Important Dates
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 23rd annual Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) will take place in Montréal, Canada, from August 21 to August 23, 2024.
SCA is the premier forum for innovations in the software and technology of computer animation. It unites researchers and practitioners working on all aspects of time-based phenomena. Our focused, intimate gathering, with a single track program and emphasis on community interaction, makes SCA the best venue to exchange research results, get inspired, and set up collaborations.
We invite submission of original, high-quality papers and posters on computer animation, broadly defined as computation dealing with time-varying phenomena. Accepted full papers will be published in the journal Computer Graphics Forum, a leading journal for in-depth technical articles on computer graphics. Posters will be published in the conference proceedings indexed by ACM and Eurographics. Best Paper Awards will be given to excellent submissions that push the leading edge.
The conference topics include:
- 2D, 3D, and N-D animation systems
- Autonomous agents
- Clothing animation and simulation
- Computational design of animated systems
- Expressive motion / communication
- Generative and morphable models
- 3D and 4D motion modeling
- Learned character control
- Facial animation
- Feature learning of motions, faces, body shapes and hand gestures
- Foundation models for animation
- Group and crowd behavior
- Interactive computer graphics
- Intuitive interfaces for creating and editing animations
- Mathematical foundations of animation
- Methods of control and artistic direction of simulations
- Machine learning techniques for animation
- Multimodal techniques for animation
- Modeling and simulation of natural phenomena
- Nature in motion (natural phenomena, plants, clouds, etc.)
- New time-based art forms on the computer
- Novel time-varying phenomena
- Perceptual metrics of animation
- Physical realism / measuring the real world for animation
- Physical simulation
- Fluid animation and simulation
- Planning / learning / optimization for animation
- Real-time and interactive methods
- Camera control methods for computer animation
- Sound and speech for animation
- ... as well as related problems in robotics game development, human-computer interaction, simulation visualization, computer vision and others.
We would like to emphasize that SCA welcomes all kinds of contributions that advance the field of computer animation. This includes new and improved algorithms but also:
- New datasets, or carefully and thoughtfully designed (collections of) datasets based on previously available data
- Advanced practices in data collection and curation
- Benchmarks and benchmarking tools
- Perceptual studies
- Experimental studies
- Material measurements
- Systems
- Hardware
- Theoretical foundations
- New promising approaches that do not yet achieve state-of-the-art performance
Dataset Papers
SCA is encouraging submission of new dataset papers to the main technical papers program. As AI is employed more and more in computer animation, animation datasets play a critical role in defining new tasks, developing new metrics and inspiring new methods. In recent years, they have provided interesting and challenging examples that have driven the field forward. This is especially so when large foundation models get popular, which have not yet widely used in the computer animation community, indicating a great opportunity.
We are therefore looking for papers that can build on this success by providing, documenting, and discussing datasets that provide larger, more challenging datasets than those seen before—or datasets that stimulate new challenges in computer animation. Importantly, however, a good dataset paper is more than just a dump of raw data. We are looking for thoughtfully-written papers, to be evaluated according to the following criteria:
- NOVELTY. In what way(s) is the dataset different from those currently available? For instance, does it provide new kinds of “rich” data? Is it organized or annotated in a different way? It is representative of a different application domain—perhaps one that is not well-studied in computer animation? Is it significantly larger/higher-resolution than previous datasets? Does it provide new challenges for robustness?
- IMPACT. What is the potential impact on research in computer animation? Will this dataset inspire the development of new kinds of algorithms? Will it significantly push forward the state of the art in terms of scalability, robustness, etc.? Does it help resolve clearly-defined holes or shortcomings of previous datasets? It is highly encouraged that in addition to the new data, new applications, tasks, and models are presented to demonstrate the potential value of the new data.
- PRESENTATION. Is the paper itself well-written and well-organized? Is the purpose of the new dataset clearly explained and motivated? Does the paper make a compelling case that the dataset presents new opportunities or challenges (e.g., experiments indicating that current algorithms do not perform well on this data). Is the data itself clearly described and documented? Are sufficient details provided about, e.g., the acquisition process, or other metadata that may be useful/necessary for interpreting the data?
- ACCESSIBILITY. Is the dataset easy to access/examine? For instance, if the dataset is very large, is there a mechanism for accessing only individual files or examples? Are files stored in standard/open formats, and/or do the authors provide guidance on how to convert data stored in non-standard formats? Do the authors provide tools that help to inspect/visualize novel or unusual “rich” data? Where will the data set be hosted, and is there a plan for ensuring the dataset will remain available in the future? Is the license clearly defined, and/or are there any significant intellectual property issues associated with sharing the dataset? It is highly recommended for the authors to make the data available for review. If not for any reason, the authors will need to share them publicly once the paper is accepted and published.
- PRIVACY AND ETHICS. Does the paper carefully address potential issues of anonymity or personally identifying information? Does it discuss any ethical issues around acquisition of the data, or potential use/misuse of data outside the intended context?
These criteria will also be provided to reviewers and committee members during the review period. Authors interested in examples of successful dataset papers may wish to consult the following list:
The dataset papers will be published similarly to the technical papers, in the same Computer Graphics Forum special issue.
TECHNICAL PAPERS - SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
We consider animation and simulation in a broad sense defined as computation dealing with time-varying phenomena, and invite you to submit high-quality work. Each submission will be reviewed by an international program committee for technical quality, novelty, significance, and clarity.
- Technical papers should be submitted electronically using the SRMv2 online system.
- Paper submissions must be anonymous and include the unique paper ID that will be assigned upon creating a submission using the online system. The SCA paper program uses dual-anonymous reviewing, so please remove all personal data, such as author names and affiliation from all your submission files.
- Papers should be written and presented in English. Format your paper in pdf according to the EG latex template that is provided on the submission platform (in the “Instructions” section). Unlike in previous years, we do not impose a strict maximum length for submitted papers. However, Computer Graphics Forum and SCA recommend that research papers be up to 10 pages (excluding references). Reviewers might rate a submission lower if it is perceived as being unnecessarily long. Authors are encouraged to use supplementary documents to provide extra content. Supplementary material such as videos may also be submitted electronically and will be made available to reviewers (size up to 500MB).
- SCA has a two-cycle review process. All technical papers accepted in the first round (to be announced on June 16th) will undergo a thorough second round of revision and review, and (conditional on final acceptance) be published in the journal Computer Graphics Forum.
- Papers should not have previously appeared in, or be currently submitted to, any other conference or journal.
- SCA follows the same anonymity policy as SIGGRAPH. Any case of violation will be determined by the chairs and could result in a desk rejection.
- A paper submission should describe an original work of the authors. Authors must not use ideas or content originating from others without properly crediting their original sources. Note that such sources are not limited to peer-reviewed publications, but also include patents, textbooks, technical reports, theses, unpublished work posted on arXiv, as well as other posts on the World Wide Web. Failure to comply with this requirement will be considered plagiarism and result in rejection. For more details, please consult the guidance provided by ACM.
- Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.
Poster Abstracts
As in previous years, the poster session will be an integral part of the SCA program. Poster abstracts will be included in the ACM and EG Digital Libraries, thus providing a better and longstanding referencing to the works. Note however that as usual, a SCA poster does not preclude subsequent publication of a complete paper on the same topic by the same authors (however, a SCA poster by other authors is considered prior art and should be cited as such).
- Poster abstracts should be sent to the poster chair Victor Zordan at vbz@g.clemson.edu
- Submissions must be camera-ready, with author names and affiliations listed. The review process will be single blind.
- Poster abstract submissions should consist of a PDF formatted paper according to the EG latex template that is provided on the submission platform (in the “Instructions” section). Submissions are permitted to be up to two pages in length, written and presented in English.
- Supplementary material such as videos may also be submitted electronically and will be made available to reviewers. All supplementary materials must be submitted as a single zip file (size up to 500MB).
- Poster abstracts will be included in the ACM and EG Digital Libraries, thus providing a better and longstanding referencing to the works.
- Accepted posters will have the opportunity to give a one-minute preview in the poster fast-forward session, and be presented in the poster session.
REGISTRATION
To meet the cost of the conference, one full registration is required for each accepted paper and poster.