Fahrenheit Digital

Although I went to bed just after 4AM, I managed to get out of bed at 8:30AM. Yes, I *DID* have an 8:30 course I wanted to attend but would just be a bit late.

This talk was about Facial Animation… and oddly, I don’t remember all that much about it. Must have still been half asleep or the coffee had not yet set in. I had to duck out a little early anyway in order to check out of the hotel and get my boarding pass for the flight home.

But I *DO* remember meeting more friends from other studios for lunch. We walked in the blazing heat and humidity to a local restaurant which, upon arriving there, found that it was packed with fellow conference attendees. Luckily there was another small restaurant across the street that we all went to.

Returned to the convention center and walked through the student projects exhibit at the main entrance of the center. There were several intersting projects, including one in which the students (from Osaka) had figured out a method of calculating volumes of a mesh then segmenting the model and placing joints inside of it. The software he demonstrated to me would automatically bind the mesh and he had a rudimentary animation recording system built in as well.

Such a system could potentially be used to automatically china and bind background characters in large crowd scenes. In a situation where you have hundreds or thousands of characters that will not take up much screen space individually, their software might allow you to handle a large number of characters with relatively ease.

I ran into a number of people that I had “met” online, like Javier Solsano. Never met him in person until that day and he somehow found me in the convention center. But it was great meeting him and the other people I finally got to meet face to face! I hope to meet more people like this and maintain some sort of dialogue with them all.

After that I sat in on some of the Massive and ZBrush demos (luckily their booths were next to each other); both companies had some great stuff to show. The mesh extraction tools in ZBrush 3.5 are great as are the increased resolution handling, ability to paint without UVs and the introduction of layers.

Then I went to the Disney booth to work for a couple of hours. I meandered about answering whatever questions I could and gave a couple of demonstrations of the rigs we build at Disney. Of course I could not go into details but had fun talking with the people there and helping out however I could.

Once my shift was complete I grabbed my luggage and went straight to the airport. The traffic was TERRIBLE, but I gave myself plenty ot time knowing that this would be the case. I was glad that I was leaving Boston a day before the convention ended. I could only imagine what traffic to the airport would be like then!

Met up with a few other Disney coworkers at the airport, we grabbed a quick bit to eat then waited for our flight to board. Once on the runway they announced that the flights were being held on the ground until air traffic control could find new routes in order to avoid a major stormfront.

After about 45 minutes in the air (once we finally got off the ground) we flew past a huge mass of dark clouds just to our north. A massive and impressive lightning storm was present throughout the clouds, lighting up the interior forms with the flashes. We flew for about 30 minutes before we were past this storm; it was enormous and impressive. And there were lights beneath the storm the whole time! Those poor people must have been pounded bby this storm, but it was great to watch from the plane.

Made it back to Los Angeles and that was the end of Siggraph 2006… until next year in San Diego!