Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 30, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008, 17:00 in the Reutlingen Room
Discover the new features of Zbrush 3.1 and its workflow that frees the artist’s creativity
Thomas Roussel, 3D designer and developer at Pixologic
ZBrush is well known to all modellers and is virtually standard in game development, concept illustration and 3D film production. Pixologic’s guiding principle: give 3D artists the freedom to focus more on the creative than the technical side of their work. With version 3.1, Pixologic has moved much closer to this goal. Alongside redesigning the interface and simplifying operation, the feature set has also been significantly expanded again. In this workshop, Thomas Roussel shows the new workflow with ZBrush, gives practical tips and . With this workshop the audience will discover a complete workflow for the digital artist:
Wednesday, May 07, 2008, 18:00 in the Reutlingen Room
Easy Integration of 3D Assets from SOFTIMAGE|XSI to CryENGINE 2 / Face Robot 1.9 Games Exporter Demo
Graham Bell, Softimage Guest Speaker: Michael Endres, Crytek
Fancy modding Crysis, Crytek’s new first-person shooter? New 3D characters, weapons, buildings, vehicles and entirely new levels can easily be created in Softimage|XSI and exported to CryEngine 2. In this workshop, Graham Bell will show how tools such as GATOR simplify the transfer of surface properties between different models, and how MOTOR simplifies retargeting motion capture data or transferring movement sequences between different rigs. Workshop participants will also see how ULTIMAPPER can create film-quality normal maps in just a few clicks. The new Games Exporter for Softimage|Face Robot 1.9, currently in development and developed in close cooperation with Crytek, makes the small but crucial difference in creating convincing 3D characters. The new technology makes working on expressive facial animation and emotion considerably less complicated. Once created in Face Robot, a character can be saved as a normal map, shared via the Nvidia shader and easily prepared for further work in XSI or another 3D application.
Thursday, May 08, 2008, 11:00 in Listsaal Tower B
SOFTIMAGE|XSI for Pre & Post Visualization in “The Golden Compass”
SOFTIMAGE|XSI and Face Robot 1.9 demo
Graham Bell, Softimage Guest Speakers: Richard Perry & Pawl Fulker, Destroy All Monsters UK
A guest presentation by Richard Perry and Pawl Fulker. The two-man London company “Destroy All Monsters” managed to win the complete pre & post visualisation work for the Oscar-winning film “The Golden Compass” (awarded in the “Best Visual Effects 2007” category). With SOFTIMAGE|XSI, Richard and Pawl were able to create highly flexible pre-viz settings and animations for the film in a very short time. These were extremely important for creative exchange and communication between production management and the VFX department to stay on schedule. In this session, Pawl and Richard explain how the previsualisation process works, why it is a very important part of film and VFX production, and how well-made pre-viz sequences turn into post-viz elements and remain as elements in the final scene. Graham Bell of Softimage follows the two speakers’ presentation in Softimage|XSI and shows in parallel how such pre-viz sequences are constructed. As a little extra, Graham will show parts of the new Face Robot version 1.9 at the end of the session and introduce the newly developed Maya Exporter, which can generate a shape-based version of the Face Robot deformers and process it further directly in Maya.
