I have to be honest, I had never heard about this event before I knew UAL got us a ticket and I was pretty excited about it, even though it was an online event it is amazing to see the people who do what I want for my career, it’s an inspiration.
The sessions I was really excited about were:
- 9am – Jonathan Cheetham: Delving Deep into Digital Humans
- 11am – Lois Van Baarle: How to Market Yourself on Social Media
- 3pm – Alvaro Martinez: Indie Storytelling and World Building in Realtime
- 5pm – Dylan Sisson: Making Art with Soul
- 10h30pm – Finnian MacManus: Terraform VR Demo
The sessions that really blew my mind were from Alvaro Martinez and Finnian MacManus, surprisingly as I was expecting to enjoy more the one from Dylan Sisson from Pixar Studios.
Alvaro Martinez was amazing as he was so fast and made such cool things in houdini. I was impressed by how easy it was for him to create an amazing super simple set up where he showed us a node called HighField which he used to create a terrain set up with just a plane and 4 tourus shapes, he created an sci-fi/starwars like moon look with no complex shapes and it looked amazing.
Finnian MacManus was something I was not expecting to watch as VR is not really something I think about much although it is super cool I won’t have any chance to use it, but I ended up whatching his session and it was also super cool as he made a “sketch” of an idea he had with the VR and he literally just grabed some shapes like a cabinet and modeled a stage with it. At first I was really not getting what was he doing, but then as he moved forward with it, it had an amazing look with such a random shape that he just copy pasted all over the place. VR is a really cool evolving tecnology that really allows artists to be inside their own projects and give them some sort of infinite reality where you wont ever run out of (physical) room space.
Dylan Sisson was also cool but I had higher expectations for his session, maybe that is what ruined it for me, the 2 sessions I just described surprised me as I had nothing on it, but as this was pixar I was thrilled. Their latest movie Soul was amazing and Dylan Sisson talked about things I did not know at all like Joe’s sweater was not a mesh it was literally 280000 strings of fabric that made his sweater, which is impressive. I really enjoyed it but I guess I was hoping for something more like a master class, this was more to show what renderman could do and it’s new features for the next version as Soul was made with it we can really see the endless possibilities of it.
XPU rendering was something I really did not know about or that it was even possible, it is the combination of both CPU and GPU rendering within the same render engine: Renderman! As well as LAMA – layered shading system (by ILM) and Stylized looks – Imagination based rendering where we can make the renders look like drawings, like literally drawings.
It was an amazing event, I learned so much in such a short time with such cool professionals and software, everything in this industry. The only thing I’d change is the format of the event – TO BE IN PERSON. But yes, not possible at the time, it was interesting either way.