Kooji does Boston - Day Four

This was the most crammed packed day out of the whole week featuring three major events: The AutoDesk User Group Meeting, The AutoDesk Party and The Chapters Party. Even though we were shattered from the night before at Lucky's Bar I was determined to attend all three events.

We started the day by taking another look at the Art Gallery and the 'Intersections' exhibition since there’d been so much to see and we hadn’t gotten round everything the day before. We then bumped into Jake again at the Education Booth who gave me a women's fit SIGGRAPH 2006 RoadTrip T-Shirt (this size is extremely hard to come by – you’re lucky to get an XL!) to accompany Johnny's and complete our His and Hers set. He offered to take us down to the Chapters Party in the AutoDesk coach later that day and we eagerly arranged to meet up later.

By the time we arrived at the AutoDesk User Group Meeting the whole place was heaving and we were very lucky to get in at all. In fact to begin with we had to sit in the aisle but after twenty minutes of this I insisted that we did a quick dash across the room to commandeer a nice bit of open floor space. (Simon Thomson and Duncan Folley later told us they’d seen us sprinting across). It’s a good job we’d done this because otherwise we wouldn’t have met J.Marshall Pittman who’s the president for an Animator’s Guild called ‘A Bunch of Short Guys’ -http://www.abunchofshortguys.com - from Dallas, Texas. This creative group supports students, educators, entertainment professionals and visual creators by providing an educational resource which focuses on career development. We exchanged business cards and he gave me a T-Shirt too which made the mad dash across the room all the more worthwhile!

The presentation lasted two and a half hours and during this time 3D Studio Max 9 was announced and we were introduced to several key speakers who demonstrated the features of both 3D Studio Max and Maya (since this year saw AutoDesk’s merger with Alias, the company which produced Maya). We were also shown outtakes, behind the scenes footage and special effects from Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest and Superman Returns.


3D Studio Max’s ability to cope with over 1500 3D characters was amazing!

The explanations for the process of creating and animating Davy Jones’ tentacle beard were astonishing.



We were then shown a demonstration using the physical attributes of cloth, fluids, and particles. A 3D model of a torso was inflated using an air pump and then exploded before us (guts and all!); it was quite remarkable and also pretty worrying. I hope Duncan isn’t expecting that level of advanced work for the third year!

The AutoDesk User Group Meeting ended with a performance of percussion music for those willing to wait behind. Most dashed to the snacks and drinks in the hall and courtyard outside.

Next was the AutoDesk Party which consisted of a large congregation out on the hotel lawn. We met a whole array of interesting individuals including Steve Stanchfield, a professor in the Animation and Digital Media department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Steve was a pleasure to talk to and gave us lots of advice on starting our business ‘Kooji Creative.’ http://www.koojicreative.com We were then whisked away to the Chapters Party at Roxies. At this point we were suffering from lack of sleep (plus we’d missed dinner but hadn’t noticed) but we battled on and had ourselves another great night out. We finally headed back to the hotel and concluded a very exhausting but most rewarding day.

Waiting patiently for the train in Boston’s Subway – The ‘T.’

We also chatted with Randy and Maya Rockafellow who were also travelling on the AutoDesk Coach with SEMAFX. Here they are dancing at Roxies.

>>> Kooji does Boston - Day Five