Technical Seminar &

So Wednesday was our seminar day, and today was our Technical Seminar. Animal Logic, Blur & Softimage all gave 3 hour presentations on studio pipelines & face robot.

I thought the production challenge was long. WOW. This was an intense day for the presenters, and the 80 attendees. It's just amazing to see that level of concentration from the audience for 9 hours. I was constantly ducking out here and there, but 80 people stayed and stayed, with only a break for lunch. It was intense!

It was really interesting to hear about the custom tools both Blur & AL developed to work with XSI and other software within their pipelines. I felt techy-d out after a bit.. it was a bit over my head!

Although, since I was able to install an addon yesterday for the training seminar.. I wonder what else I could pick up with XSI?

Off to dinner now. It's 7:0pm on Friday night and everyone is exhausted. Thomas, Jeff, Nick, Remi, Damien and Jeff are all heading home this weekend, but Nikki and I leave for Shanghai on Sunday to meet Alex Liao from our Taiwan office and my boss, Teresa Manley.

No more blogging for the weekend, but I will post some photos with Picasa tomorrow. Have a great weekend!

Our first Training Seminar

Thanks to our sponsors from Dell, we were able to hold two hands-on training sessions today with our Seoul-based training partner, SoftimageATC (http://www.softimage-atc.com/index2.htm)

My colleague Nikki Bridgman trained over 30 users with our brand new Professional User Material recently developed for Softimage by Adam Sale.

The day was great.. Trainers from local universities and top studios in Seoul were present to learn an overview of the software. Our partners here now have 30 more hours of material to present once we leave. We'll be making the material available ww very soon, stay tuned!

Seoul Seminar Wrapup - Animal Logic & Blur

Nick Hore & Damien Gray of Animal Logic.

So many times at events like SIGGRAPH or GDC, I only get to catch half of a presentation before I am pulled away for something. It's such a treat to be able to sit down and listen to our clients talk about their projects for an entire presentation.

Yesterday, thanks to Animal Logic and Blur, I was able to do just that.

Damien's presentation on Happy Feet yesterday was great. Based on the Happy Feet seminar presented at SIGGRAPH, Damien went through the process of bringing this Oscar-winning production to life. Happy Feet was shot using traditional filmmaking principles, as if it were a live action movie rather than a CG film. Director George Miller said at the onset of the project that he would have use real penguins in Antarctica if he could. Scenes were developed rather than shots, starting with the voice acting, then mocap shoots driven by the voice performance and later a technique called "lensing" allowed the teams to see what worked and didn't from the mocap shoots.

Damien stated that they were consistently adapting live filming techniques to a CG process and vice versa, which overall enhanced the creative result of the project.

One aspect that I found particularly interesting as part of the character performance pipe was the audition process for each character, where each character was auditioned similar to that for a real actor, with voice and movement. This also proved to be an audition for each animator too.

Damien's parting words from his presentation was that two main lessons were learned during the making of Happy Feet.. 1) The importance of flexibility and 2) Having several iterations minimizes overall risk.

Some fun numbers I walked away from the presentation with.. over 5600 rigs were created, 17 mocap actors were on stage at one time, up to 600 people were on staff at the project's peak, and over all 94 TERAbytes of data were stored.

Next up was Remi's presentation of Gentlemen's Duel. GD is another project that I am quite attached to, because last year during my first Asia tour & the XSI 6 Tour, we were given permission to play the short in every city, so I have seen it probably a dozen times, and I love watching a audience react to this great project. For those who don't know, Blur works on short films as a creative enhancement process for their artists. There is essentially (and again, I am paraphrasing) an open call for story pitches. The winning story pitch gets to be made into an animated short within the studio.

For XSI, GD was the first time the SW was used in Blur's pipeline for animation & rigging. Since GD had a longer project schedule, the team was able to look at what needed to be done in order to incorporate XSI into Blur's MAX-based pipeline. Never easy to incorporate anything into an established pipeline, the artists and TDs at Blur embraced XSI for its artist-friendly workflow, reliable architecture, strong referencing system, scripting with Python and the speed and flexibility in the rigging and animation toolsets.

Remi also talked about the Transformers cinematic, which was all keyframe animation, and a few other ongoing projects that are mocapped based.

All in all - our 9 hour day came to a close at 7pm, where we posed for a few photos before heading out to yet another delicious Korean feast.

Mmmm.. Green Tea Dunkin Donuts.

Not quite Red Bull, but it will do the trick.

Nabe pours a beer for Nick. It's considered impolite in Korea to pour your own alcohol. It's not rude, I discovered, to elbow your colleague and say "Please pour beer. Now."

The team at CORE with Softimage & guests.

Animal Logic & An Artist Finds His Dream Job

About 300 CG artists attended the seminar.

After Jeff and Thomas presented FR 1.8, we heard a few words from Jang Jin-Ho.

Jin-Ho, a very talented modeler from Seoul, was looking for a job in CG and a chance to see the world. He started posting his work on one f our favorite CG sites, www.3dtotal.com . His art was receiving a lot of hits, but no offers were forthcoming. So Jin-Ho went to the next step, and created his own website, and sent off samples of his work out. A short while later, Jin-Ho's incredible work attracted the sharp eyes of the recruiters at Blur Studio, where Jin-Ho will be starting work in October of this year.

Jin-Ho had some advice for the audience here in Seoul that I think resonates internationally - and I am paraphrasing here - "Don't be afraid to speak up .. it's better to try to be heard than not speak at all."

The incredible work of Jin-Ho.

Next up were Nicholas Hore and Damien Gray from Animal Logic from Sydney, Australia. Nicholas talked about the working environment & the potential job opportunities that will soon be available at AL, and encouraged the audience (and anyone reading this!) to check out the Animal Logic website at http://www.animallogic.com/ for current open positions. Nick also mentioned that artists should feel free to send their information in now, so when AL will be ramping up for their next animated feature in a few months they'll have a database of artists to work with.

Nick highlights that Animal Logic is very close to the famous Bondi Beach!

CG Supervisor Damien Gray was up next, and I have to say, gave one of the most illuminating presentations on a film that I have ever seen. I'll admit, I am biased, I LOVED Happy Feet, but hearing the production details were fascinating. Damien started off be explaining the mission of Director George Miller, who's mantra was " The story is not the plot.. the story is the audience's experience of the film."

More details later.. we are on hour number 6.. one more demonstration to go!!

Real-time updates.. gotta love free Wi-Fi!

This is cool.. we can blog and email during the Seoul Seminar.. not that I don't want to pay 100 per cent attention to Jeff presenting Face Robot... but I can multi-task.. excellent! I just finished my presentation, which Nikki commented was the slowest she ever heard me speak... it's all due to simultaneous translation.. otherwise i would have whipped through it! Imagine last year when the poor translators had both me AND Mark Schoennagel to translate?

So - Nikki and I are currently sitting in a room with about 300 student and professional 3D artists, and the event has begun, with over 6 hours of XSI and Face Robot technical presentations.

Earlier today, Jeff & Thomas Kang were interviewed by several CG magazines based in Seoul. One of them - Graphics Live - has a huge feature on SIGGRAPH. Since I can't read Korean (yet!) here's the link for those who can.. http://www.graphicslive.co.kr/xbook_read.html. What's fun is seeing the huge article on ARK (SIGGRAPH 2007 Best of Show) and Mirage (2007 Student Academy Award winner) plus the photos of the Soft booth. I'll be bringing a few copies home.

Here's some early photos of today.. or tomorrow for those of you back in my home timezone!
(it's so hard to use this blog program with all the commands in Korean!)

Softimage Press Conference

Keeping watch at the door.

Now that's a banner!

Softimage's Jeff & Remi from Blur

We have all arrived safe & sound in Seoul!

This is so strange, all my tabs and headers on the blog page are now in Korean!

I don't have much to report yet, yesterday was a big travel day for most of us. It was a very international evening at the Inchon airport, with Damien & Nick coming in from Sydney, Remi from LA, Nikki from London, and myself from Vancouver.

We were met at dinner by the team from CORE, as well as Souma-san, our head of Asia sales from Japan.

Today the seminar starts at 12:30pm with a presentation from Softimage Montreal. Oh wait, that's me. Luckily I still have Leo's memory stick from SIGGRAPH with Marc's User Group presentation.. I hope I can do it justice, and try to remember the biggest rule of simultaneous translation.. SLOW DOWN. YES, EVEN MORE.

Then its a full afternoon with tech presentations from Animal Logic and Blur, along with Jeff Wilson and Thomas Kang. We are expecting over 250 people today. Can't wait!

A full report and photos will follow..

Vancouver Film School Visit

The first thing I did when I got to Vancouver (after digging out my umbrella!) was stop by Vancouver Film School with my colleague Kevin G. Clark to visit Larry Bafia and his team of talented teachers including Glenn, Michael, Nigel and Magic who are training the next generation of XSI masters.

With over 200 licenses of XSI, VFS is one of the biggest XSI training facilities in the world. We shared some of our new material created for SIGGRAPH, including our new reel, the results from the Production Challenge and the 'Making of Mirage,' the Academy-award winning student film by the talented Young Jang.

It was a great visit, and I am really, really glad we stopped by. Huge thanks to Larry Bafia for hosting Kevin & I and taking us through the program and the classes.

Observing Michael Monks' Modeling Class

These guys shared some of the their work in progress on their final projects in the VFS production studio.

Teaching leads at VFS.

There's a Hoodie Guy in every city!

Next stop Seoul, but first 2 days of downtime for me in Vancouver. I'll post next Tuesday, once I get to Korea.