Meeting Report
Summer Gathering
Mar 27, 2003
July's meeting gave us the perfect opportunity to kick back on the patio at Ivan's with our fellow gaming enthusiasts to enjoy the nice weather, cold drinks and fantastic sandwiches (or cheeseburgers mainly with our crowd)! About twenty-five people met on Tuesday to talk about SIGGRAPH, socialize and to hear a short presentation by the Discreet team on 3D Studio Max 5.0.
SIGGRAPH was fun. There were some cool things. It was a little more subdued than previous years, for some reason, and there were not as many major advancements that I encountered. I've heard from others that the expectation is that any SIGGRAPH on the west coast is always larger than when it is somewhere else, because a lot of people can just drive to SIGGRAPH when it is in LA vs. flying when it is somewhere else. SIGGRAPH is a very large conference so maybe there were items that I would have been very intrigued by that I just wasn't exposed to. Overall, I would say the gap between film and games in terms of technology is narrowing, and there was more evidence of that this year. It's very interesting to see offline rendered items from
last year's SIGGRAPH now rendered in real-time. - Jesse Helton
Some of the new features of 3D Studio Max 5.0 shown at our meeting include: new Poly modeling tools for faster organic character creation, new UVW mapping/unwrapping tools, new Photometric lights for advanced soft shadowing and real world lighting design (can be baked into vertex colors and texture maps for easy exporting into game engines), new Radiosity rendering for advanced real world lighting effects, using minimal light sources for photoreal results, new Animation tools, Set Key and Function Curve Editor.
Thanks again to Discreet for generously providing food and beverages, in addition to some great raffle prizes including a copy of Discreet's Plasma, t-shirts, back-packs and a back massager.
For more information on purchasing animation products from Discreet, please see your local reseller at: www.discreet.com/resellers to look for one in your area. You can also buy at our new web store: www.discreet.com/purchase. Their local sales office is located at 730 N. Franklin #210, Chicago, IL 60610. The phone is 312-440-1200, and ask for Susan Jones. To schedule a demo of 3ds max5 or combustion2 please contact the Midwest animation sales rep, karen.Jacobson@autodesk.com. There are numerous new learning materials and e-learning opportunities at discreet.com under training.
Currently we are in the process of organizing the next few upcoming IGDA meetings. If you have any suggestions for speakers or have a topic you would like to learn more about, please e-mail galec@aii.edu or tstankiewicz@attbi.com - Carrie Gale