SIGGRAPH 2026
Basics
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Event | SIGGRAPH 2026 — 53rd annual ACM SIGGRAPH conference |
| Dates | (Exhibition Jul 21–23) |
| Venue | Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles |
| Chair | Chris Redmann (Conference Chair) |
| Papers | Mirela Ben-Chen (Technical Papers Chair) |
| Site | s2026.siggraph.org |
| Schedule | s2026.conference-schedule.org — program browser, personal agenda, calendar sync |
| Next | SIGGRAPH 2027 — |
Status: concluded. This is a retrospective note — written 2026-07-24, the day after close — so it is built from the published program and the awards, not from attendance.
Program structure
The schedule portal lists these venues/tracks, which is a decent map of what SIGGRAPH now covers:
| Group | Tracks |
|---|---|
| Research | Technical Papers, Talks, Posters, Technical Workshops, Courses |
| Industry / production | Industry Sessions, Production Sessions, Games Summit, Frontiers |
| Live / demo | Real-Time Live!, Emerging Technologies, Appy Hour, Immersive Pavilion |
| Art & film | Art Gallery, Art Papers, Computer Animation Festival, Spatial Storytelling |
| Community | Birds of a Feather, Panels, Educator's Day / Forum, Pathfinders, ACM SIGGRAPH 365, Award Talks |
| Commercial | Exhibition (Jul 21–23), Stage Sessions |
Interest categories used for filtering: Arts & Design, Gaming & Interactive, New Technologies, Production & Animation, Research & Education.
Notable structural change: 2026 is the first year with a dedicated Games Summit.
Keynotes
| Day | Time | Speaker(s) | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 20 | --- | Lanny Smoot (Research Fellow, Disney Research) | Inventions, Innovations, and Imagination: Lanny Smoot's Prolific Path |
| Mon 20 | 15:45 PDT | Neil Ashton, Ming-Yu Liu, Edward Liu (NVIDIA) | Next Era of Graphics — Neural Rendering, World Models, and Simulation |
| Tue 21 | 14:30 PDT | Darwesh Singh (Founder, CEO/CTO, Bolt Graphics) | Building a GPU for the Future of Computer Graphics |
| Wed 22 | 14:30 PDT | Yanpei Cao, Yuan-Chen Guo, Zi-Xin Zou, Ying-Tian Liu, Biao Zhang (Tripo AI) | The Teapot Test: First It Tested Showing. Now It Tests Making |
Three of the four are sponsored keynotes (NVIDIA, Bolt Graphics, Tripo AI) — worth reading as vendor positioning, not neutral survey. The through-line across all three: rendering is being reframed as inference, and the Utah-teapot benchmark is restated as a generation benchmark rather than a display one.
Technical Papers
Chair: Mirela Ben-Chen. Scope spans animation, simulation, imaging, geometry, modeling, rendering, HCI, VR/AR/MR, haptics, fabrication, robotics, visualization, audio, optics, programming languages, immersive experiences, generative AI, and ML for visual computing.
Awarded / highlighted
- Best Papers Award — Robust Planar Maps for 3D Vectorization — Robert Fuchs, Keenan Crane (Carnegie Mellon University). Converts 3D scenes into clean scalable 2D vector graphics; the contribution is occlusion handling robustness.
- Honorable Mention — Spatiotemporal FLIP for Fast Free-Surface and Two-Phase Simulation With Very Large Time Steps — Bernhard Braun, Rene Winchenbach, Nils Thuerey (TU Munich); Jan Bender (RWTH Aachen). Claims fluid time steps up to 10x larger than conventional solvers at comparable visual quality.
- Better Bending: Analysis, Construction and Verification of Discrete Bending Models for Kirchhoff-Love Shells — Zhen Chen, Danny Kaufman (Adobe Research); Etienne Vouga (UT Austin). Evaluates existing shell bending models and proposes a replacement for cloth, paper, and sheet metal.
The Better Bending paper is the one that rhymes with the formal-methods thread here: it is an analysis-and-verification paper about a family of discrete models, not a new-technique paper. Same shape as the discretization audits in 2025-formal-transformer-verification.
References
- Conference site
- s2026.siggraph.org
- Schedule portal
- s2026.conference-schedule.org (Home / Schedule / Exhibition / Participants / Search Program)
- Keynotes
- program/keynote-presentations · sponsored keynote announcement
- Technical Papers
- program/technical-papers · papers press release
- Host city context
- SIGGRAPH 2026 returns to Los Angeles
- Proceedings
- ACM Transactions on Graphics 45(4) — via ACM DL SIGGRAPH (papers land in the DL; check for open-access author copies first)
Related notes crosslink
- Same body, adjacent events
- ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026 (Aug 30–Sep 2, Atlanta) · ACM TechTalk — reasoning models to agents (Aug 19).
- Verification of numerical/model choices
- 2025-formal-transformer-verification.
- Architecture / ML background
- attention-is-all-you-need · 2026-liquid-neural-networks.
This is the first graphics-conference note on the site; there is no prior SIGGRAPH coverage to extend.
Claims to test refutation
- Spatiotemporal FLIP gives ~10x larger time steps at comparable quality
- a scene class (thin films, high-vorticity, strong surface tension) where the large-step result visibly diverges from the small-step reference.
- Robust planar maps produce clean vectorization robustly
- a scene with degenerate/coplanar geometry or near-silhouette grazing where the planar map still self-intersects or drops occlusion order.
- Neural rendering is the next era (NVIDIA keynote)
- a production pipeline where neural substitution loses on total cost — training + inference + artist-controllability — against a conventional path-traced path.
- (no term)
Follow-up
[ ]Pull the three highlighted papers from ACM DL / author pages and read Better Bending first[ ]Get the full Technical Papers awards list (Best Papers + all Honorable Mentions) once posted[ ]Check whether Real-Time Live! and the Games Summit recordings are posted to the ACM SIGGRAPH YouTube channel[ ]Decide whether the neural-rendering/world-models thread deserves its own research note, or belongs in an existing one[ ]Diary: SIGGRAPH 2027 — Aug 8–12, 2027