SIGGRAPH 2019.. Virtually the Best

One of Jellyfish Pictures’ favourite events in our calendar has been and gone. Back in its hometown of Los Angeles, the city was once again inundated by the computer graphics industry for SIGGRAPH 2019. Eager to learn about the latest trends, product launches and issues across the VFX and animation industries, professionals travelled from all over the world to celebrate and learn.

For our team at Jellyfish Pictures, we were on one mission – to spread the word and wisdom on virtualised workstations. Jellyfish CTO, Jeremy Smith, hosted a Birds of a Feather talk with industry experts Doug Sherman, Principal Engineer, DreamWorks Animation, Ian Main, Technical Marketing Principal, Teradici, Joel Sloss, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Azure Security Strategy, Omer Farooq, Senior Software Engineer, Independent Security Engineer and Joe Sanginario, Founder, [RE]DESIGN. With standing room only for the discussion, ‘Living in a Virtual World’, the panel discussed best practices when deploying a virtual infrastructure, providing insight from a security, facility, storage and protocol standpoint. For us virtual studios really are the new frontier for VFX and animation studios, opening up access to talent and enabling a more flexible and scalable foundation, ultimately promoting collaboration.

Elsewhere, Jeremy continued to keep his head in the cloud, providing a presentation for Microsoft Azure on our use of Batch rendering, and Microsoft’s part in making our studios completely virtual.

He then stood up on stage and joined, Doug’s ‘Going Cloud Native’ Birds of a Feather, where he was joined by the three biggest cloud service providers; Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services.

As always, SIGGRAPH was not only an opportunity to catch up on the latest technology, but also catch up with friends.. making new ones along the way too. The memories and connections made at SIGGRAPH are ones that are made for life.