What a max(imum) blast!
We arrived at Utrecht a day early to be sure we don’t miss anything and that was a very good idea. 25 speakers in two days is impossible to do! It was very hard to choose the sessions as there where 5 sessions in 5 rooms and it all sounded very interesting! It was all very 3dStudio Max orientated which was extremely nice!
The venue was a pub with smaller conference rooms. So it was a very nice atmosphere and not a clean business style venue. There was 200 guests on each Day and a total of 250 attendees.
It all started around 2004 as a 10 PC gathering as Joep Van Der Steen and Michael Quist told me. 2007 was the first bigger one and in 2009 was the first 2 day event.
Day1:
Bobo of MaxScript fame talked about Krakatora and Frost and he blew my head off! Krakatora is so fast when it comes to particles and seems to even outperform Houdini! Developments like this secure the future of 3dsmax more than anything. I hope I find some time to try out Krakatora myself one day....
Next on my list was Neil Hazzards the principal engineer for all rendering and viewport issues from autodesk. He talked about “Nitrous” the new max viewport and I really like the direction this is heading. One of the statements was that it might make sense to think about multi Gpu set-ups if you want to work high end. He showed some examples how transparency was improved and how max is now capable to display 4500 objects and 6 million polys fluidly in the viewports. Also worth mentioning is that if you display more than 5 lights a different system kicks in that will consume quite a lot of ram on the gpus. I just got my 580 with 3gb ram and that is another good reason for this graphics card!
Shane Griffith / Michael McCarthy and Neil talked +2 Hours about the future of Max in an invite only (NDA) session. Again very cool but I am not allowed to talk about it!
Wayne Robson famous for his vector displacement shader talked about Mudbox. I missed that speech but I got to talk to him in person for a while and that was even better. He is a very nice guy from the north of england and he had to tell some stories!
I missed the rest as I just had to talk to the other visitors and speakers in the Pub where it was free drinks all day long and free beer in the evening! I was one of many happy max users! I love a good pint of Killkenny.
Day2
Rune Spaans talked about his work on “The Troll Hunter” a Norwegian movie which is coming to a cinema near you in the very near future! This was amazing stuff he was showing as he designed two of the trolls. And moreover he and his brother created a bunch of the scenes with the trolls themselfes! I have to repeat myself it was amazing!
http://www.superrune.com
He also showed his timekeeping scripts which made procedural infographics out of the excel sheets he used to do his timekeeping. I dont need to say more do I?
Dionissios
From Italy is the one to talk to about iray! His company deltatracening is producing high end images for kitchen and furniture catalogues in italy. He swears on iray! He has put together an iray impressive iray renderfarm. I have to say that I realy liked the light distribution in the images he showed. Dionissios is a very friendly greektalien who knows his stuff. We also talked a while about business and how things changed a few years back.
Yoni Cohen – http://www.snowballvfx.com
talked about the Animals TVCommecial - Hakibutzim
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InbaZsy9JWY
Snowball is the leading Visual Effects and Animation Studio in Israel.
He also said they would be releasing two of their inhouse tools. I especially like one of the tools that was for showing properties (like material id, or faceount) as a colors in the viewport.
There was even more speeches held by even more cool speakers but I still cant clone myself...
Utrecht is actually like a small Amsterdam and I might even like it a little bit more...
I will be there next year if there is one! And you should go too!
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