SIGGRAPH Day 1
Ed Catmull’s Keynote was awesome. If you didn’t catch it, a lot of the ideas and philosophies he talks about are also in the book “The Pixar Touch,” but its great to hear it in person. Normally I’d go into great depth, but most of what he said was so juicy that I’m actually going to take bits of it and turn them into podcasts.
Next up was the production session for Kung Fu Panda. One of the directors was there and talked a lot about story and development. There was also a lot of focus on the production design and developing that very simple and asian-influenced visual style.
The final event for the day was the Autodesk user group and party. The user group was cool but LONG. I think it was almost 4 hours. It had a lot of good stuff in it, but also a lot of fluff. Here’s a few of the highlights.
The Third Floor (a previz company) showed how they work with Maya and Motionbuilder to act out their previz shots in real time with the director, and also let the director control a physical camera that sends the data into 3D so he can get the shots himself. All of it is pretty standard in the previz world, but it was very cool to see it demonstrated live and also pretty entertaining.
Mudbox 2009 also has a bunch of new features to improve the real-time display to make it easier to work. Mostly bells and whistles but the real thing that I liked was the texture painting tools. Very fast with a cool way to visualize texture painting. Oh, and UV editing. Nice.
Maya 2009 also had some really cool features, most notably some pretty extensive stereoscopic support with real time stereo viewports, even anaglyph if you don’t have a stereo monitor.
They also showed a bunch of stereoscopic content throughout the night, a stereo version of a Kung Fu Panda sequence, a sequence from Monsters vs. Aliens, and even some of the stereo versions of the original Star Wars movies but I’ll talk more about the stereo stuff tomorrow after the panels.
I actually didn’t stick around the party for more than 10 minutes. I was pretty worn out from the marathon user group and also fairly jetlagged so I dragged my cranky butt back to the hotel. The Softimage NiceIce party is tonight so I’m hoping to be in more of a party mood for that.
