Chapter Meeting: June 2006
On April 6th, 2006, the originating Chapter Coordinator Tom Buscaglia, the Game Attorney, had named Kenny Carvalho, Parasytic Moon, as his successor for the South Florida IGDA Chapter. In his first act as Chapter Coordinator, Kenny Carvalho organized the first ever South Florida IGDA Boot Camp.
The featured artist for the Boot Camp was award winning Character Artist, Vitaliy Naymushin. Vitaliy, known as Mr. Rockstar, has worked at many premiere studios and is currently starting as a Character Artist for id Software. One of his recent success' was winning Best Character Model in the Dominance War between Cg Chat and Polycount. Vitaliy's proficiency and fine artistry was a perfect choice to teach high poly modeling techniques using Pixologic's Zbrush.
The South Florida IGDA Boot Camp was sponsored and hosted by American Intercontinental University . Also Pixologic endorsed the event by giving out some full free copies of Zbrush and had student evaluation copies available on every machine at AIU's computer lab.
The South Florida IGDA Boot Camp began on Thursday June 15th, at FAU's Askew Tower in Downtown Ft. Lauderdale. Our local chapter meeting acted as a preview for the Boot Camp, where Vitaliy showed off some of his body of work and what types of modeling techniques he would be teaching. There was a great turn out of students and industry professionals. Shadows in the Darkness, a local Ft. Lauderdale studio attended as well as Marc Mencher from Game Recruiter. After the Boot Camp preview, the meeting retired to River Walk where students and professionals were able to network.
The first day of the Boot Camp was on Saturday, June 17th. Between 12pm - 2pm, AIU held an Open House where food and drink were served. At the Open House, the first full copy of Zbrush was raffled off amongst other shwag. Vitaliy was on hand to talk and answer any questions people had before the Boot Camp began. AIU's computer lab was spacious and had over twenty computers for participants to follow along. Five of the front computers had full versions of Zbrush for the more advanced attendees. Once all the computers were filled, it became standing room only.
From 2pm - 6 pm, Vitaliy went through the creation of creating a highpoly mesh in Zbrush by starting from a lowpoly base. He showed the power of the Zbrush package to create a finely detailed hyper realistic face and the methods of his work flow. He illustrated how the toolset for Zbrush would allow you to do things that would be tedious and time consuming in other modelings packages. His ability to make a next-gen face in just a couple of hours showed how talented Vitaliy was as a modeler. After finishing up the highpoly mesh, he opened it up to Q&A until it was time to wrap up.
The second day of Boot Camp, Sunday, June 18th, was an earlier session that began at 12pm and went till 4pm. Vitaliy demonstrated how to build a lowpoly mesh from a highpoly mesh and then tranfser the normal maps. He showed how powerful Zbrush is in tandem with other modeling packages and how vital it is to create next generation assets. He was able to show the process and trouble shoot typical problems that most modelers have when mapping the normal maps to the UV's. Afterwards, he opened it up to another Q&A where attendees were able to ask more detailed and off topic questions.
The Boot Camp was a successful event that brought out a good number of attendees with many of them being different developers in South Florida . It is a testament to the skill and talent of Vitaliy Naymushin. He demonstrated effortlessly his competency with Zbrush and how useful it is in creating Next-Gen assets. The South Florida IGDA Chapter marks this as the first of many Boot Camps that they will be organizing.
IGDA South Florida Reporter
Alex Solarte
Parasytic Moon
