GDC 2007 Schedule

Date/Time: Wednesday (March 7, 2007)   9:00am — 10:00am. Here’s the entry on the GDC page.

GDC 2007 Session

Details for my GDC 2007 session finalized! It hasn’t been posted (or scheduled) yet, but if you’re going to be in San Francisco this year keep it in mind!

More Than Just A Pretty Map – Creating Next-Generation Materials for Lair
Presenter: Matthias WorchSession Description:
Next-generation materials are more than just an accumulation of color and normal maps. Join us as we take an in-depth look at the techniques that were used to create the highly detailed materials in LAIR.
The focus of this session is on the artist. It will present multiple ways to quickly and efficiently create color, normal and height maps for realistic materials. It will also demonstrate different ways of acquiring source data for these maps, for example by scanning real world surfaces. To address the bigger picture, we will look at the texture/material creation process from a technical art director’s perspective. We will review different approaches to a company-wide shader authoring system and discuss ways to spread material creation knowledge throughout the team.

Idea Takeaway:
Attendees will acquire techniques that help them to quickly and efficiently create realistic-looking materials for next-generation games.

Intended Audience:
Texture artists and art department managers working on next-generation 3D games.

This should be a really fun session! I have a lot of material and demos to share. As usual not many slides, mostly realtime demos that show how stuff is actually done in the applications. Some topics circle back to my GDC 2005 talk, so I can build on a lot of the concepts and ideas that I presented back then. I used similar material to educate our company, and I had various programmers tell me that it helped them to get a much more indepth idea of what the art department is doing. Even if you’re no artist, this would be a great way to broaden your horizon. Hope you can make it!

Update: Talk is posted on the GDC webpage now. No scheduling yet, though. And an outdated bio

Siggraph…

My Siggraph 2006 experience, in glorious 3D 2D boring text. Siggraph was kinda fun, but damn stressful.

Monday: 10 hour workday. Dinner with Victoria on the way to the airport. 11pm departure on the redeye to Boston.

Tuesday: Arrive at 7am local time on almost no sleep. Check into hotel, shamble to the showfloor to hook up with the Softimage people and to take a quick peek at the showfloor. Back to the hotel for A/V setup for the user group. Back to (nice!) hotel room for updates to the Powerpoint and a quick 1-hour nap. 3 hours of user group preparation and the actual show. The Softimage|3D demo was particularly fun, and the future technology preview was cool. My talk went okay, but I could have used some sleep beforehand. Softimage party afterwards and drinking. I certainly had fun there, minus the completely drunk guy who tried to punch Javier as we went back to the hotel for a while. Went to bed at 3am with way too much alcohol in my bloodstream.

Wednesday: Get up only three hours later. Still hung over, of course. Arrive at the airport to find that the nonstop flight back to SFO got cancelled and I’m rebooked on a route with layover in Denver. 45 minutes additional wait for the flight to Denver. Sleep on the plane next to a hyperactive little girl. 2 hour wait in Denver. Finally arrive at SFO at 3:15. Rush hour has started, Airporter and subsequent drive home take another 2 hours. Finally get to our house at 5:30 – only 4 hours late. Thank you United, there’s a reason I don’t fly you anymore unless I absolutely can’t help it (but that’s a story for another time – the amazing E3 2005 experience).

So yeah, my Siggraph 2006 experience certainly could have been less stressful. The Softimage people around Jennifer Goldfinch made up for it, but if there is a next time I’ll do it in such a way that I get to have more sleep inbetween everything.

Siggraph 2006

August 1-3, 2006 – Boston Convention & Exhibition Center

At SIGGRAPH 2006, Softimage will be showcasing the tools and technologies that empower artists to create the world’s most compelling 3D character performances.
[...]
And don’t forget to register for our user event, taking place on August 1st at the Seaport Hotel, which will include a look back at Softimage’s twenty-year history of 3D innovation, presentations by Marc Stevens from Softimage and Matthias Worch from Factor 5, a sneak-peek at upcoming technologies, and a few exciting surprises. Registration opens July 10th.

I suggest you register, last year’s event was full! I might post more details as they become available – if Softimage only do half of the stuff I’ve heard the whole event will be very cool!

Siggraph 2006

Getting serious now finishing my Siggraph stuff. I’ll be in Boston all of Tuesday (Aug 1st), doing the user group (and assorted Softimage parties) in the evening. I don’t know yet exactly what material I will show at the user group, but you should expect everything that was shown at this March’s GDC session – and maybe some extra stuff as well. Looking forward to it! It will be a hectic schedule, but fun nonetheless.

Siggraph 2006!

I’m going to be at Siggraph this year and do a presentation involving a certain game. More details as I can talk about it.

E3 Pictures

Some personal pictures taken at E3. I only took my camera on the last day to sample the surroundings. Here’s us with a Powerpuff Girl and Victoria playing the Cars demo.

E3 2006

E3 2006. People, games and excitement in the LA heat. And Lair, on the big screen in the Sony Playstation 3 area. More pictures of the conference soon (Sunday). Online version of the trailer here.

Woohoo!

Woohoo! E3 coming up! Are you excited? I’m excited, and I hope you will be, too! See you in LA.

A Postcard from GDC

As mentioned earlier there won’t be any online material from the GDC talk about Lair, but Victoria just got some pictures developed that she took during that time. Here’s one of me setting up before the talk. See, it’s almost like you’re there! No? Not really you say? Ah well…