| Afrigraph |
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| Thursday, 17 July 2008 | |
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Those of you who have been interested in computer graphics for a while will no doubt have heard of Siggraph. On a recent trip to the University of Cape Town I met the people behind Afrigraph - our local high-end graphics entity: The Afrigraph organization was established in order to provide a home for practitioners of computer graphics (CG) in the education, arts, visual effects (VFX) and entertainment arenas. One of the fundamental goals of the organization is to promote CG and related disciplines as viable careers in South Africa (and Africa in general). To this end we are actively seeking to engage with both the creative and technical communities, with a specific focus on graphics development for games. Afrigraph is formally affiliated with ACM SIGGRAPH, the top international professional organization for computer graphics and related industries. Afrigraph also has ties with existing VFX companies in South Africa as well as universities and technology companies involved in computer graphics. The Afrigraph portal (www.afrigraph.org) serves as a central point of contact for those who wish to find out more or contribute to the organization's mission. Currently, we are planning to launch a job posting service for interested parties, and to expand our outreach efforts to schools and colleges by means of graphics/games programming and computer art competitions. For those who are technically inclined, we stage a conference every 18 months, which is now internationally recognized (details of past conference scan be found on the web page). The conference includes both technical paper and tutorial sessions. A recent addition has been the inclusion of animation studio show reels and computer art installations. Since a number of VFX and technology companies attend the conference and give talks about the work they are doing, the conference also provides possibilities for recruitment. This is one of the exciting new avenues we are exploring is collaboration with the burgeoning SA game development community, via organizations such as Game.Dev and technology enabling corporates such as Microsoft. We firmly believe that a thriving local games industry will generate greater interest in the underlying core CG technologies, helping to realise the goal of a sustainable, technically competitive game development and VFX industry in Africa, which rivals others elsewhere in the developed world. The next Afrigraph conference should be coming in 2009, I'm definitely going to be there if I can help it! |