The Emergence of the Demoscene: Ziggy

Speaker(s):

Ricardo Cabello (@mrdoob) is a self-taught computer-graphics programmer. Originally from Barcelona, Cabello began his professional career alternating between roles as a designer and developer. In his spare time, his involvement in the demoscene set him on the path to learning graphics programming. Combining his background as a designer and expertise in development, his work ranges from simple interactive digital toys — Google Gravity, Ball Pool and Harmony — to full featured experiences — The Johnny Cash Project, The Wilderness Downtown, ROME and Under Neon Lights. Nowadays, Cabello spends most of his time developing open source libraries and tools — three.js, frame.js and stats.js — with the aim of making design and development simpler for everyone.

Xavier contributes at the CSIRO's Data61 in Australia as a software crafter, focusing on real-time data visualisation, creative coding, and interaction design. His work spans across multiple scientific research areas, including Smoke and Fire, Transport Logistics (TraNSIT), and StellarGraph. In November 2019, he obtained his PhD at The University of Sydney in games studies and data visualisation, with a living project Roguelike Universe that seeks to connect the dots. His interest in the demoscene is new school, influenced by new technology like projectors, audio synthesis, and computer graphics on the web. He collaborated on game jam projects like Golden Fleece, and worked with an audio-visual production installation at Vivid Sydney. He is currently hitting up books and resources around physically-based rendering to go deeper into the graphics rabbit hole. Xavier chairs the Poster Track for the International Conference on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game Creation Events in Osaka, Japan in 2020. He previously chaired the Poster Track for the Foundation of Digital Games in 2019. He also gave 2 intro to WebGL courses with Juan de Joya at SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia in 2017 and 2018.

Paul Kanyuk is a Crowds and Animation 2nd Unit Technical Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios with credits on "Cars", "Ratatouille", "Wall-E", "Up", "Cars 2", "Brave", "Monster’s University", "Lava", "The Good Dinosaur", "Finding Dory", "Cars 3", "Incredibles 2", and "Onwards". His specialty is crowd simulation, shading, and rendering, and he is responsible for the procedural animation and rendering of numerous crowd spectacles, including the hordes of rats in "Ratatouille", the deluge of falling passengers in "Wall-E", and the vicious pack of talking dogs in "Up". Paul earned his BSE in Digital Media Design at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches courses in RenderMan and Crowd Simulation at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Paul Kanyuk, is also known since Nov 4th 2019 as GelatoVonBismarck, is a demoscene newb and learned about the artform from Inigo Quilez (IQ) when they were coworkers. He first mustered the guts to try it out with his "wild category" winning submission to the Pixar 2017 Demo Party, "Terminal 5 Jingle Beeps". Inspired by Julien Guertault (Zavie) and Daniel Lindholm (Dropkickmonk3y)'s talk at Siggraph Asia 2018, Paul is giving a proper 64k intro a try with his latest piece, "Total ZAG".

Matthias works on perception technologies at Google. He's also the author of multiple open source projects, including a vector graphics library, an animation editor, a machine learning library and several compilers and static analysis tools. He has a Ph.D. in computer science (data compression). In his spare time, he takes apart old computers. Demoscene Bio: Matthias goes by the pseudonym "Quiss". As part of the demo group Reflex, he released five C64 demos between 1994 and 1996 that all won first place in demo competitions, at events in Europe. One of his demos ("Mathematica") is still in csdb's all-time top 100. Talk synopsis: What are the tricks, algorithms and optical illusions that make 8-bit (C64) demos "tick"? This talk covers, among others, fake zooming / texture-mapping, 2D zoetropes & cyclers, XOR filling and Bresenham decision trees, and how to dissect a more complicated effect into the individual building blocks.

Pol Jeremias Vila is a Lead Graphics Engineer at Pixar Animation Studios where he develops algorithms to help artists make movies. Recently, his team created Hydra, Pixar's real-time rendering framework. Pol is credited in multiple movies including Toy Story 4, Incredibles 2 and Coco. Prior to Pixar, he worked in rendering technology for multiple games, such as Star Wars 1313. In 2013, he co-founded Shadertoy.com, a website that enables artists, programmers, technical artists, and professors from all over the world to create and share rendering knowledge. Today, the Shadertoy.com has more than 30k publicly listed shaders created by thousands of contributors from more than 100 different countries. Pol has spoken and juried work at multiple conferences around the world including SIGGRAPH, Game Developers Conference, SIGGRAPH Asia, FMX or Eurographics. Since 2012, he has been actively involved with SIGGRAPH, he directed the Computer Animation Festival, Real-Time Live!, and more recently, the Immersive program at SIGGRAPH 2018. Pol will be the Conference Chair of SIGGRAPH 2021 in Los Angeles. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

John Doolan is Lead Software Engineer at Virtual Immersive. John is a rendering and interactive graphics guru based in Sydney, Australia. He has been in the Australian development scene for over 20 years. He has been lead programmer on multiple VR projects including SkyKraken and Infiniti VR. He is a co-founder of the Official UE4 Sydney Meetup and has taught VR courses at Academy

Joe Cincotta is the Managing Director of Thinking.Studio, a full-stack enterprise ux and software design agency based in Sydney, Australia. Since founding Thinking.Studio in 2003, Joe and his team have crafted integrated software solutions for clients like Intel, P&G, Tourism Australia, Sydney Opera House, Macquarie Bank, Westpac Group and Steadfast Insurance. Joe is chair of the University of Wollongong School of Computer Science and Information Technology (SCIT) advisory board, member of the University of Wollongong Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences (EIS) advisory board. Joe started coding in the demoscene back in 1987 on the Commodore 64 organising one of the very earliest Australian demo parties back in 1989.

Michael Sänger is currently CTO & Co-Founder of San Francisco based startup Unbound. Before coming to the US he was a graphics developer in germany, working for companies such as Siemens Healthcare, BMW, 3dexcite(formerly RTT) and Mercedes Benz. Michael started his demoscene experience in the early 2000s with a Playstation platform. He went on to have his first major success with the 2003 64k “point blank” which was nominated for 2 scene.org awards. After a bit of a timeout he joined mercury in 2009, with whom he worked on numerous 64k demos, culminating in the 2016 revision 64k competition which is to this day described as one of the best 64 competitions ever.

Chris works with Melbourne based VR companies in delivering positional audio elements for simulation environments. In the visual world, he has long been an advocate for “online” post production, ditching lengthy conforming stages and striving for real-time outputs. He has both graded and mixed documentaries which have seen international and cinema release.

Greg Newton identified his creative Graphic design talents throughout his teenage years in the early 90s that initially evolved from the demoscene. Greg then went on to run two successful Graphic and digital media studios (Pixel image artworks and Avision interactive) in his early 20s and since then has ran companies with his current success being Avisa Australia that involves sourcing IT talents around the world to come and work in Australia. Greg was also marketing director for Victoria University for several years with the launch of VU's Sydney campus that led Greg to travel the world and promote their Higher ed programs in Computer science.

Dan has taken a keen interest in computer graphics since his first glimpse of some creative educational games on a BBC Micro in the school library during his early primary school years in the late 80s, and seeing friends typing in games in Basic on their C64’s! This interest developed into a passion which ultimately landed Dan a position at VFX company Rising Sun Pictures, where Dan has worked for 17 years since early 2002. Starting out with Renderman shader programming and effects in Maya. Dan enthusiastically transitioned to Houdini in 2006 and using Houdini, finalled many major effects tasks on big films. Dan made significant (mostly python) programming contributions to the Houdini pipeline at RSP, becoming a respected developer for the Effects department. Dan has also become a key instructor for Houdini in the RSP Education programme on the side. All of this time Dan has been exploring creative graphics and graphics coding in his spare time, including an enormous catalogue of 2d fractal images made using UltraFractal (see UltraIterator Blog) and explorations into Reaction Diffusion (see Dan Wills’ Youtube). More recently 3d simulations and renderings using Houdini, and dabbling with glsl shader programming on Android.

Description: How the demoscene has progressed into the web browser What are the tricks, algorithms and optical illusions that make 8-bit (C64) demos "tick"? This talk covers, among others, fake zooming / texture-mapping, 2D zoetropes & cyclers, XOR filling and Bresenham decision trees, and how to dissect a more complicated effect into the individual building blocks. What is the demoscene? - From cracks to glitches to the pushing the GPU - how a subculture became the purest convergence of art and science. Limitations Push Creativity - Thinking and Working the Demoscene Way The evolution of chiptune, video hardware tricks and a world where limitation gives birth to visual aesthetic.

Demoscene Videos

Speaker(s):

Description: