IMAGINA 2005 Review

IMAGINA 2005
By Jeff Mottle - CGarchitect.com

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending IMAGINA 2005 in Monte-Carlo, Monaco. The show brought roughly 2500 participants to Monaco for four days at the Grimaldi forum which overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. My role at the event was two fold, as I was covering from the perspective of a member of the press, as well as a moderator for one of the two new Architectural panels that were presented this year.


Main Hall of the Grimaldi Forum Conference Center
Although this was my first time to IMAGINA, they have been around for a number of years, with this event marking the 23rd European digital content creation show. In years past IMAGINA was primarily reserved for the gaming and entertainment industries, but 2005 marked the first year for an Architectural tract to be introduced to the event. While the conference had a very small feel to it, I was told that this year’s attendance was up by 8% over last year. It was very reminiscent to the now defunct 3DFestival event that happened last year in Copenhagen. From 10am to 6pm daily lectures, panels and presentations were presented by some of the top people from the Entertainment, Gaming, Manufacturing, Post-Production and Architecture industries.

A view from the Conference Center looking towards the Monte-Carlo Grand Hotel
and the Mediterranean Sea

The Architectural panels took place on Friday with four presentations back to back over the day. I was able to attend the first two morning and afternoon sessions entitled: “Emerging Technologies in Architectural Visualization and Design” and “Tools and Techniques to crate low-cost realistic Environments”, the former of which I was moderator. While the crowd fluctuated in size throughout both presentations, there were about 120 for the morning session and 80 people for the afternoon session. This was roughly the same size of the audience in Copenhagen as well, but I am hopeful that future years will see this number grow. I know that the organizers were quite pleased with the turnout given the fact that they announced the Architectural tract quite late.

Audience from the morning Architectural Session

The first panel was made up of a number of familiar faces including Lon Grohs of Neoscape, Kim Bauman Larsen of PLACEBO EFFECTS, Alex Morris of Hayes Davidson and Stephane Donikian from IRISA. The panel, which lasted two and a half hours covered a number of very interesting topics including a very insightful hands on look at Ambient Occlusion, which seems to be the latest buzz word in the Architectural CG industry as of late. Lon Grohs took the audience members though a number of example scenes and implementation methods. The overall summary however was the use of AO to supplement a GI scene that had been processed with low settings. By combining the two, you can gain the look of GI with the speed of Ambient Occlusion. The two AO plugins that were shown included the Mental Ray Ambient Occlusion shader that now ships with 3dsmax 7, as well as a Dirt Map Shader that is featured on this site.

Alex Morris, presented some of the latest works to come out of their office with an emphasis on the approaches that were taken to achieve the superb quality realism for which Hayes Davidsone have become known for.

Alex Morris presenting works from Hayes Davidson

Kim Bauman Larsen, examined some of the new Real-Time solutions that are available on the market and walked us through their implementation on a number of projects produced in-house at PLACEBO EFFECTS. Stephane Donikian, whom I had not had the pleasure of meeting before IMAGINA, presented a fascinating session on Informed Virtual Environments. While the research itself is quite complex, Stephane did an excellent job of making his work very understandable. His work examines how we can create virtual environments in which virtual humans can interact with the space and other humans. This interaction is based upon years of research into human behavior and interactions. Not only do the virtual humans understand how to interact with the physical environment, but can learn from each other and have information transferred from objects themselves. If you ever get a chance to see one of his presentations I would highly recommend it.

Joseph Azzarelli demonstrating the PanoScan

The afternoon session, moderated by Jan Rybar of ImagesFX, featured Joseph Azzarelli of Envision Digital Imaging, Greg Downing from the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Eric Lux from Ginger Studios as well as Knut Ramstad of Selvaag Blue Think.
Joseph Azzarelli presented a demo of his office’s Panoscan 360 degree panoramic scanner and how the output can be used for engaging background plates for Architectural scenes and QTVRs. Knut expanded upon his earlier presentation in Copenhagen with another look at the different techniques used to present real-life architectural projects at various stages of the design and decision-making and communications process. Greg Downing’s presentation was a fantastic session on Omnidirectional panoramas and image based modeling including a new Giga pixel image project that he has been working on. Those of you that were not able to attend his session can also check out his newly released DVD from Gnomon covering image based modeling and spherical panoramic Photography.
Eric Lux ,like Kim Bauman Larsen in the morning session, also covered the increasingly popular Real-Time software that is being used in our industry. Eric broke the various methods, softwares and techniques down and presented their various advantages and disadvantages including his outlook for the future of the technology.

Eric Lux and Jan Rybar

Overall I have to say I really enjoyed the Architectural sessions and IMAGINA in general and hope to make a return visit next year. I do hope in future years the make a concerned effort to increase the number of internet conections as 2500 people had to share only 4 connections and a very expensive wireless connection. The lack of updates during the show was due in part to this. I expect that Architectural CG will continue to make strong inroads at the event and will hopefully grow considerably in size over the next several years. For more information on this year’s IMAGINA event you can visit the IMAGINA website. I have also posted a number of photos from the event on our forums.

If you would like to post comments or questions about this review, please visit our forum