I thougth I’ll note down some lines before I forget about all the little details. And why not doing it here so others might get one or the other inspiration out of it… So… if you excuse myself… I’ll just go rambling along… Whatever comes up first.
First of all, the organisation of the event was great (well it’s still going on as I write…). It is complex to tie so many people living in so many hotels to so many events and other details. I am pretty demanding and quickly turned off by poor performance. But I can only shell out compliments to the organizers. From the shuttle to the registration process everything was smooth. Almost German precision hahahaha.
I spend two days which IMHO is a perfect amount of time for the visitor who does not attend many special programs. Next year I’ll be there for the week as I missed a few interesting events. But I feel no regret. Actually I feel tired, hung over, and if I hear the word polygon another time I fear I will get sick. To make it short, mission accomplished…
On the flight to Boston I met Bicc39 and we had a lot of fun. Learning that public pay phones in Boston are not one armed bandits but no arm bandits did not make it less fun.
In no time we were checked in at the event which was a painless procedure involving laser scanners reading your confirmation letter and printing your passes. Nice and painless.
Here is a Pic of the main Floor. Go, find the Pixologic Booth!
The ZBrush team was flattened out by their Demo Marathon. So not much life left there. So I decided to have some fun at the Softimage Event. Later I made good use of my Rhino 3d Party card… Amazing what happens when people come together in 90Degree heat, at night, outside, with a few vodka tonics or other pleasant beverages. Language and skill barriers are vanishing, a good feeling sets in, stories of wild projects, orc battles, strange client projects and other folklore spreads around. Till some evil process converts your eye lids into lead and your knees slowly into butter. Time for the Taxi home, a few hours sleep a cold shower and day two.
I visited the Art Exhibit. Nice stuff! Many of our Artists from ZBrush Central should have send prints there. Time to ramp up ye olde skill set and try and get something together for next year.
Hidden in the back (??? WHY) was the advanced technology section. If there is something which motivates me and inspires me then it is a section like this. You see things which are not meant for consumers (yet). Thus they are free from the polution of marketing. Pure in their principle and purpose. I saw (personal taste!!!, there was way more to see) three amazing items. One was a face digitizer without the need for any radiating makeup… Plain optics… Good ‘old’ photo grammetry with an IMMENSE relsolution. Push of the button ZBrush high res equivalent heavy mesh. Way cool!!! They had something more commercial on the ‘product’ floor which was humiliatingly ‘simple’ compared to that hidden gem. I hear Darvin calling …
Another really amazing ‘product’ was a table with an architectural plan (exchangable plan of course… sort of laminated to a poster board) on top. AND…an LCD screen which sat like a borderless picture frame on top. When you moved the picture frame over the plan it depicted the 3d sliced image of the coresponding 3d image in relation ship to the plan. WAY cool. So you could take a look at the entire building when you moved the display to a corner of the table and when you touched the floor plan while moving the display around the building in the display changed to the section you were slicing into with the display. I hope you can imagine wjay I try to say here. Like an interactive clipping plane. Amazing when you do it hands on.
Next mega cool thing was a star wars (old school) fan boy’s dream come true.
Remember the cool scene in the war room with the planet as holograph hovering on the middle of the room… Impossible with smoke, mirrors, media… yes. NOOOOOOO it IS possible hahaha. There was a demo where the fact was exploited that at a focal point of an intense laser a plasma discharge would occur. And that’s like a miniature lighting bolt. The group found a way to control that focal point in x,y, and z direction. Having that said… with the sound of a 60’s scifi movie (zap zap pricle zap) a 3d image was projected into clear air. Leaving a slobbering Lemo with the Jaw dropped to the floor standing motionless in front of the demo. Wild! Imagine a small airplane with 3D lettering and animation doing sky painting for advertising… ahhhhh the possibilities… And if something goes wrong… the population get’s free tatto’s as well hahaha. Bzzzzzzzttttt. Demo sounded very buck rogers but the result was truly impressive. However… I would not advise walking through such an image… At least… close your eyes…
Another amazing display was a non graphic one. It was more geared towards controlers. Like switches, sliders, potentiometers in all sorts of shapes (radio control, turn knob)… So what’s the surprising thing about that??? Simple…
Imagine a foam (semi rigid) board. And then a hand full of ‘controllers’ which have a couple of spikes on their back. You simply plop the controller (button, slider whatever) onto the board. Wherever you like it, and with a serial protocol, and two layers providing power and data exchange the status of the controllers is read by a PC which is interfaced with another plug on the board. NEAT Idea. Imagine you sit on your desktop and the light in the room is to bright. You are to lazy to get up to reach for the dimmer, so you open your drawer and take out a dimmer pot and plop it right onto your desk, turn to the left and light dimmed… Or you plop another slider on and adjust the volume of your stereo… Or you plop a radio control poti on and use that to rotate your model on screen. And if it should be somewhere else on the desktop, pick it up and drop it somewhere else. NICE! They also demo’d a few sliders connected to a synth so they could set up sound/stage controllers according to functional groups. Great idea! (Fun to change a few around while the demonstrator talks to someone else… hehehe)
A lot of really cool ideas were presented there which definitely will have an impact on future products. If for anything… it was great to see the interesting things people come up with. And a challenge to one self to keep on thinking.
After that I left for the movie theater. 2.5 hours of animations clips. Only one word… AMAZING. Maybe a second one ‘ENVY’. 8-). I saw quite a few people buying animation books after the performance. Not much to say about the movies other than that the organizers did a great job putting everything together. There were a few extremely funny clips (have to laugh out loud recalling one right now) and a few so touching and beautiful that yours truly had a tear or two in his eyes. Hangover always make me so emotional snifff. The amount of emotion you can relay with the medium is soo immense and made me think a lot about my own projects and where I wish to go next. Funniest thing for me was a flock of Canadian Geeze carrying little funny looking Skunks who grabb the geeze feet to hang on, attacking a bunch of hunters. HAHA… LOL… sorry… getting carried away here… The most touching one IMHO was a visualization of a poem by WB Yeates. To his Love which was never returned. It reminded me to the many desires, feelings, intentions one has and which are never fulfilled or returned. And my Hangover…
Here is the Poem if you are interested:
HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
W.B. Yeats
The animation consisted out of the letters and words of the poem gliding by radiating smooth curves, melting, constructing and deconstructing a female model. Really… you would have to see it yourself. It’s just great. However, again, my taste…
However, also a reminder to tread softly on other’s dreams as many spread their dreams under our feet. Specially on ZbrushCentral. (RE: one point votes…)…
Any case, that rounded that afternoon up on day two. Ohhh… before I forgot. Before the animations started the theater (seating) was divided up into two logical sections and the two groups played ‘ball’ and later dog and cat against each other. ??? Wut?
Well… when we got into the Theatre everybody received a Wand. The top of the wand had a (2inch x 2inch) flat end (like a square flat spoon) and one side was red reflective and the other green reflective. We moved a projected guy through a maze on the projector screen to warm up. One side of the room controlled up and down (red / green) amd the other side of the room left and right (also red and green). Hahahahaha chaos. mayhem… FUN! Strange looking at a bunch of people waving wands like crazy yelling ’ RED RED nooooo GREEN GREEN’.
We did manage as a ‘collective brain’ to maneuver the guy through the maze. Later the display changed to a GIANT etch a sketch and we attempted to draw some simple geometric figures… Terrible results… But strangely enough… we produced an amazingly nice cirlcle. Interesting…
The dog and cat game was a riot… You remember the first B/W Ping Pong computer game? In our case the ball was a dog, the paddles were a section of fence, and behind that were 6 cats on each side… Now each group had to prevent that the dog get’s to the cats. HAHAHAHAHAHA. THAT was a riot. LOOOL. When the Dog got to the cats a wild fight broke out on the screen with really funny dog/cat fighting sounds… hehehe as I mentioned already… a riot…
After the 2 hours of animation (I think I still need therapy from that experience) the Display technology (SONY) was tested with a couple of DEMO pictures. It was a 4096x2000something Theatre Projector of the ‘Holy Cow’ Class. All I can say is ‘Woaaaaaaaaa Goooooozzzzeeeee bumpeeeee’ good!
There has been so much more detail… My fingers are getting tired typing… But it was fun letting all this pass in front of my mind again… And if you have a question feel free to Post…
Cheers
Lemo the 3D Reporter (Sort of… lol)
PS:Sorry… could not make my way through the Fan cloud to meet’n greet Taron… All I can say is that he looks like the Pic in the Community section 8-).
PPS:Thanks again to the Pixologic Gang making this a fun visit 8-))))).
PPPS:Yes, Aurick is really the nice Guy he is on the forum and not an AI Helpdesk System!
PPPPS:There must be a sgribt which insertz typo’s when you save your perwectly schbelled massage!
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