Siggraph 2025 Roundup!
Takeaways from Vancouver
I’m writing this on the plane back from SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, which has officially become my post-conference tradition. I always try to get my thoughts down while the sensory overload is still fresh in my head.
Because SIGGRAPH is an overload. It’s days of back-to-back sessions, dense research papers, product demos, hallway conversations, and a million little moments you didn’t plan for. It’s equal parts inspiration and exhaustion. And for me, doing this write-up is how I sort through it all.
This isn’t “everything that happened.” I don’t pretend to grasp every deep technical paper or research project fully. I don’t pretend to fully view the lens of a student just graduating or any other professional.
It’s simply my lens: where I went, who I talked to, what stuck with me, and the bigger patterns I think might matter to all of us working in 3D.
The Big AI Question
Yes, it was everywhere. Panels, talks, booth demos, etc…some focused on speculative “where this could go” thinking, others grounded in existing workflows.
The big vibe?
We’re still figuring this out, but implementation is starting to take place, and executives are getting antsy.
Multiple friends and peers told me some version of the same story:
“My exec sees an AI tool demo on LinkedIn, sends it to the team, and says, ‘Look into this.’ We stop what we’re doing, investigate it for a couple weeks… and realize the demo was pure hype. The capabilities are so limited they’re useless for our pipeline.”
More than once, I have heard the AI sizzle reels on LinkedIn described as “fraud.”
If you need an analogy, think of those LinkedIn posts as toy commercials from our childhood. They would show an epic action figure with jets, lights, and explosions… but the one you buy at the store, the action figure just kind of lifts its arm a little…
I’m not saying AI is a flop.
It just means we’re still in the messy middle. There’s brilliant research happening, but often without asking the most important question: is the output actually usable to a creative team at scale?
As one attendee said to me:
“A lot of researchers working on AI imaging maybe took one film class in college and now they think they know how feed a creative content pipeline without talking to anyone involved in that process.”
I also noticed something I didn’t expect: there wasn’t much conversation about AI ethics in the big, fear-driven sense we see online. There were smaller discussions about rights, attribution, security and storage but no broad anti-AI movement. The mood felt more like: “It’s here and we need to start adapting.”
3D Is Becoming Normalized
One of the threads that kept coming up this year was how much 3D’s trajectory feels like what happened with video.
There was a time when producing video meant big budgets, big crews, and big equipment. You needed specialists for every step. For most brands, the barrier to entry was enormous and they needed to hire outside agencies to create any video content.
Then the tools got better, cheaper, and faster. Film became digitized and shrunk and, suddenly, every brand had a video content creation team that could do it in-house. Video stopped being a separate, rarefied thing and became just part of the content companies put out.
3D is moving down the same road. Up until this point, the tools have been cumbersome, the hardware expensive, and the talent rare. For most brands, the barrier to entry was enormous and they needed to hire outside agencies to create any 3D content (notice how I said that same sentence a couple of paragraphs ago…)
And just like for video, the tools are getting simpler. The skillsets are spreading. Brands aren’t just hiring agencies anymore, they’re building their own teams, slotting 3D right alongside photography, design, and copywriting.
One studio leader summed it up to me:
“We’re not a VFX company anymore. We’re a digital production company.”
That shift in language matters. When you say “3D,” a lot of people still picture complexity…hard-to-use software, long render times, big teams.
But in reality, modern 3D workflows are about scalability: producing more, faster, and at a higher quality.
That’s how I’ve started framing it in my own conversations. I’m deemphasizing 3D as a silo and treating it as an accelerant to the entire content pipeline. Once you start thinking about it that way, you see how naturally it fits into almost any creative process.
My Talks and Panels
I had a busy schedule this year, hosting multiple sessions for students and professionals, plus delivering several talks on working in 3D outside of entertainment.
The response was the strongest I’ve ever seen. Packed rooms. Engaged questions. Long follow-up conversations in the hallways.
I also heard something from a hiring manager at large apparel brand say in my panel discussion…
“I had over 200 artists from VFX apply for a role in 3D fashion and I couldn’t hire any of them because they weren’t ready to work in my team.”
My big personal takeaway? We need more specific guidance for making that leap, not just “you can work in fashion or product design,” but:
Which tools to learn
What workflows to adapt to
Which industries are growing
How to translate entertainment skills into new contexts
Basically… an instruction manual. I don’t know yet what form it will take, but I’m going to try to build it. More to come on that soon :)
Smaller Highlights and Oddities
Vancouver for the win – Waterfront views, great food, walkable everything. I’ll say it: light-years better than downtown LA as a venue. Plus all the formline art from the First Nation Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian nations was everywhere.
AI + USD files – Yes, you can have ChatGPT help you author USD with Python… but you must very clearly say you mean Universal Scene Description and not U.S. dollars.
Just Show Up - There were multiple moments during the event where I was tired and wanted to crash early or sleep a bit more. However, I forced myself to continue meeting with anyone who reached out or had a cool conversation. And I’m so happy I did. So many amazing conversations with brilliant people. When attending these events, simply keep showing up. You won’t regret it.
The shrinking show floor – Smaller booths, fewer big-budget parties. But walk the perimeter because that’s where you find the passionate founders building interesting tools you’ve never heard of.
A very kid-friendly SIGGRAPH – Lots of local families this year. Are we officially in the “second-generation 3D artist” territory?
The fridge fire incident – A personal one here….Moments before one talk, I texted my wife a photo from the stage. She replied: “Good luck! By the way, the refrigerator’s on fire.” That was all I knew for the next hour. Gave the entire talk with that bouncing around in my head. Later got photos: a smoky kitchen, a melted fridge…and my kids gleefully hanging out with firefighters.
Final Thoughts
SIGGRAPH 2025 reinforced a few things for me:
Generative AI is exciting, but we’re still cutting through the hype to find the real workflows.
3D is on its way to being “just another part” of content creation, and that’s an opportunity, not a downgrade.
There’s a hunger for practical, step-by-step guidance on moving between industries.
That’s my homework for the year ahead. And as always, if you were there and saw something I missed, I’d love to hear your take.
Final Final Thing...
I may have fallen down the rabbit hole of making too many First Nations-inspired art with The 3D Artist Logo, so I wanted to share…enjoy!
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Hello! Michael Tanzillo here. I am the Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D team at Adobe. Previously, I was a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic.
In addition to his work as an artist, I am the Co-Author of the book Lighting for Animation: The Visual Art of Storytelling and the Co-Founder of The Academy of Animated Art, an online school that has helped hundreds of artists around the world begin careers in Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Imaging. I also created The 3D Artist Community on Skool and this newsletter.
www.michaeltanzillo.com
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