SIGGRAPH 2026: Volunteering, Neural Shading, and a Teapot
This year’s SIGGRAPH was in Los Angeles, and I went as a student volunteer. That means trading a few shifts of badge-checking and room-running for a free pass into the rest of the conference, which is about as good a trade as exists in this industry. It’s also a genuinely good way to meet people: volunteering puts you next to other students and researchers doing the same rotations, and by day two half the lanyards around me belonged to people I actually knew.
Talks
Introduction to Neural Shading (NVIDIA)
The standout talk of the week for me. NVIDIA walked through where neural networks are actually being dropped into the shading pipeline right now, not the hand-wavy future version of it. The framing that stuck with me: neural shading isn’t replacing the pipeline, it’s slotting into the specific stages that are historically hard to hand-author, like BRDFs, and letting a learned representation do the job instead. Dense talk, worth every minute of it.
Hands-On with NVIDIA Nsight Developer Tools
Less theory, more actually opening the tool and poking at a frame. Small group, live machines, an engineer walking around answering questions instead of clicking through slides. Getting to trace through a GPU capture myself instead of watching someone else do it on a projector made the whole session click in a way the usual talk format never quite manages.
Papers
Beyond the two talks above, I sat in on several of the real-time rendering technical papers sessions, plus the Thesis Fast Forward session for a rapid-fire look at what the next wave of graduate research looks like. The papers track is still the best signal in the industry for where rendering research is actually heading, usually a year or two before any of it shows up in an engine you can download.
Meeting Jim Blinn
Got to meet Jim Blinn. Did not have anything particularly clever to say to him, just “thank you for everything,” but he was gracious about it anyway. Not something I expected to happen at a conference I was mostly there to badge-check for.
The RenderMan Party
The RenderMan party this year was at The Belasco, and it was exactly the kind of chaotic, well-catered wind-down the week needed after four days of sessions. Picked up both variants of the 2026 teapot, which now sit on my desk as the most impractical and most deserved souvenirs I own.
Closing Thoughts
Volunteering was the right call, fewer free hours but far better people. Neural shading is clearly working its way into pipelines that used to be entirely hand-written, and that’s going to shape how I think about rendering going forward.
Fantastic week. Already figuring out how to get back next year.