Dave Geldart, an animator and owner of Toronto's Waveform Digital Productions, was in Los Angeles earlier this month to check out this year's siggraph convention and trade show. He files this report.

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Siggraph is the "special interest group for graphics" of the Association of Computing Machinery. But you wouldn't know it was a special interest group by looking at the size of the crowds at the 24th annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques ­ and you don't have to be a member to attend.

When Los Angeles is the site (as it is every other year), the crowds are huge. This year's attendance by over 48,700 people, strolling 182,600 square feet of exhibit space checking out the wares of 359 companies marked a record-breaking year for the landmark show.

siggraph is a mecca for anyone with a serious interest in computer graphics and animation. Every year, the hordes come from all over the world to make their annual pilgrimage to the week-long conference and trade show.

This year, computer animators, facility managers, software developers, researchers, and the rest of the digerati converged on the Los Angeles Convention Centre Aug. 3-8 to learn new techniques, see new developments in software and hardware, and of course, to party.

The show featured the regular full schedule of conferences, papers and panels, and exhibitions which delved deeply into the technical, and sometimes the philosophical, underpinnings of the graphics world.

Thirty-five courses were offered this year on topics like motion capture in practice, designing realtime graphics and digital color.

In the keynote address, titled "Storytelling: The World's Oldest Profession," Brian Ferren, executive vp for creative technology and r&d at Walt Disney Imagineering, cited the overwhelming significance of the Internet to culture, comparing its importance as a technological invention to the printing press.

Trade show

Yet given all these gems, people consider the trade show to be the main event. Filling two floors of the Convention Centre, the show was loud, hot, crowded, and lots of fun.

On the main floor, there seemed to be a contest among exhibitors as to who could build the highest booth. Digital Equipment, Silicon Graphics and Discreet Logic were among several towering landmarks dwarfing their neighbors. As well, many software exhibitors such as Side Effects Software, Alias/Wavefront and Microsoft Softimage had "public" demos which attracted large crowds that sometimes blocked the aisles.

A strong continuing trend was the growth of Microsoft's Windows nt operating system as a viable platform for serious computer graphics and animation tasks. Eyeon Software demonstrated a robust image compositing system called Digital Fusion, while Discreet Logic showed nt and Mac-based offerings from its new Illuminaire product line. This software performs many of the paint, compositing and image processing tasks of its Silicon Graphics-based brethren, but at a fraction of the cost. Of course, there are some trade-offs in terms of speed and flexibility, but in general, it offers remarkable performance for the price.