Technical Papers

SIGGRAPH 2021 will move forward at this time as a virtual-only event. We look forward to celebrating 48 years of advancements in computer graphics and interactive techniques in our virtual venue. We are excited you are submitting your work for consideration. As we finalize our conference plans, visit the About the Conference page for the latest updates.

NEW IN 2021

• We have updated the policy on prepublications like arXiv .
• We have updated the questionnaire used by the reviewers to evaluate the submissions .

Start by reading the information below about how to prepare your submission, including information on formatting, anonymity, resubmissions, etc. Then log into the Submissions Portal, select the “New Submission” tab, and then select the Technical Papers form. You will be asked for basic information about your submission.

Wednesday, 27 January 2021, 22:00 UTC
Deadline for creating the submission form with the title, the complete list of co-authors, as well as the specification of conflicts of interest (COI) for each co-author. To see what you will need to submit, view the Sample Form (Stage 1). Creating a submission form will assign your submission a paper ID, which must be included in your submitted paper.

Thursday, 28 January 2021, 22:00 UTC
Deadline for the complete submission, including either the actual PDF paper or an MD5 checksum (which will be required in lieu of the actual files starting at some point on this day). If you wish to submit supplemental material (movies, code, data, etc.) as well, these files (or their MD5 checksums) must also be uploaded by this date and time. To see what you will need to submit, view the Sample Form (Stage 2).

Friday, 29 January 2021, 22:00 UTC
Deadline for uploading all materials if you used MD5 checksums. No new or changed material may be uploaded. Only files matching MD5 checksums submitted the previous day are valid.

English Review Service
Non-native English speakers may optionally use the English Review Service to help improve the text of submissions. Please note that this process takes time, so plan far ahead in order to meet the submission deadline.

Physical Submission of Supplemental Materials
We strongly encourage electronic submission of videos and other supplementary materials, since they are easier to distribute to reviewers than physical media. See Submission Requirements for details on electronic supplementary materials and their format. However, if you believe reviewers of your paper need to see physical supplementary materials, you may mail or ship six copies, to arrive by (not be postmarked or sent by) the paper deadline (Thursday, 28 January, 22:00 UTC/GMT, see Timeline) at this address:

Sylvain Paris
SIGGRAPH 2021 Technical Papers Chair
℅ Leona Caffey
SmithBucklin Corporation
330 North Wabash Avenue, Suite 2000
Chicago, Illinois 60611 USA
+1.312.644.6610

All complete submissions received by the deadline will be acknowledged by email. For this purpose, a submission is complete if a paper ID has been assigned and a PDF file of the paper and a representative image have been successfully uploaded. Such submissions will be reviewed unless they are withdrawn by the author. For more information about the papers submission and rebuttal process, please refer to the Technical Papers FAQ.

For more information about uploading files for your submission, please refer to the Technical Papers FAQ.

Double Submissions

By submitting a manuscript to the SIGGRAPH Technical Papers program, authors acknowledge that the technical contributions they claim have not been previously published or accepted for publication in another peer-reviewed venue, and that no manuscript substantially similar in content is currently under review or will be submitted to any peer-reviewed venue during the SIGGRAPH review period. Violations constitute grounds for rejection. If you wish to submit revised or extended versions of conference or workshop papers, please directly submit to TOG instead of SIGGRAPH.

Plagiarism

A submission to the SIGGRAPH Technical Papers program 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.

Prior Art

Authors are expected to cite, discuss differences and novelty, and compare results, if applicable, with respect to relevant existing publications, provided they have been published in a peer-reviewed venue before the SIGGRAPH submission deadline. This also applies to patents, which also undergo a professional reviewing process.

But what about technical reports, and other non-peer-reviewed publications, such as technical reports or papers posted on arXiv, which we henceforth refer to as prepublications? With the rapid progress of search engines and the increased perusal of arXiv papers by the scientific community, asking authors to thoroughly compare their work to these prepublications imposes an unreasonable burden: a seemingly relevant report that is incomplete in its disclosure or validation might appear online shortly before the deadline. While peer-reviewed publications are certainly not immune to these shortcomings, they have, at least, been judged sufficiently complete and valid by a group of peers. Consequently, authors are not required to discuss and compare their work with recent prepublications (arXiv, technical reports, theses, etc.), although they must properly cite those that inspired them (see “Plagiarism” above). We nevertheless encourage authors to mention all related works they are aware of as good academic practice dictates. Note that with new works posted on arXiv on a daily basis, it is increasingly likely that reviewers might point out similarities between the submitted work and online reports that have been missed by the authors. In this case, authors of conditionally accepted papers should be prepared to cite these prepublications in their final revision as concurrent work, without the burden of having to detail how their work compares to or differs from these prepublications.

Anonymity

The SIGGRAPH review process is fully double-blind: the committee members and external reviewers do not know the identity of the authors, and the authors do not know the identity of the reviewers. This anonymity is an integral part of an objective and fair review process, so authors are required to take all reasonable measures to preserve their anonymity. Specific instructions for preserving anonymity in your submission are discussed in the Submission Requirements section. Below, we discuss specific situations in which authors may have to mention their own publications and how to handle such disclosures in the context of a SIGGRAPH submission.

Before Submission

When citing already published work by the same (or an overlapping) group of authors, the citation should refer to that work in the third person, just as it would refer to any other previously published work by a completely different set of authors. For other relevant work from the same author(s) as the submission, we distinguish between two cases: (A) works that have been submitted for publication elsewhere, but have some relevance to and/or overlap with the submission; and (B) largely overlapping prepublications that are available online at the time of submission (arXiv, technical report, thesis, etc.).

• For case (A), the other work should be cited anonymously, as well as provided as anonymous supplementary material. The authors must convince the reviewers that the current submission is sufficiently different from the other work, which can be done using an anonymous cover letter that outlines the differences.
• For case (B), namely earlier or largely similar versions of the submission that are publicly available (on arXiv, as a technical report, etc.) are NOT to be cited in the submission, as this would identify the authors. Instead, these prepublications must be listed in the appropriate field of the submission form, titled “Prepublication.” This field is not visible to reviewers.

After Submission

Blatant violations of anonymity are not acceptable. However, we also recognize that prepublications and talks have become part of the scientific discourse, and SIGGRAPH allows these means of communication. Specifically, before the final acceptance decision is made:

• Authors must not discuss the research described in submitted SIGGRAPH papers with the media. Media includes editors/journalists/writers/interviewers of newspapers, radio, television, magazines, as well as public relations and media arms of companies, universities, and other research institutions.
• After submitting to SIGGRAPH, authors may archive the submission without mentioning SIGGRAPH as an institutional tech report or on arXiv or a similar service.
• Authors must not make any posts to social media or elsewhere that can be linked to a specific SIGGRAPH submission (e.g., mentioning the title of the submission or details and content and saying that it is a SIGGRAPH submission).
• Authors may talk about their work in a presentation without saying it is submitted to SIGGRAPH.
• Authors may mention their submission(s) as under review at SIGGRAPH as part of the written materials submitted for job and funding applications. Authors may talk about the research involved in their submission in talks given for these purposes as well, without mentioning SIGGRAPH.

Lobbying Reviewers

It is strictly prohibited to make any attempt to intervene in the review process. For example, it is inappropriate for an author to contact a committee member or a person they suspect to be a reviewer during the review process and mention the author’s own submission, even if the author does not explicitly ask for a favor. Committee members and reviewers will be asked to report such incidents and subsequently may be marked as conflicted and removed from the review process for that submission. For the most serious interventions, the submission may be rejected without completing the review process.

Technical Papers authors should prepare their documents according to the ACM SIGGRAPH publication guidelines. Please pay particular attention to the citation format for prior ACM SIGGRAPH conference papers, as specified in the ACM SIGGRAPH publication guidelines, because the proper format varies depending on the year of publication. Moreover, if you use LaTeX, make sure to change the \documentclass{} command to: \documentclass[acmtog,anonymous,review]{acmart} and to add your paper ID through: \acmSubmissionID{your_paper_ID_here}. Please ensure that you are using version 1.61 or higher of the acmart class. Earlier versions (e.g., from your previous submissions) will not produce a valid submission format. Download the latest acmart class along with other necessary materials here. A LaTeX submission template is provided for your convenience.

Authors are required to submit fully formatted papers, with graphs, images, and other special areas arranged as intended for final publication, using the ACM SIGGRAPH paper preparation guidelines. Be sure that all pages are numbered and contain your paper’s ID number. You should obtain this paper ID by completing the Online Submission Form before finalizing your paper. If your paper is accepted, you will receive instructions for formatting the final version, which will be different because, among other things, the authors’ names and affiliations will be included, and the pages will not be numbered.

Authors must submit their papers electronically. The only allowable format is Adobe PDF. We prefer that authors upload supplemental materials (anything except the paper) electronically, but physical submission also is possible. If there is some reason why electronic submission is impossible for you, please contact us via the Technical Papers Email Contact Form well before the deadline. See How to Submit for more information. For videos, we strongly encourage QuickTime MPEG-4 or DivX Version 6, and for still images, we strongly encourage JPG or PNG. If you use another format, you are not guaranteed that reviewers will view them. In preparing videos, please choose a reasonable frame size and rate, but be prepared to submit a higher-resolution video if a section of your video is selected for the Papers Preview section of the Electronic Theater. If your supplemental materials amount to more than 100 MB of data, you are not guaranteed that reviewers will download and view them.

Anonymity

Remove any information from your submission materials (paper, video, images, data, code, etc.) that identifies you or any of the other authors or any of your institutions or places of work. In addition to not listing your names and affiliations in the paper, please omit acknowledgements (you will be able to add them back upon acceptance). If you are a well-known author, don’t narrate your video; get someone else to do it. You must reference all relevant work completely, including your own and that of the other authors. The detailed policy on how to cite these papers, including prepublications (arXiv, technical reports, etc.), theses, submitted work, and published work, is described in the Submission Policy. Please read it carefully before submitting your work.

Do not include URLs referring to websites that contain vital material for your submission. Such material won’t be considered due to the fact that reviewers cannot access it without endangering the anonymity of the reviewing process.

Please keep the PDF version anonymous; in particular, note that under some operating systems the “properties” of a PDF file may contain the creator’s name. Also, Version 7 PDF files allow inclusion of a script that will contact the author each time the file is opened. Do not include this script in your PDF file; if we find it, we will reject your paper without review. Make sure that no submitted files contain any information about the authors in the metadata.

For more information, see the Anonymity section of the Submission Policy.

Paper Length

There is no arbitrary maximum (or minimum) length imposed on papers. However, clarity of writing is considered vital to a high-quality submission. Papers may be perceived as too long if they are repetitive or verbose, or too short if they omit important details, neglect relevant prior art, or tamper with formatting rules just to save on page count. Have a look at previous proceedings to get a sense of the range of paper lengths, where typical lengths are between 8 and 10 pages, not including references (though the variation is large). The page length need not be an even number.

If a submission is conditionally accepted, its length may change only by permission from the primary reviewer.

Companion Videos

Papers may be accompanied by a video that is five minutes or less in duration. In recent years, well over half of the accepted papers were accompanied by some kind of video material. To the extent possible, accepted papers should stand on their own, with the video providing supplementary information or visual confirmation of results. However, it is fine to refer to the video in the paper, in which case the video should be submitted under Supplementary Materials, part A in the submission form, as described below. Such a public video should not be included in a submission unless substantively similar footage can appear in the ACM Digital Library. If your paper is accepted and you cannot comply with this requirement because of copyright or permission problems, your acceptance will be rescinded.

Supplemental Materials

Authors are invited, but not required, to include supplemental materials such as code and data files (so that reviewers can reproduce results in the paper), additional images or videos, related papers, more detailed explanations, derivations, or results. These materials will be viewed only at the discretion of the reviewers, who are only obligated to read your paper itself. These materials must be anonymized, so that they can be made available to all reviewers. There are two separate parts in the online submission form for uploading supplementary materials:

A) Anonymous supplemental materials that are considered part of the submission, and that you are committing to provide for the ACM Digital Library if your paper is accepted.

B) Anonymous materials that you are submitting to help in the review process but do not plan to submit to the Digital Library.

For instance, in addition to videos, A) may include some code, and a .zip archive containing result images and some text files, such as detailed user-study results or other appendices associated to your submission. B) may include anonymized versions of related papers from the same authors currently under review or in press elsewhere, together with an anonymous cover letter that outlines the differences between the submission and these other papers. In case of resubmission with reviewer continuity, the cover letter explaining how you took into account previous reviews and listing the improvements in your method should be there, too.

Resubmissions

If your paper is a revision of a paper that has previously been submitted to a SIGGRAPH or SIGGRAPH Asia conference, we recommend (but do not require) that when you fill out the submission form you identify it as a resubmission, and select the option that allows the previous review materials (reviews, reviewer discussions, summaries, etc.) to be made available to the Technical Papers Committee. Please indicate the latest conference that your paper was submitted to and its paper ID at the time. If you choose to use this option, your paper may be assigned to some or all of the previous reviewers, and all reviewers will have access to suitably anonymized versions of the prior review materials. We encourage you to choose this option if you consider the paper to be derived from the previous version, even if the paper has been substantially rewritten and authors have been added, because it will result in more consistent reviews and decrease the chance that a new set of reviewers will want completely different changes than those you made in response to the reviews of your earlier submissions. This option also has the added side benefit of reducing the overall burden on the volunteer reviewing community. Note that simply responding to all earlier criticisms will not guarantee acceptance. If you resubmit with reviewer continuity, you should include a cover letter within the anonymous supplementary materials, part B, in order to explain the changes you made to the paper and how you improved your work and its exposition since the last review cycle.

Permissions and Copyrights

You must have permission from the owner or copyright holder to use any images or video (or provide rationale for using them without permission) that you do not own in your submitted paper or supplementary material. ACM has a clear policy and procedures for handling third-party material. If your submission is accepted, you will be asked to provide a signed rights form, which is required by ACM before your paper can be published. The contact author of each paper will receive an email message from ACM Rights Review containing instructions and a link to the rights form, which is completed online.

Authors of accepted Technical Papers are required to complete the ACM Rights Form prior to publication. They also are required to upload final versions of all public supplementary materials (Part A) that were originally part of their submission.

The Technical Papers Committee and a set of external reviewers, both consisting of recognized experts, will review submitted papers. Then, at the committee meeting, the committee will select the papers to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2021 and published in a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics.

The Technical Papers review process will be conducted by (1) the Technical Papers Chair, who was chosen by the SIGGRAPH 2021 Conference Chair and approved by the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee and its Conference Advisory Group; (2) the Technical Papers Advisory Board, consisting of past and future Technical Papers Chairs and other trusted and experienced advisors, chosen by the SIGGRAPH 2021 Technical Papers Chair; (3) the Technical Papers Committee, chosen by the Technical Papers Chair with the assistance of the members of the Technical Papers Advisory Board, and consisting of about 70 people whose expertise spans the entire field; and (4) the Conflict of Interest (COI) Coordinators, also chosen by the Technical Papers Chair. The composition of the COI Coordinators group is similar to the Technical Papers Committee, but the members are disjoint from that committee.

The Review Process

1. After the submission deadline, the Technical Papers Chair and several others selected by the Technical Papers Chair will conduct the papers sort. During this meeting, they assign each paper to two senior reviewers, called the primary and secondary reviewers, who are members of the Technical Papers Committee. Additionally, each submission is assigned a COI Coordinator. All parties participating in the review process enter their conflict of interest data into the submission system ahead of time. The Technical Papers Chair does not make assignments or review papers. Rather, it is the job of the chair to facilitate the process. Papers that are inappropriate may be rejected during this assignment process, without being sent to any senior reviewers. Papers will normally be rejected at this stage only if they are clearly off topic for SIGGRAPH 2021, or if they are discovered to have been published previously or to have been submitted simultaneously to another conference or journal. For more details, see Submission Policy.
2. The two assigned senior reviewers may, upon conferring with each other and the Technical Papers Chair, recommend a paper to be rejected without additional review. A paper will normally be rejected at this stage only if it falls into one of the categories listed in phase one, but this fact was not detected during the papers sort. It is possible that a paper also may be rejected at this stage if it solves a problem that is known to be already solved; or if it does not cite (and the authors seem unaware of) important prior work on the same problem and does not address how it is different; or if it has no evaluation via proof, experiment, or analysis; or if it is solving a problem sufficiently minor that the senior reviewers do not believe that it belongs in the program; or if it addresses a topic that is clearly outside the purview of SIGGRAPH.
3. Each paper is distributed to three or more additional experts, called tertiary reviewers. Two of them are selected by the primary senior reviewer of that paper, and the third is selected by the secondary senior reviewer. The identity of the authors is not revealed to any of the reviewers. The primary and the secondary reviewer are warned by the submission system, Linklings, if their selection of tertiary reviewers would result in a conflict of interest. In addition, the assigned COI Coordinator does see the identity of the authors and approves the tertiary reviewers selected by the primary and the secondary reviewer after verifying that there is no COI in the assignment. The primary, secondary, and tertiary reviewers all write full reviews. See the Review Form and Reviewer Instructions. Thus, at least five reviews are written for each paper that has not been rejected during phases one and two. In unusual cases, such as when a tertiary reviewer fails to deliver a review on time, papers may receive only four reviews. However, if a paper receives fewer than four reviews, additional reviewers will be found, possibly from the committee. For more details, see the Review Process section in the Technical Papers FAQ.
4. After all reviews are complete, the review system allows the authors access to the reviews and scores for their papers on 8 March. Then, authors have until 12 March, 22:00 UTC/GMT, to enter rebuttals if they feel the reviewers have made substantive errors or to answer specific questions posed by the reviewers. The rebuttal is confined to 1,000 words in length (plain text), and must be self-contained. For instance, URLs to additional material are not allowed. The rebuttal period is for addressing factual errors in the reviews, not for providing revised text or new results. Any such novel material will be ignored by the reviewers. For more details, see the Rebuttal Process section of the Technical Papers FAQ.
5. Between the end of the rebuttal period and the committee meeting, the senior reviewers will read the author rebuttals, confer intensively about the paper, and prepare a recommendation for the committee meeting. The three tertiary reviewers will see the author rebuttals and will participate in discussions about the paper. Due to the double-blind review process, the authors must maintain anonymity in their rebuttals. In addition, the tertiary reviewers do not know each other’s identities, so they too must maintain anonymity during the discussion. The preliminary recommendation agreed on at this stage will be either conditionally accepted or rejected. If an agreement on the recommendation cannot be reached, a third option is to table the paper for further review and discussion during the final Technical Papers Committee meeting.
6. If a paper is tabled, the senior reviewers will select one or more other members of the Technical Papers Committee to write extra reviews of the paper and be prepared to discuss it in detail at the meeting. The extra reviews will be written during the week before the committee meeting. If consensus still cannot be reached, it is even possible that extra reviews will be assigned during the meeting itself. Any extra review will be provided to the authors after the meeting.
7. The full Technical Papers Committee meets to finalize conditional acceptance or rejection of each paper. In cases where a consensus on a paper was not reached during the pre-meeting discussion phase, additional committee members may read the paper, and their evaluations will be taken into account in the decision.

Members of the Technical Papers Committee, including the chair, leave the room when papers for which they have conflicts of interest are discussed. Papers are judged solely on their merit, as determined by the reviews. Although the acceptance rate of SIGGRAPH papers has remained nearly constant in the range of 15% to 28%, there is no quota for the number of papers that should be accepted by the SIGGRAPH 2021 Technical Papers Committee; this number will arise organically from the actions of the committee.

Possible Outcomes for a Paper

Email notifications of the Technical Papers Committee’s decisions will be sent following the committee meeting (see the Timeline below). The notifications will place each paper in one of the following categories.

1. Conditionally accepted for presentation at SIGGRAPH 2021. Conditionally accepted papers undergo a second reviewing process, in which a referee (a member of the Technical Papers Committee, usually the primary reviewer) verifies that the final version of the paper is acceptable, i.e., that any required changes have been made, and that other changes made by the authors, perhaps in response to reviewer comments, have not compromised the paper in any way. This second and final stage determines the final acceptance status of all papers. The referees’ decisions are final. Papers that do not satisfy the referees in the second stage of reviewing and/or that are not uploaded in final form by the final deadline, together with the original or revised versions of the submitted supplementary material, will be rejected. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings, which will continue to be published as a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics. One author of the paper must commit to presenting the paper virtually at the SIGGRAPH 2021 conference.
2. Rejected from SIGGRAPH 2021. Submissions that were deemed not suitable for the conference, or too flawed or incomplete to be accepted, will be rejected. In some cases, the reviewers may find enough merit in the submission that they encourage the authors to consider resubmitting to either ACM Transactions on Graphics or a future SIGGRAPH conference, with reviewer continuity. The review summary includes a set of suggested changes.

Authors of papers conditionally accepted by the committee must revise their submission for the second round of reviewing, and deliver that material to Linklings. Once the reviewers have approved the paper, authors will finalize the preparation of their camera-ready paper, and deliver the source of that paper, and any supplemental materials, to TAPS for publication in the ACM Transactions on Graphics issue that documents the work presented at SIGGRAPH 2021.

TAPS is ACM’s article processing system, which accepts LaTeX or Word source documents and prepares the formatted PDF and HTML5 versions of one’s article for publication in the ACM Digital Library. The use of TAPS replaces the need for authors to prepare and deliver “camera-ready” materials to Linklings. Information on preparing and delivering materials to TAPS can be found here.

Notification of conditional acceptances and rejections will be sent to authors, along with any extra reviews and possibly a list of required changes (see Timeline below). A member of the Technical Papers Committee, typically the primary reviewer, will be assigned as referee for the revision cycle.

A few days after notification, any changes to the paper title, list of authors, or 30-word paper summary will be due back to your referee. Changes to the paper title and length must be approved by your referee. Extensions of more than one page are unlikely to be granted.

The deadlines for the revised version and final version of your paper are listed in the Timeline below. During the week between these two dates, the referees and authors will communicate via the bulletin board process about the adequacy of the changes in the revisions. Sometimes, changes are not initially considered adequate, or introduce new problems, so further revision may be required. It is recommended to submit the initial revised version sooner than the deadline in order to provide more time for iterated revisions. It is hoped that all conditionally accepted papers will be accepted by the end of this process, but this is not guaranteed. When writing successive revisions, the referee’s job is made easier if authors use a different color for the added or revised text in each new version. (Please remember to remove these colors in the final version.) It also helps to describe the changes in the bulletin board post to which the revision is attached.

Pre-Recorded Video Presentation

To present in the virtual conference, the authors must: 1) provide a video of their presentation, and 2) plan for one author to be present for the entirety of the virtual session for their paper. Further details and instructions regarding video specs will be provided upon acceptance.

Presenter Recognition

To present your work at SIGGRAPH 2021, at least one contributor per submission must register at the appropriate registration level. All other contributors can register at the level of their choice.

You can find a link to the contributor recognition policy here.

Authorization for Use

Any material that supports a paper’s acceptance for publication must be available as part of the final publication (see Submission Requirements). Thus, all material uploaded for review in the “public materials that are considered part of the submission” section of the submission form, including supplementary text, images, and videos, are subject to the ACM copyright policy, and the required permission forms must be completed upon acceptance. If it subsequently becomes apparent that the necessary permissions cannot be given for publication of material that is substantially similar to that submitted for review, acceptance of the paper may be withdrawn. Upon acceptance, authors must deliver final versions of their papers and their supplementary material, which will be made available to subscribers to the ACM Digital Library via the web page associated with their TOG papers.

Please be aware that ACM has updated its copyright policy to give authors the options of retaining copyrights on some materials or to pay fees that enable free access. You can read about the policy here or a more concise summary here. Authors of accepted Technical Papers are required to complete the ACM Copyright Form prior to publication. For every supplemental file originally uploaded as part of your submission, you must upload either copies of the originally submitted material (now in non-anonymized form) or updated versions of this material to the online submission system’s final versions page (see the Timeline below for the deadline).

Technical Papers Preview Trailer

A Technical Papers Preview Trailer will be prepared from selected parts of the videos accompanying accepted papers. The preview will appear in the Computer Animation Festival at the conference and may also be used to publicize the Technical Papers program inside and outside the conference, like on the web. If a section of your video is selected, you will be asked to provide a high-quality rendering of that clip. Therefore, if you submit a video accompanying your paper, please keep your raw data available for that purpose.

Technical Papers Fast Forward

In addition to the material that is part of your publication, you will be asked to provide a short presentation for the Technical Papers Fast Forward. This session is held on the first day of the conference. The authors will be allowed 30 seconds to summarize the paper and entice attendees to attend their complete paper presentation later in the week. See the Timeline below for the deadline for Fast Forward material.

ACM Rights Management Form

If your work is accepted for presentation at SIGGRAPH 2021, you must complete the ACM Rights Management Form. The form will be sent to all submitters whose work is accepted.

Your representative image and text may be used for promotional purposes. Several SIGGRAPH 2021 programs — Art Gallery, Art Papers, Real-Time Live!, Technical Papers, and all installation programs — will prepare preview videos for pre-conference promotion of accepted content, which may include a portion of the video you submitted for review. You have the option to grant or deny us the ability to use the representative image and submitted video for these purposes.

All deadlines are 22:00 UTC/GMT unless otherwise noted.

27 January 2021
Submission form deadline
One of the authors must start a submission in the online submission system and provide basic information about the paper, including the complete list of authors. All authors must enter their complete and valid conflict of interest data in Linklings by this deadline.

28 January 2021
Paper deadline
All information about your submission, such as paper title and length, is required. Additionally, the submitted paper in PDF format and a representative image must be uploaded, along with any video, code, data, and other supplemental material if applicable. Alternatively, MD5 checksums may be uploaded in lieu of any of the files involved in the submission.

29 January 2021
Upload deadline
If MD5 checksums were submitted by the paper deadline (as described above), files that match the checksums must be submitted until this deadline.

8 March 2021
Reviews available.

12 March 2021
Rebuttals due.

29 March 2021
Decisions announced.

23 April 2021
Revised paper submitted by authors for final review.

30 April 2021
Final version deadline.

4 June 2021
Fast Forward material deadline.

Summer 2021
SIGGRAPH 2021