Presentation / Installation
Sponsored by Unity Technologies: Assisted Artistry Unleashed: Powering the Future of Film and Real-Time 3D With Unity Wētā Tools
DescriptionUnity Wētā Tools presents groundbreaking work in character creation, environment building, rendering, and compositing with the public release of tools once exclusive to top-tier VFX houses. Presenters Allan Poore, Natalya Tatarchuk, and Joe Letteri take the audience inside this tech and show how it’s being used in award-winning films to accelerate creative workflows, implement creative changes more easily, and produce higher-quality final shots.
Natalya Tatarchuk (@mirror2mask) is a graphics engineer and a rendering enthusiast at heart, currently focusing on driving the state-of-the-art rendering technology, graphics performance, and character content creation in her role as a Distinguished Technical Fellow and Chief Architect, VP, Wētā Tools at Unity. Prior to that, she led the graphics team at Unity, as VP of Graphics for the Unity Editor and Engine. Before that she was a AAA games developer, working on innovative cross-platform rendering engine and game graphics for Bungie’s Destiny franchise, as well the Halo series, such as “Halo: ODST” and “Halo: Reach,” and AMD Graphics Products Group where she pushed parallel computing boundaries investigating advanced real-time graphics techniques, and graphics hardware design and APIs. Natalya has been encouraging sharing in the games graphics community for several decades, largely by organizing a popular series of courses such as Advances in Real-time Rendering, Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering, and Rendering Engine Architecture at SIGGRAPH and convincing people to speak there. It seems to be working.
Allan Poore has over 25 years of leadership experience building products and services for the media and entertainment space. In this time, he has brought more than a dozen innovative products to help artists and developers achieve their artistic vision. He has held leadership roles at Pixar, Autodesk, Microsoft, and Amazon. Allan recently joined Unity as the Senior Vice President of Professional Artistry. In his last role, he led Product and Program on Xbox Cloud Gaming and successfully launched Xbox’s first game streaming service. Prior to that, Allan was the VP of RenderMan products at Pixar Animation Studios.
Joe Letteri’s pioneering work in visual effects has earned him five Academy® Awards for Best Visual Effects — most recently for “Avatar: The Way of Water” following earlier wins for “Avatar,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” and “King Kong.” He has a long-standing interest in creating compelling, realistic creatures and characters — from the Na’vi to Gollum, Alita, and Caesar. Joe has developed many techniques that have become industry standards for creating photorealistic digital effects. This includes co-developing the subsurface scattering technique that brought Gollum to life (winning an Academy® Technical Achievement Award) and pushing the development of large-scale virtual production. Under Joe’s leadership, Wētā FX has continued to expand and improve these techniques through films like “The Hobbit” and “The Planet of the Apes” trilogies. Joe is currently working on the upcoming “Avatar” sequels and continues to drive the advancement of Wētā’s technological and artistic innovations.
Natalya Tatarchuk (@mirror2mask) is a graphics engineer and a rendering enthusiast at heart, currently focusing on driving the state-of-the-art rendering technology, graphics performance, and character content creation in her role as a Distinguished Technical Fellow and Chief Architect, VP, Wētā Tools at Unity. Prior to that, she led the graphics team at Unity, as VP of Graphics for the Unity Editor and Engine. Before that she was a AAA games developer, working on innovative cross-platform rendering engine and game graphics for Bungie’s Destiny franchise, as well the Halo series, such as “Halo: ODST” and “Halo: Reach,” and AMD Graphics Products Group where she pushed parallel computing boundaries investigating advanced real-time graphics techniques, and graphics hardware design and APIs. Natalya has been encouraging sharing in the games graphics community for several decades, largely by organizing a popular series of courses such as Advances in Real-time Rendering, Open Problems in Real-Time Rendering, and Rendering Engine Architecture at SIGGRAPH and convincing people to speak there. It seems to be working.
Allan Poore has over 25 years of leadership experience building products and services for the media and entertainment space. In this time, he has brought more than a dozen innovative products to help artists and developers achieve their artistic vision. He has held leadership roles at Pixar, Autodesk, Microsoft, and Amazon. Allan recently joined Unity as the Senior Vice President of Professional Artistry. In his last role, he led Product and Program on Xbox Cloud Gaming and successfully launched Xbox’s first game streaming service. Prior to that, Allan was the VP of RenderMan products at Pixar Animation Studios.
Joe Letteri’s pioneering work in visual effects has earned him five Academy® Awards for Best Visual Effects — most recently for “Avatar: The Way of Water” following earlier wins for “Avatar,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” and “King Kong.” He has a long-standing interest in creating compelling, realistic creatures and characters — from the Na’vi to Gollum, Alita, and Caesar. Joe has developed many techniques that have become industry standards for creating photorealistic digital effects. This includes co-developing the subsurface scattering technique that brought Gollum to life (winning an Academy® Technical Achievement Award) and pushing the development of large-scale virtual production. Under Joe’s leadership, Wētā FX has continued to expand and improve these techniques through films like “The Hobbit” and “The Planet of the Apes” trilogies. Joe is currently working on the upcoming “Avatar” sequels and continues to drive the advancement of Wētā’s technological and artistic innovations.
Contributors
Event Type
Keynote
TimeMonday, 7 August 20232pm - 3pm PDT
LocationWest Hall B
Session TimeMonday, 7 August 20232pm - 3pm PDT
LocationWest Hall B
Livestreamed
Recorded
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