
Vice
Chair: Erin Dalli
Associate Vice Chair: Tim Everingham
Secretary: Fran Zandonella
Treasurer: Jeff Chan
Chair Emeritus: Joan Collins Carey
Executive Advisor/Past Chair: Diane Piepol
Past Chair: Genny Yee
Past Chair: Aliza Chameides
Membership Chair: Cathy Blanco
Membership
Secretary: Andrew Milne
Webmaster: Janet
Gervers
Publicity Chair: Diana Lee
SIGGRAPH Tech Chair: Howard Neely
SIGGRAPH Art Chair: Sheri Burnham
Committee
Members:
Diane Solomon, Zachary Taylor, James Guilford
Bold
indicates elected officers.
Executive Council meetings are held on the third Tuesday of the month.
If you would like to attend call the SIGphone at 310.288.1148.
Newsletter Contributors:
Art
Direction: Janet Gervers
Writers: Suzanne Lezotte,
Janet Gervers
Newsletter Archives:
SIGGRAPH Conference 2002:
Web Graphics (continued)
by Janet A. Gervers, LA Chapter SIGGRAPH, Webmaster
A few key points covered by Sandro on Flash were: the economy of keyframes and frames, where
Flash can tween the frames inbetween the keyframes, eliminating rigorous handwork done in the
past, resulting in reduction of overall production time and without sacrificing creativity. The software
is currently available on multiple platforms as is the website plug in, and above all is
affordable.Vector art can be created within the Flash environment as well. Flash designers and
animators create animated graphics, buttons with rollover effects with an ease of use and fluidity.
He demonstrated this for captive audience with a character " Da Boss", modeled after his high
school principal. With one character in one keyframe, he showed how a variety of poses were
achieved by flipping, rotating, copying and pasting graphics from one keyframe, expanding to 4
keyframes total, all in a matter of minutes.
Besides demonstrating how quickly and efficiently Flash can be used as an animation tool, it was an
entertaining presentation.
Animation
For those that attended the previous SIGGRAPH Conference, the memorable Winner from the 2001
Web3D RoundUp, Horses for Courses, by website designer Michela Ledwidge should come to
mind. This animated short film is a case study in 3D filmmaking, using Lightwave 3D to create a
lush environment of interactive 3D graphics that blurs the line between games and film.
Michela chose an edgy little green character based on the mythological god, Pan, who is used as
an entertaining metaphor for the dotcom boom of the late nineties. She wanted to have a level of
interactivity similar to a game, so that the end user could "play with a film" instead of only being a
passive viewer. This works successfully in this film and accomplishes her goal of quality story telling
with a collaborative medium in an immersive environment. The film is available on the web,
although only for the Windows platform in its interactive version using the B3D plug in; however,
the passive viewable film is available for Macintosh and other platforms via streaming video. It can
still be appreciated this way, however it is important that the development community addresses
multiple platforms to bring access to more endusers.
Art & Design
A Case Study in 3D Filmmaking: Horses for Courses: Michaela Ledwidge
Color Aesthetics for Web Graphics Creation: Lynda Weinman
Renowned web designer, author and educator, Lynda Weinman presented a highly informative course on color palettes for the web, namely for those newer to website design and a great refresher course for more experienced website designers. Strategies for creating harmonious color schemes for web pages was covered, with Lynda noting that there is a frequent misuse of color on the web, in addition to color usage for sight disabled access for the web. She expressed that all of the color theories presented were universally applicable to all digital forms of media.
Some of the technical constraints for web color palettes are color shifts on different operating systems, namely Macintosh and Windows platforms, a wide variety of color bit depth on monitors; however, the 8 bit color depth issue is obsolete at this point with the proliferation of new computers in the past 2 years, therefore the web safe color palette (aka- browser safe color palette) with 256 colors is not a requirement as it was back in the mid- nineties. Lynda stressed creating a visual hierarchy with color by using harmonious color palettes on web pages, based on value, saturation and hue, then showed examples of sites using monochromatic and analogous color schemes that were aesthetically pleasing and visually legible for all kinds of endusers including sight impaired. A useful site recommended, http://www.vischeck.com can be utilized as an effective source to test your website to demonstrate how sight disabled people view a webpage.
Lynda's process for creating websites is familiar to seasoned website designers; a site is created in a layered Adobe Photoshop document with a built in mask to lock transparency, then is opened in Adobe Image Ready for optimization and slicing of graphics.
Art & Design
Integrating Multiple Narratives- The Mirror that Changes: Annette Weintraub
Another course in Art & Design focused on an atmospheric and mesmerizing Flash website presented by Annette Weintraub, Professor of Art at The City College of New York, and Director of the Robinson Center for Graphic Arts and Communication Design. The Mirror that Changes was commissioned by The Ruschlikon Centre for Global Dialogue and is currently exhibited internationally.
The Flash project integrated animation, images, text with voiceover, sound effects and music, therefore, multiple narratives. While this is a website, it can also be seen as a multimedia/digital art experience, thematically based on water sustainability. The piece starts with an animated intro that visually explains a quote from Leonardo Da Vinci. This site was designed to have a page to page momentum, with sections that represent various aspects of water, namely seen as a daily ritual in life.
The website animation uses layers of images selected from public domain stock photography collections and text quotes, combined with a voiceover and simultaneously trickling water sound effects. Annette's site is a wonderful visual feast for the eyes that must be seen to be truly appreciated.
http://www.annetteweintraub.com
Interactive 3D Characters for Web Based Learning and Accessibility: Ed Sims and Dan Silvergate
This cutting edge character animation tool developed by Ed Sims and Dan Silvergate of Vcom3D, Inc. is an educational software system for educators in assisting hearing impaired individuals by translation via an interactive 3d character. The software is designed for a low bandwidth internet connection and is created with an ease of use and doesn't require advanced technical knowledge for use by educators.
The interactive 3d character is an interpreter that uses speech synthesis combined with facial expressions that can be selected from a library and gestures that translate to ASL (American Sign Language) and has capabilities according to its authors to translate into other languages. Each character has embedded behaviors that make them more unique and lifelike, although the facial expressions are a bit limited and movements somewhat stiff; however, those are aspects that can be developed over time. In studies by the developers people responded well to these interactive avatars. The positive results of this tool far outweigh its limitations and will be a great benefit for the hearing impaired community.
Standards
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG): The World Wide Web Consortium's Recommendation for High
Quality Web Graphics: Dean Jackson, Max Froumentin, Chris Lilley, Vincent Hardy
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), is an Open Standard for vector graphics designed for the web as a common imaging format that is resolution independent which is based on XML. The World Wide Web Consortium's (more commonly known as the W3C) main presenter Dean Richardson highlighted the attributes of SVG , such as: accessible- with graphics that can be animated that are are time based and not frame based, are stylable through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), sculptable through Javascript and profilable for PDA's and instant messaging; also SVG is touted as html for graphics and can be converted to Flash or DHTML.
The SVG Viewer plug-in is available for multiple platforms and distributed free by Adobe and other companies and uses Open Source code.
Standards
The Xj3D Browser: Community Based 3D Software Development: Justin Couch, Alan D. Hudson,
Stephen N. Matsuba
The Xj3D Browser is a cross-platform browser defining 3D (X3D) and VRML content for the web. This is a major reshaping of VRML 97 and is considered as the new VRML with the goal of having standards, something that never materialized with VRML 97.
The Yumetech presenters are on a team of people using a community development process that will allow for more creativity without corporate dominance that can stifle the proliferation and global usage as was the case with VRML.
Uses described for Xj3D are: web pages, scientific and engineering visualization, training applications, multimedia presentations and networked virtual worlds. Some key features were: modular architecture, encoding format, a number of features adapted from VRML 97. In addition, improvements were made in contrast to VRML 97 which required adoption of an entire feature set for compliance with X3D divided into 2 sets of components and profiles where developers can determine which elements they need to use.
It should be noted that there were other web related courses outside the Web Graphics program that gave hands on demonstrations of X3D, SVG, and SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) which is typically used for authoring web presentations integrating streaming audio, and video with images, text and other media objects. Leonard Daly presented a full-day course "Introducing X3D" (he also taught the first course on X3D at the 2000 Web3D Symposium) and explained that X3D is the next version of VRML, offering more performance elements and a version that does not require a plug in; it is the developing standard for web-based 3D content. For more on X3d, go to http://www.realism.com. Leonard also noted that the content from the Web3D Consortium SDK 2 CD kit which was given out during the conference is also available from the Web3D Consortium online at http://sdk.web3d.org/.
Also courses were presented on MPEG4, the new high quality movie compression standard for the web embraced by Apple in its release of Quicktime 6. It was unfortunate that the ever popular Web3D RoundUp was absent from the Conference this year as a result of funding, although there was a small scale web 3D event produced by Leonard Daly and others that featured projects presented in the Web Graphics program. Perhaps the Web3D RoundUp will return to next year's conference in San Diego and could expand to include animated and/or interactive website graphics with the event renamed as the Web RoundUp.