Siggraph was totally awesome.
I go to E3 and Comicon in San Diego and frankly this convention was so much more enjoyable. The convention center was nice and huge and not too crowded and the tech I saw blew my mind.
I have heard about a lot of this stuff but to get to try it out was like playing with the best toys ever.
Here is a little rundown on the **** I saw.
I saw a 3d monitor. You just look into it and the image is 3d. It was totally awesome. Think of using that with Zbrush.
I got to try out a new VR helmet. It was 200000 dollars and I had it on my head. It was totally awesome. VR is really the future. People say it is a failed experiment but it really hasn’t started yet. Within 10 years we will not be using monitors. We’ll just put on glasses and be IN the monitor.
I got to try out Novint’s Falcon Haptic 3d mouse thing. It was pretty cool but still kind of crude. I guess it will only be 100 dollars so I’ll have to try it out more. It could be a nice supplement to a wacom tablet for Zbrushers. It looks like it would be a bitch to support but if you could feel and sculpt your model in 3d it would really be the next level.
The Wacom Cintiq tablet was also sick. I know this is standard issue now but they are so big and sharp. Using it with Zbrush really just makes it much more intuitive. They are still a couple grand but I have got to get one.
There is still so much stuff I can’t even think of right now.
Zbrush had one of the big main booths right when you walk in. It was packed and the presentations were always watched by many.
The new stuff for 2.5 looks pretty sweet. There were several big thing for me. One of which was the bone system that you can rig with. It looks really intuitive and easy and you will be able to pose your zbrush models without messing around too much. The presenter said that you won’t need to use “envelopes” for weighting the bones. I don’t know really how that will work. It seems like you will have to be able to adjust weights manually somehow but they didn’t show it in the demo. I guess we’ll see in the future.
That was big and then the generate mesh looked cool. It basically lets you just model a nude dude and then just mask off the parts you want and it will generate a hollow mesh for clothes and shoes and whatever you want.
So you model a nude dude in a neutral position then you can mask off his legs and hit the generate mesh button and you get a separate pants model in the shape of his legs. Then you can go in and sculpt those up to a pants level and then you have a perfectly fit pair of pants that you can turn on and off. You can do this for everything so he can have socks, shoes, hats, armor, etc.
The other thing was regenerating the topology once you are done sculpting. This can be really handy because we all know that as you push and pull those pieces around the topology can get really wonky. This lets you go back in and just draw in the crude polys where you want them and then regenerate the mesh. It was hard to tell but this looks like it will lose a bit of detail when you do this. Not very much but it is like a slight step down in resolution. So I would guess that you would not want to do this after you have sculpted all the pores and wrinkles. You would want to get a final version of your basic mesh. Then before you are going to start detailing you would want to redo the topology. Then do the details. It will be great for rigging and animating.
So I had a blast. This was like a toy store for adults who love tech. I’d recommend going next year as now that E3 is dead it will only be this and PAX and Comicon. See you next year!
