Siggraph

Today I went to my very first industry convention -- Siggraph!

It was lots of fun. I took the purple line (commuter rail) in to South Station, walked .75 miles SE to the Westin Hotel, and breathed a sigh of relief as I entered the cool, crisp, oh so sweetly air conditioned lobby.

In the morning I went to a class on high resolution head modeling, which was mostly useless and completely boring. I am so glad I am not in school anymore! After that we headed over to the convention hall and walked about the exhibit. Our UI builder sort of accidentaly snuck into this 'art exhibit' area that normally costs more. He couldn't help but tell us over and over again how cool the live, interactive music show was, how soft the couches were, or how awesome hot the virtual reality japanese chick was.

The rest of us had to make due with the plain old exhibit halls, which were really fun anyways. Notable booths included LucasArts, which was showing off this new physics technology where Indie can be bombarded endlessly with falling stones and will react dynamically to each one. Sweet. We also saw a few demos; the demo we saw at the Massive booth (the technology behind all the orcses fighting it out in the LOTR movies) was enlightening, but my favorite was actually the ZBrush booth, where we got to see a cool demo of the new version's features. ZBrush is a high-poly modeling tool that is very intuitive and acts like you are sculpting clay. It was used to make Davey Jones (squid faced bad guy) in the new Pirates movie.

The last thing we did was go to a Google party upstairs, where I finally ate some food (good food, actually) and a had a Corona on a near empty and quite dehydrated stomach. It kind of messed me up. They demoed the features in Google Earth and talked about the philosophy behind it, which was cool to see, but by that time we were all tired so we scooted out early and headed back towards home.