NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio has released some beautiful visualizations of ocean flow called “Perpetual Ocean”. Meant as a submission for the SIGGRAPH2011 computer animation festival, it wasn’t accepted.
This visualization was produced using NASA/JPL’s computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2.. ECCO2 is high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice. ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization. The dark patterns under the ocean represent the undersea bathymetry. Topographic land exaggeration is 20x and bathymetric exaggeration is 40x.
The fact that this wasn’t accepted I think is more evidence that SIGGRAPH has been steadily moving away from scientific visualization and computer graphics research work, and more towards the Visual Effects and Computer Animation industries for the last several years. The videos are beautiful and mesmerizing, as well as fairly computationally complex.
hi horace, thanks for commenting. and maybe there’s something more significant to look at: why aren’t more viz projects being accepted? i know the committees look for beautiful viz pieces — or any viz pieces — and i know we’re always thrilled when they come in. (Saying that, please believe me when i tell you that when close to 1,000 pieces are submitted annually, we’re thrilled when ANY good animation comes in.) Having been involved in the process for a long time, we’ve seen vast increases in quality each year, so yes, competition is fierce. Maybe you could help SIGGRAPH find more great viz content? Maybe there’s a way SIGGRAPH can even help…I don’t know….I do know that the deadline this year is 9 april, so there’s still time to gather animations that would already be ready for submission. There’s always room for improvement, and we strive to represent our audience and our community — our entire community. If there’s a way we can help, please let us know…
Just to clarify, the original visualization was 20 minutes long and contained no music, title, etc. We liked it and thought it appropriate for SIGGRAPH, so we edited it down to 3 minutes by cutting and retiming, added the background music and titles and submitted it. We like submitting to SIGGRAPH, and hoped it would get in because we are proud of it, but it didn’t. We mention that fact in the page that documents the visualization as an interesting fact, not as a comment on the judging process.
I would agree, though, that our kind of work (scientific data visualization) is increasingly difficult to get accepted by the Computer Animation Festival.
hi…this post just caught my attention, and as a juror for last year’s Computer Animation Festival, I just wanted to comment. The creators of this piece note that “This visualization was created as a last minute entry for theSIGGRAPH 2011 computer animation festival; however, it was not accepted. ” SIGGRAPH animations have been improving exponentially since the film show started in the early 80s. The Computer Animation Festival strives to showcase the best submitted animation in all categories. To accomplish this year after year, the SIGGRAPH community and its volunteer chairs, reach out to an increasing number of industries, creators and communities. Had the creators of this piece spent more time and effort on the graphics and the story; had they looked at other very beautiful viz pieces, had they been inspired by other extraordinary pieces of animation, had they told us a story using beautiful computer graphics; had they created a piece for the beauty, rather than “for the SIGGRAPH 2011 computer animation festival,” I’m pretty sure the jury would have seen what it has seen in the animations they have accepted over the years that have gone on to garner multiple nominations and awards — including the Academy Award, as was won by the 2011 SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Best of Show. I implore you, rather than sit back and feel victimised by a dedicated team of volunteer jurors, please look at this as a challenge and a call to create beautiful, educational, interesting, entertaining computer generated graphics we can all look forward to watching at the 2012, 2013, 2014…..SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival.