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GraphQuon 2024 — ÉTS (Montréal)

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Ava: Antoine's biggest conference job in 2024 wasn't giving a talk. It was making sure nobody hit a broken PDF link in a hallway.

Andrew: What conference was this?

Ava: GraphQuon, the Quebec and Ontario pre-SIGGRAPH workshop for East-Canadian computer graphics labs. The 2024 edition ran November ninth and tenth at ÉTS in Montréal.

Andrew: And what's the point of a pre-SIGGRAPH event?

Ava: Students present work headed for SIGGRAPH to a friendly but constructively critical audience, and get feedback before the real submission crunch. Labs take turns hosting, and 2024 was ÉTS's turn.

Andrew: So Antoine was on the organizing side.

Ava: Yes, the web side. He helped build and host the site on GitHub Pages, with schedule pages and contact blocks. He says it taught him the boring critical path: bios on time, links that don't 404, and a schedule that works on a phone.

Andrew: Any highlights from the event?

Ava: Antoine had a hallway chat with Masha Shugrina from NVIDIA. She showed Diffusion Texture Painting from SIGGRAPH 2024, where a diffusion brush paints on a mesh so strokes stay seamless. Plus a Gaussian splat scene you could walk around in.

Andrew: He called it the useful kind of industry chat, concrete tools instead of buzzwords.

Ava: And the questions were about evaluation and whether a method would survive a SIGGRAPH reviewer, not startup pitches.

Andrew: There's a nice follow-up too. In 2025 he presented at the Toronto edition, and he says organizing first made presenting calmer. He already knew where the HDMI adapter lived.

Ava: Funny how the unglamorous job pays off. The full write-up has the schedule highlights and tips for next year.

GraphQuon 2024 — ÉTS (Montréal)
Table of contents

GraphQuon 2024 auditorium at ÉTS — red carpet, white chairs, projection screen and ÉTS podium

GraphQuon (formerly MOTOGRAPH) is the annual Quebec–Ontario pre-SIGGRAPH workshop for East-Canadian computer graphics labs. The 2024 edition ran 9–10 November 2024 at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) in Montréal. I helped build and host the conference website at graphquon.github.io[1] so schedules, registration, and past editions stayed in one place.

1. What GraphQuon is for

From the site’s About the event copy: students present prospective SIGGRAPH-bound work to a friendly, constructively critical audience and get feedback before the real submission crunch. Faculty groups across Quebec and Ontario rotate hosting; 2024 was ÉTS’s turn.

Questions for organizers: [email protected].

1.1. Earlier names

YearNameDates
2018MOTOGRAPHNov 17–18
2019MOTOGRAPHDec 7–8
2021TomatographDec 3–4
2022FOIEGRAPHNov 11–12
2023GRAPHQUONDec 2–3
2024GRAPHQUONNov 9–10 @ ÉTS

2. 2024 schedule (highlights)

Full timetables live on graphquon.github.io[1]. A few anchors I remember from the published program:

Saturday 9 November

  • Morning talks included Quoc-Minh Ton-That, Melissa Katz (McGill), and Ivan Puhachov (UdeM) among the honourable mentions.
  • Midday ÉTS/Sherbrooke block: Justin Benoist, Arthur Delon, Joel Pelletier-Guenette.
  • Afternoon: Abhishek Madan (Toronto); Clara Kim (Waterloo) won Best presentation.

Sunday 10 November

  • Morning honourable mentions included Victor Rong, Ryusuke Sugimoto, Yue Chang, and Ege Ciklabakkal.
  • Late afternoon ÉTS/MILA block: Alex Hoang-Cao, Darsh Kaushik.

The room itself matched the workshop vibe: ÉTS auditorium, red carpet, simple stage, and a lot of white chairs filled between sessions.

Networking at GraphQuon 2024 — ÉTS hoodie and conference badges, thumbs up between talks

3. Hallway highlight: Masha Shugrina (NVIDIA)

Between sessions I talked with Masha Shugrina (NVIDIA Spatial Intelligence Lab / creative AI tools). Two demos stuck with me:

  1. Diffusion Texture Painting[2] (SIGGRAPH 2024) — painting on UV-mapped meshes with a diffusion brush so strokes stay seamless and you can blend complex reference textures interactively, not just stamp pixels.
  2. A Gaussian-splat style environment scan — a simple scene you could walk around in, the kind of collider/scan setup that makes spatial content feel immediate without a heavy offline pipeline. (NVIDIA’s newer line of work includes Gaussian splat painting[3] research; the booth conversation was about that direction more than a single paper title.)

It was the useful kind of industry chat: concrete tools you could imagine plugging into a lab pipeline, not a slide deck of buzzwords.

4. Audience and vibe

Mostly graphics + vision grad students and faculty from Quebec and Ontario — people who understand meshes and shaders but still want a friendly room. Talks skewed research-heavy; questions were about evaluation protocols and whether a method would survive a SIGGRAPH reviewer, not startup pitch decks.

5. My role vs 2025

For 2024 I was on the organizing/web side (site on GitHub Pages, schedule pages, contact blocks). That meant I learned the boring critical path: bios on time, PDF links that do not 404, and a schedule page that works on mobile in a hallway. In 2025 I presented at the Toronto edition — see GraphQuon 2025 — University of Toronto (Where to Wear? with Sheldon Andrews). Organizing first made presenting calmer — I already knew where the HDMI adapter lived.

6. Tips if you attend next year

  • Bring a question for the presenters — honourable mentions get sharp feedback when they name what they want (SIGGRAPH track, clarity, eval).
  • Talk in the hall — half the value is comparing pipelines with other Quebec/Ontario labs.
  • Check the site early — schedules shift; graphquon.github.io[1] is the source of truth.

References

  1. graphquon.github.io. (). [Web page] graphquon.github.io.
  2. Diffusion Texture Painting. (). [Web page] research.nvidia.com.
  3. Gaussian splat painting. (). [Web page] shumash.com.

References use this article’s publication date.