Tuesday night’s event on my schedule is the Softimage User group meeting.
Set in an old theatre, the event is an occasion for Softimage to show off the achievements of their product line – XSI, Face robot – and to invite cool speakers such as world famous Futurist – Syd Mead.
The designer behind vehicles of TRON, Blade Runner or Alien, talked about his long carrier and offered glimpses into his creative process along with a flurry of pictures from his personal collection.
Featured next was a fascinating tour behind the scenes of the move 300 with some members of the VFX team. It was amazing to see how much they achieved with a tiny set, a handful of people and a lot of computational power.
The show was concluded by a preview of XSI’s next technological advances – a system of visual scripting called Moondust.
The power of this new programming tool was clear when the developer showed applications such as : lighting a log on fire interactively, dynamic simulation of waterfalls, cigarette smoke, crowd simulations and physics collisions between hundreds of cubes. Look out for future announcements about this technology.
