In a New Yok Minute...

One of the downsides about writing a blog is the associated guilt I feel when I don't update it fast enough! I have been trying to get a quick around to posting an update about the NYC Make Your Mark event, but time keeps getting away from me!

I am now in LA, gearing up for the next event, but I want to share some details about last weekend in NYC.

I arrived in the city last Thursday and headed off right away to meet with some schools and training facilities to discuss XSI training for professionals. We know there are so may jobs out there for talented artists that can use XSI, we just need to be able to offer a couple of transition courses.

One of the things I was discussing with the schools I was at was offering a free weekend class in Feb for non-xsi freelancers to get them up to speed. I would love to hear some feedback from NY shops if they think they could help us get some people there.. also we are looking at London as a possibility as well.

So after a long day running around NYC I got to SVA to meet up with Mark Schoennagel and Mike Walsh of Softimage, where we were getting ready to be the guest speakers at the NYC User Group, run by Phill Avanzato. This was exciting, because we were showing a little tech preview from SIGGRAPH of some exciting technology that may or may not make it into the next release of XSI. Looks like what Mark showed resonated well with the crowd, so that was very encouraging! Mark also opened up XSI 6.5 and showed how the 3Dlight beta plug-in works for rendering in XSI.
http://www.3delight.com/en/modules/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=3delight_for_xsi_changelog

It was a great opportunity to catch up with a few XSI guys (and gals!) that I haven't seen in a while, like Todd Peleg, Leigh Rondano, Alex Arce, Mike Wharton and many more. (We missed you Kris Rivel!) I love going to the NYC User Groups- they jut go by SO fast!

On Friday, we went to a couple of client shops to hold some technology sessions and talk training. Both places we visited have grown SO much since the last time I had been there, with both project scopes and team sizes. There are some fantastic projects coming that are using XSI - I can't wait to be able to talk about them!!

Later in the day we met up with our guest panelist for the event, Chris Johnson of TOPIX and his wife Melissa. It was nice being able to have the time to chat and catch up, very different from when we are all running around at SIGGRAPH.

This was a longer post than I expected.. I'll do a second one for the Make Your Mark event later today - it was a great day.

see you later!