Day 5 (Friday 18 Dec )
you might be wondering why am i typing all of this out 2 days after the event has ended, well, as during the event i've been sleeping at 1-3am plus plus and have been really tired, so i decided that it would be best to cover the wholoe even after the event ended, but i;ve been putting it off till the end. so yeah.
anyways back to the adventure. This is the 3/4 day of the siggraph event. the siggraph event is 4 days, and we have reached the 3rd day of the event. So let's begin.
We started the day with the Sega Corporation's training, which is one of my highlights of the event as they talked about the training program for their staff. There briefly i learnt that there are no internship programs and that knowing japanese is really important as most of their staff there are japanese. At least this is true for their japanese branch. actually the truth is that they accepted any kinds of staff as not all of them are programmers. the training program teaches the very basics of programming for the programmers and they teach the very basics of art to their artists. then there is a job called technical artists which basically know the aspects of both the programmer and the artists and therefor are able to liase between the two. this job particularly caught my eye as i have always been an artist at heart. they mentioned how mocap(motion capture) is taught to all staff no matter what job angle.
after the sega talk, i went back to the exhibition hall and explored futhur at the emerging technologies section.
Okay i have an appointment today with my team, i'll continue the story later.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Day 4 Continued( Thursday)
The exhibitors there told me to send my portfolio and my resume to the email adress and we will discuss furthur. It seems Square is an MNC and the knowledge of japanese is not essential, but would be useful.
right behind the square booth is the lucasarts booth. they were featuring thei rmaster jedi program and how they need staff for the singapore branch. oh the irony. haha. seems my level of diploma is not enough, but he asked to send in the portfolio anyways and see what happens. He recommended i try gambit, as they have taken several people onboard from gambit.
after spending my time at lucas booth, i headed down the hall and the nokia booth caught my eye. The nokia QT engine is an engine that is similar in disign like opengl, but it works on all nokia devices, microsoft os handphone devices and even on pc. IT caught my attention as the possibilities with this is endless, though limited, since it only works on nokia devices. I grabbed his name card and continue exploring this wonder. I bypassed the university of scad, and came across the kronos booth. the kronos booth is made up of a number of booths that seems to feature opengl technology, specifically opengl es. this engine is used in tablet devices, handphones, gps devices, and several handheld devices.
i left and came across several other booths one of which is KAUST which is a saudi computer science university, i was introduced to some of thir programes, and was asked to try their really really spicy ginger coffee. i gulped it down...really hot and really spicy, i then came across the emerging tech section.
the first thing that i saw was the big dome theater which eventually i went in on the second last day of siggraph. actually this day i briefly toured the booths as right after this i had a talk to attend t at the auditorium. I will go into this more detailedly later as i went to explore again at another day.
after the exploration i met some of the group members and they were apprently meeting at the pixar booth. there we were asked to choose between the acm reception or the pixar reception. at first i was okay with anything as both seemed reasonable. but izak wanted the acm talk as it's about eating and networking. I now regretted the choice personally, but that doesn't matter atm. we decided to go for ACM and went to reception. we were told that it is not confirmed that there is a bus back but there are buses from the hotel to the reception hall.
we then asked for directions incase there really wasn't any buses back to the hotel. We were kinda nervous and excited at the chance of the possibility to explore japan via the subway. and even at one poaint later we had talked about infact walking back.
izak had a really heavy pack so he went back to the hotel room, but failed to tell me where to meet up later. i got the instructions and directions and went off looking for izak. at this point of time, i noted that we were late and the time for the buses to arrive would have passed. i quickly ran to the point where i saw busses accumilating, and i fiddled with my phone trying to call izak but it was futile, as at that time i didn't know how to use a starhub phone to call another phone from outside singapore.
so this wasn't good, we havn't even reached the destination yet and we had lost each other. luckily izak called me and we met up at the lobby where the busses were arriving. there i decided to leave my back pack behind in the room so i went up and emptied the contents of my bag and picked up patato chips and a bottle of water since it was going to be a preety long journey.
the bus reached the destination and along the way we saw an ice skating ring and several other really beautiful scenery, we then reached the destination, the jetty ferry terminal. there, as we had arrived late, there wasn't any food left, we briefly walked around hoping to meet someone we know, but alas there was non, so we left in search for food.
we took photos at the jetty and decided, screw this, since were here, now on our own, let's go walk around town. or even, walk back, since they would probably be arriving back and they would have guessed we would come back late, so we decided to use this as cover and explore town.
so we went out of the terminal and alas, there sat a bus bound for the hotel. so indeed there are buses that are heading back to the hotel. we board the bus and awaited it to arrive back at the hotel, where we decided to explore. firstly we went back to the convinence store and bought some food, or at least izak, and we headed off. briefly, we went to a place called world portal, went to another train station furthur along, saw some banking buildings, went into 3 other malls quite a distance away from the hotel and to the jetty behind the hotel and to the carnival nearby.
we practically went all around the area. we then stopped at the world portal and spend some time exploring the nick nacks store at world portals. but by that time the shop was closing, so we just briefly looked around then headed back to the hotel, where we saw them coming back to the room.
we heard those who went for the pixar reception had fairly good food and received the pixar walking teapot. pitty. i wanted one of those, but sadly fate had other plans.
and that ends a really long and adventurous day.
The exhibitors there told me to send my portfolio and my resume to the email adress and we will discuss furthur. It seems Square is an MNC and the knowledge of japanese is not essential, but would be useful.
right behind the square booth is the lucasarts booth. they were featuring thei rmaster jedi program and how they need staff for the singapore branch. oh the irony. haha. seems my level of diploma is not enough, but he asked to send in the portfolio anyways and see what happens. He recommended i try gambit, as they have taken several people onboard from gambit.
after spending my time at lucas booth, i headed down the hall and the nokia booth caught my eye. The nokia QT engine is an engine that is similar in disign like opengl, but it works on all nokia devices, microsoft os handphone devices and even on pc. IT caught my attention as the possibilities with this is endless, though limited, since it only works on nokia devices. I grabbed his name card and continue exploring this wonder. I bypassed the university of scad, and came across the kronos booth. the kronos booth is made up of a number of booths that seems to feature opengl technology, specifically opengl es. this engine is used in tablet devices, handphones, gps devices, and several handheld devices.
i left and came across several other booths one of which is KAUST which is a saudi computer science university, i was introduced to some of thir programes, and was asked to try their really really spicy ginger coffee. i gulped it down...really hot and really spicy, i then came across the emerging tech section.
the first thing that i saw was the big dome theater which eventually i went in on the second last day of siggraph. actually this day i briefly toured the booths as right after this i had a talk to attend t at the auditorium. I will go into this more detailedly later as i went to explore again at another day.
after the exploration i met some of the group members and they were apprently meeting at the pixar booth. there we were asked to choose between the acm reception or the pixar reception. at first i was okay with anything as both seemed reasonable. but izak wanted the acm talk as it's about eating and networking. I now regretted the choice personally, but that doesn't matter atm. we decided to go for ACM and went to reception. we were told that it is not confirmed that there is a bus back but there are buses from the hotel to the reception hall.
we then asked for directions incase there really wasn't any buses back to the hotel. We were kinda nervous and excited at the chance of the possibility to explore japan via the subway. and even at one poaint later we had talked about infact walking back.
izak had a really heavy pack so he went back to the hotel room, but failed to tell me where to meet up later. i got the instructions and directions and went off looking for izak. at this point of time, i noted that we were late and the time for the buses to arrive would have passed. i quickly ran to the point where i saw busses accumilating, and i fiddled with my phone trying to call izak but it was futile, as at that time i didn't know how to use a starhub phone to call another phone from outside singapore.
so this wasn't good, we havn't even reached the destination yet and we had lost each other. luckily izak called me and we met up at the lobby where the busses were arriving. there i decided to leave my back pack behind in the room so i went up and emptied the contents of my bag and picked up patato chips and a bottle of water since it was going to be a preety long journey.
the bus reached the destination and along the way we saw an ice skating ring and several other really beautiful scenery, we then reached the destination, the jetty ferry terminal. there, as we had arrived late, there wasn't any food left, we briefly walked around hoping to meet someone we know, but alas there was non, so we left in search for food.
we took photos at the jetty and decided, screw this, since were here, now on our own, let's go walk around town. or even, walk back, since they would probably be arriving back and they would have guessed we would come back late, so we decided to use this as cover and explore town.
so we went out of the terminal and alas, there sat a bus bound for the hotel. so indeed there are buses that are heading back to the hotel. we board the bus and awaited it to arrive back at the hotel, where we decided to explore. firstly we went back to the convinence store and bought some food, or at least izak, and we headed off. briefly, we went to a place called world portal, went to another train station furthur along, saw some banking buildings, went into 3 other malls quite a distance away from the hotel and to the jetty behind the hotel and to the carnival nearby.
we practically went all around the area. we then stopped at the world portal and spend some time exploring the nick nacks store at world portals. but by that time the shop was closing, so we just briefly looked around then headed back to the hotel, where we saw them coming back to the room.
we heard those who went for the pixar reception had fairly good food and received the pixar walking teapot. pitty. i wanted one of those, but sadly fate had other plans.
and that ends a really long and adventurous day.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Update!
Hi again!
I guess this post is quite late, well...actually very late.. it's like the second last day of the trip. here's a summary of what has happened.
DAY 1(monday, 14-DEc-09 )
We left singapore on monday, and the flight took about 7 hours. when we arived it was about 10 degrees. yes, really cold. then we head down from the airport to a bus station where we then travelled to the hotel. took us quite a while to find the hotel, shinjuku prince hotel. One thing to note is that not all japanese people know english. I'll explain this later.
We stayed at the hotel for a day, basically the day we arived, we walked around the shinjuku area, looking around the area.
Day 2(tuesday 15-dec-09)
The next day, we met the square enix tour guide at the hotel lobby at 9am. sadly i and izak overslept and we met up late, so by the time we arrived at toei, we had to skip out some parts of the tour, cos the staff had to work. Heres some interesting fact, they are very very proud of digimon. They are the creators of one piece, and one piece has a very strong following in japan. it takes 2 weeks to do their animation. there is 3500-5000 character drawings and 2500 backgrounds that had to be drawn. their first anime which is done using computers is Digimon. before the use of computers and wacom tablets it would have taken at least 6months to do an episode of a tv series.
after that we skipped out of the sega amusement park, and instead we went akihabara where it's really the world of anime and manga stuffs. however we didn't spend alot of time there, cos after that we went to harajuku to a place called kiddy palace which is a shop. did a fair bit of shopping there. there, they have really amusing items from all types of licences. this includes the general floor, where yes, there's a humping dog usb drive. the second floor is another character and so on. until the last floor where there are cool gundam stuffs.
after visiting there we headed back to the hotel and packed as the next day, is siggraph day.
Day 3(wednesday 16-dec-09)
We packed and left this time...on time. but edmund had a sudden stomach attack and he needed izak to be with him... no idea why. we then were left at the yokohama station waiting for them, it took longer than we had anticipated as they went missing. turned out that the toilet was on the inside at the platform, so they had to enter to go to the toilet. They went missing for quite awhile, and we sent out 2 search parties for them. apparently izak had some problems with the suica card. which is like the ezlink card back in singapore.
once all that is over, the clock was already ticking for the opencl talk. when we arrived to the hotel it turned out that we couldn't check in. check in only starts at 2, here at the yokohama intercontinental hotel. after much arguement, that i believed we could leave the luggage with the concierge, i and the girls went off to the registration booth. the rest decided to stay behind with the bags. i really don't understand why we can't just leave the bags with the hotel. quite a number of the other people didn't want to leave the luggage alone with the staff with some unknown reasons and i got into an argument with him, i shall not name names.
after being annoyed about the whole episode, i left my luggage with izak and left with the girls. registration was quick and swift, which then we went to the conference hall. i went to the first quarter of the whats your story talk, which after a while i started nodding off to sleep, that was when i changed over to the opencl conference. i stayed while they were talking about the syntax and how opencl works with opengl and how in some ways it's better than using the standard opengl shaders. when it started getting way too technical, i switched back to what's my story where i encounter the speaker coming up a story about a gay school boy with super powers where he fights against a bully of sorts.
we had lunch after that then i went back to opencl. once again it started getting way too technical, i switched over to the The look of UP: the film maker guide to the pixar process. it was an interesting talk as i never noticed these things about the movie. though i have yet to watch UP. basically, they use shapes and camera angles and keep to it across the movie and vary it abit based on how they want to add emotion to a scene. for example, during sad scenes, they keep the camera facing at a downward angle and during happy scenes there is a look up camera angle.
they also talked about the different characteristics of each character of UP. how the main character is square in design, to mean sad while circle and round is to means happy. they ensure that the main character stays away from other characters, creating a partion off for every scene, untill he gets closer to the boy, at that point the partition goes away. There are other things, but at this moment that's all i can recall.
after that we went back to the hotel dumped our stuff then headed out to pokecenter. i gotten myself magikarp, 2 togepies, 1 merril. we headed back and the day ended.
Day 4(thursday 17-dec-09)
we started the day going to the tips for successful voice recordings for anime and CG. it was fairly entertaining as they acted out problems these professional voice actors faced which includes, no aircon in the studio, lousy equipment and lousy direction and lousy script. it was fairly more like complaining than anything. but in an interesting way.
after which i went to encountering the cutting edge of japanese video game development. one of the special program talks at the auditorium. briefly, here's some interesting information. in japan, old development methods emphasises on originality, thus it is important for japanese studios to spend alot of resources on originality, however it is inefficient. they showed a chart that mentions that the japanese market is selling more western games that emphasises on more advanced technology and thus, japanese game studios are moving towards this western model. this was mentioned by the square enix researcher.
after the talk i had lunch then went off to the games educators program. IT was a series of presentations by lecturers from different universities talking about thier case studies. the first one was about a game combatting HIV for the mayans. they did extensive research in what the community wants in the game. they created the hero's profile based on what the people wanted.
the next talk was by a NUS lecturer from the SADM in singapore. they produced a walking with dinosaurs game. he mentions the challenges faced when producing the game. such as that the programmers were computer science and in mechatronics, the artists did not have degrees so they couldn't be hired, and students that are part of the team left cos they are not interested in continuing the research and are more interested in pursuing works at lucasarts and other companies.
i left midway, because i realised that majority of the people in the room, were lecturers. i snuck out and went to the art gallery first. there were a number of amazing things there and some quirky, while some downright scary. there are some cool ones, like the post apocolyptic use of a mosquito to create sound. really interesting. while another one was about sexuality in dolls. really freeky stuffs.
I left then headed down to the jobfair. lucky i went there as the third day of siggraph, square enix has left. The first thing that caught my eye at the fair, was the equipmentless mocap. there was no equipment to hinder the actors from performing. they didin't have to wear uncomfortable suits. there are a series of cameras that capture the data and send it back to the software.
alot of the technology on display are Augmented reality and 3D stereoscopic technology. nvidia had a booth there show casing their CUDA technology. Square enix's booth was there as well. i discussed about the game development an internship program at square enix.
omfg it's 2.26am am going off to sleep. i'm gona continue posting my epic journey thus far tommorow.
I guess this post is quite late, well...actually very late.. it's like the second last day of the trip. here's a summary of what has happened.
DAY 1(monday, 14-DEc-09 )
We left singapore on monday, and the flight took about 7 hours. when we arived it was about 10 degrees. yes, really cold. then we head down from the airport to a bus station where we then travelled to the hotel. took us quite a while to find the hotel, shinjuku prince hotel. One thing to note is that not all japanese people know english. I'll explain this later.
We stayed at the hotel for a day, basically the day we arived, we walked around the shinjuku area, looking around the area.
Day 2(tuesday 15-dec-09)
The next day, we met the square enix tour guide at the hotel lobby at 9am. sadly i and izak overslept and we met up late, so by the time we arrived at toei, we had to skip out some parts of the tour, cos the staff had to work. Heres some interesting fact, they are very very proud of digimon. They are the creators of one piece, and one piece has a very strong following in japan. it takes 2 weeks to do their animation. there is 3500-5000 character drawings and 2500 backgrounds that had to be drawn. their first anime which is done using computers is Digimon. before the use of computers and wacom tablets it would have taken at least 6months to do an episode of a tv series.
after that we skipped out of the sega amusement park, and instead we went akihabara where it's really the world of anime and manga stuffs. however we didn't spend alot of time there, cos after that we went to harajuku to a place called kiddy palace which is a shop. did a fair bit of shopping there. there, they have really amusing items from all types of licences. this includes the general floor, where yes, there's a humping dog usb drive. the second floor is another character and so on. until the last floor where there are cool gundam stuffs.
after visiting there we headed back to the hotel and packed as the next day, is siggraph day.
Day 3(wednesday 16-dec-09)
We packed and left this time...on time. but edmund had a sudden stomach attack and he needed izak to be with him... no idea why. we then were left at the yokohama station waiting for them, it took longer than we had anticipated as they went missing. turned out that the toilet was on the inside at the platform, so they had to enter to go to the toilet. They went missing for quite awhile, and we sent out 2 search parties for them. apparently izak had some problems with the suica card. which is like the ezlink card back in singapore.
once all that is over, the clock was already ticking for the opencl talk. when we arrived to the hotel it turned out that we couldn't check in. check in only starts at 2, here at the yokohama intercontinental hotel. after much arguement, that i believed we could leave the luggage with the concierge, i and the girls went off to the registration booth. the rest decided to stay behind with the bags. i really don't understand why we can't just leave the bags with the hotel. quite a number of the other people didn't want to leave the luggage alone with the staff with some unknown reasons and i got into an argument with him, i shall not name names.
after being annoyed about the whole episode, i left my luggage with izak and left with the girls. registration was quick and swift, which then we went to the conference hall. i went to the first quarter of the whats your story talk, which after a while i started nodding off to sleep, that was when i changed over to the opencl conference. i stayed while they were talking about the syntax and how opencl works with opengl and how in some ways it's better than using the standard opengl shaders. when it started getting way too technical, i switched back to what's my story where i encounter the speaker coming up a story about a gay school boy with super powers where he fights against a bully of sorts.
we had lunch after that then i went back to opencl. once again it started getting way too technical, i switched over to the The look of UP: the film maker guide to the pixar process. it was an interesting talk as i never noticed these things about the movie. though i have yet to watch UP. basically, they use shapes and camera angles and keep to it across the movie and vary it abit based on how they want to add emotion to a scene. for example, during sad scenes, they keep the camera facing at a downward angle and during happy scenes there is a look up camera angle.
they also talked about the different characteristics of each character of UP. how the main character is square in design, to mean sad while circle and round is to means happy. they ensure that the main character stays away from other characters, creating a partion off for every scene, untill he gets closer to the boy, at that point the partition goes away. There are other things, but at this moment that's all i can recall.
after that we went back to the hotel dumped our stuff then headed out to pokecenter. i gotten myself magikarp, 2 togepies, 1 merril. we headed back and the day ended.
Day 4(thursday 17-dec-09)
we started the day going to the tips for successful voice recordings for anime and CG. it was fairly entertaining as they acted out problems these professional voice actors faced which includes, no aircon in the studio, lousy equipment and lousy direction and lousy script. it was fairly more like complaining than anything. but in an interesting way.
after which i went to encountering the cutting edge of japanese video game development. one of the special program talks at the auditorium. briefly, here's some interesting information. in japan, old development methods emphasises on originality, thus it is important for japanese studios to spend alot of resources on originality, however it is inefficient. they showed a chart that mentions that the japanese market is selling more western games that emphasises on more advanced technology and thus, japanese game studios are moving towards this western model. this was mentioned by the square enix researcher.
after the talk i had lunch then went off to the games educators program. IT was a series of presentations by lecturers from different universities talking about thier case studies. the first one was about a game combatting HIV for the mayans. they did extensive research in what the community wants in the game. they created the hero's profile based on what the people wanted.
the next talk was by a NUS lecturer from the SADM in singapore. they produced a walking with dinosaurs game. he mentions the challenges faced when producing the game. such as that the programmers were computer science and in mechatronics, the artists did not have degrees so they couldn't be hired, and students that are part of the team left cos they are not interested in continuing the research and are more interested in pursuing works at lucasarts and other companies.
i left midway, because i realised that majority of the people in the room, were lecturers. i snuck out and went to the art gallery first. there were a number of amazing things there and some quirky, while some downright scary. there are some cool ones, like the post apocolyptic use of a mosquito to create sound. really interesting. while another one was about sexuality in dolls. really freeky stuffs.
I left then headed down to the jobfair. lucky i went there as the third day of siggraph, square enix has left. The first thing that caught my eye at the fair, was the equipmentless mocap. there was no equipment to hinder the actors from performing. they didin't have to wear uncomfortable suits. there are a series of cameras that capture the data and send it back to the software.
alot of the technology on display are Augmented reality and 3D stereoscopic technology. nvidia had a booth there show casing their CUDA technology. Square enix's booth was there as well. i discussed about the game development an internship program at square enix.
omfg it's 2.26am am going off to sleep. i'm gona continue posting my epic journey thus far tommorow.
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