Despite the rather wet and windy weather, we still had a good turnout for our last event of 2006. Once again we were in the Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa and once again there were many familiar faces as well as some newcomers.

With the main raffle prize being a Wii console, raffle tickets sold like, well, Wii consoles – and we actually ran out of tickets some time before the raffle was held!

SQUASHY FACES

We’d billed this evening as essentially a social event, so that people could chat and catch up on gossip with friends and colleagues. But we thought it would still be nice to have some sort of information-sharing, so we asked Blitz’s Jolyon Webb to reprise a talk that he gave recently at the Swansea SAND animation festival. ‘Early Experiments With Capturing Normal Maps For Facial Animation Using 3D Scans’ started off with a couple of characters from ‘SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab’ (some fine examples of squash and stretch animation!) and went on to demonstrate some experiments with 3D facial scanning that Jolyon has been involved with.

Also utilising ‘stunt faces’ from the serried ranks of Blitz’ developers, the talk was illuminating and entertaining and seemed to go down very well with the assembled crowd.

Next year we are hoping to expand the content of the evenings, perhaps holding some panel discussions with local developers, as well as talks by other more high-profile industry figures. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to email us at

RAFFLE PRIZES

Wii console – Blitz Games Ltd
Winner: Matthew Tempest

IGDA T-shirts - IGDA

Adrian Smith
Matt Tempest
Sion Lenton

Xbox 360 games – Microsoft

Perfect Dark
Winner: Lyondon Homewood

PES 6
Winner: Rich Jones

Ridge Racer 6
Winner: Rosh Kessopersadh

Burnout
Winner: Adam Law

Fight Night
Winner: Martyn Ash

Reservoir Dogs
Winner: James Fingleton

Moto GP
Winner: Daz Watford

Thank you!
We would like to thank our sponsors:

• Autodesk, and Neil Parmer from BlueGFX for the sponsorship of the bar
• Mick Morris from Audiomotion for paying for the venue

Our guest speaker:

• Jolyon Webb from Blitz Games for his talk on facial animation

And lastly thanks to our volunteers:

IGDA Midlands will return in Spring 2007 with a post-GDC evening!