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It was a great event and exciting for lots of different reasons (I may have had a few plays on the latest Occulus Rift). In attendance was myself, Alex and one of our students Oliver Herman, who was there as a Siggraph helper, but also\u00a0undercover\u00a0to help us promote the film.<\/p>\n
Our first event was a presentation on\u00a0how\u00a0we’ve been using the film as a method of teaching our students. We were in-between two\u00a0other presentations by other film projects being developed in the education sector. After some initial panic about absolutely nothing working with our powerpoint, we finally got it going and got ready for our biggest presentation to date:<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n The talk went very well by all\u00a0accounts, with some great questions at the end, although the\u00a0turnout was rather smaller than we’d hoped for (Around 35ish, we were competing with some much higher profile presentations\u00a0that day unfortunately) We were very excited to see that Jorge had come to see us however, a head\u00a0of one of our main sponsors SOLID ANGLE. It was also very interesting\u00a0to see what other universities had been up to and we got some useful\u00a0insights into improvements we could make in\u00a0scheduling our student milestones.<\/p>\n Before our next presentation we had some time to check out the conference exhibition hall where Stina was making a debut on few of our sponsor’s stands:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At\u00a0the VICON stand<\/p>\n At the FACEWARE stand<\/p>\n And playing\u00a0out in the\u00a0dallies reel over lunch.<\/p>\n We also had a chance to talk to the guys at FABRIC ENGINE<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who make a piece of software that may just save our bacon when we\u00a0start transferring our entire film pipeline over to Maya (which, for those who don’t know we have had to do as the software we have made our film on up until now: Softimage, has now been canceled by the people that made it: Autodesk) This software will allow us to use the skills and methods we have developed in ICE, (a system of visual programming integrated\u00a0into Softimage) \u00a0within Maya, as the new release of FABRIC ENGINE will effectively allow ICE within Maya. This really did make our day, as up until that point the assumption was that all the\u00a0skills we\u00a0and the students had developed using ICE were now effectively redundant. We are also planning to open up this software to all the\u00a0students outside the Stina project, as FABRIC ENGINE\u00a0is now being adopted by commercial studios and will soon become an\u00a0invaluable programming tool in a graduate’s arsenal of skills.<\/p>\n For our final \u00a0presentation we were lucky enough to be sandwiched in-between some pretty high profile\u00a0and exciting\u00a0speakers, so our audience was guaranteed to be a lot larger:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alex and I had 90 seconds to deliver our double act\u00a0as the trailer played out on the screen. Luckily it was a lot more packed as we’d hoped, and we got a fantastic\u00a0reception. It seems that the trailer is provoking a lot of very positive feedback from people who get see a lot of professional feature level work, which is very encouraging indeed. Also\u00a0the trailer is\u00a0now playing over on\u00a0CGBROS<\/a>, where we’ve had over 1000 likes so far (plus a lot of heated debate about whether the trailer is too obscure or not.. which i’m personally very happy about!)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The rest of the conference led to some great new discoveries\u00a0for software solutions for the film:\u00a0SPEEDTREE<\/a>\u00a0Looked ideal\u00a0to help us solve our extensive foliage problem, allowing us to make dynamic forests and plants; and\u00a0QUALOTH<\/a>\u00a0looked like it might be a very useful augmentation\u00a0to our Marvelous Designer cloth pipeline, particularly as we now have to switch to Maya. (where it has an integrated plugin already\u00a0developed.)<\/p>\n
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