Boston Unity Work Flow Event

Make Your Ideas a Reality: Suites and Unity Workflow

"On Tuesday, June 14th we are hosting event that should knock your socks off... Make Your Ideas a Reality with a Max and Maya workflow that works with Unity - there will be an in-depth look at Unity and the workflow with Max and Maya - then Carl will demonstrate how to make a game and build it for the web, iOS and Android.

Jono Forbes will be presenting Defective Studio's Unity-based world-builder, Platformer, working with their Maya plug-in for full modeling of terrain, and the ease in which it lets you move back and forth between Maya and Unity.

Carl Callewaert has 10 years experience working in motion capture, 3d animation and game development. His professional experience includes working as a liaison between artists, programmers and sales department on software/hardware development, motion capture pipelines and (mobile) game development. As an Autodesk Certified Instructor and Unity expert, Carl has taught specialized courses and workshops on game engines, key framing, motion capture, photo-realistic rendering, visual effects, modelling, level editing at companies and education institutes. Currently, Carl is Unity evangelist at the award wining company Unity Technologies . He also runs Fundi 3D where he is involved in the production of games. At The Gaming and Animation Institute of Fredericton Carl oversees the 3D gaming programs and runs the eMentorship program.

When: Tuesday, June 14th, 6pm - 10pm
Where: Bunker Hill Community College

How Much?: Free. But registration is required"

Should be an interesting event for Boston Indies to get involved with especially as the folks at GET put on such great stuff for the games community!

Stuff from 3D Stimulus

So this is really a highlight of some of the info as there are videos of some of the talks to come later.

Okay, so most probably couldn't care, but asking to help folks at the local New England resellers out, they're looking to get 200 people signed up for the 20th April event. GET.

If they do, they'll get some money to put towards local events, and they've helped put on a lot of cool events for artists in the Boston area, so if you're in the area or just want to help out, register through them and it'll be much appreciated.

The webinar is mostly a bunch of presentations about vfx, one is from the effects on Black Swan and another movie and one is a game I think.

If anyone is interested, give Heidi a shout - hjelev@greateasterntech.com

She needs your name, email and either an address or your company name and she'll automatically opt you out of receiving any Autodesk newsletter spam, unless you actually want it.

Other bits and pieces, Motion Builder or the Entertainment Suite of products, if you buy through GET, you'll get a free Kinect and set up with hacked software to have your own motion capture device out of it.

www.brekel.com if you want to check out the software that was demo'ed as a mocap software that plugged right into Motion Builder.

A nice free shader for people to use in their work was 3Point Shader Lite found here.

3D Stimulus Day

GET are hosting another 3D Stimulus Day event - 9th April

A recap about the event, which is an awesome free art and networking event -

Location: Mt. Ida, Newton, MA

Time: 9:00am - 5:00pm

Presentations this year include:

• Chad Moore of Turbine and Rigging Dojo, with Job Hunting Tips for 3D Artists
• Alex Schwartz and Yilmaz Kiymaz of Owlchemy Labs, presenting Mixing 2D and 3D in Unity
• A panel-discussion with various tech artists from local game companies, mediated by Chad Moore
  • Ryan Griffin, Senior Character TD, Turbine
  • Elliott Mitchell, Vermont Digital Arts
  • Brandon Bateman, Senior Tech Artist, Turbine
  • Farley Chery, Instructor, ITT Institute and Bunker Hill Community College
  • Justin Woodard, Technical Artist, Turbine
• Willem Van Der Schyf, Tencent Boston, presenting his Workflow for Character Creation using Max & ZBrush
• Afternoon networking session upstairs with demos from local individuals and companies including Brass Monkey, Vermont Digital Arts, Owlchemy Labs, 3d Camera Technology, Mocap with Kinect and Motion Builder and lots more!!!

Adding to this, The Boston Post Mortem are having a meet up on the 13th April and will be talking about Game Law Hot Topics.

This should be a great, interesting meet up too.

From the discussion last night

The "Jobs in 3D discussion" was interesting because it came from the view points of someone in education trying to place students, an internal recruiter, someone who hires contractors, a art director and someone who runs a small business.

From the perspective of the small business owner, having all round skills were the most important factor because there wasn't many resources and projects keep changing that you had to be able to work on whatever came in and a great way of getting a foot in the door was as a school/college internship or offering to help out on a certain project for free.

From a contractor perspective, Lane Feuer at Hasbro just wanted to see good looking sculpture work, doesn't matter about the quality of the model or texturing, just the final sculpture because that is all they are interested in, which is quite different to a lot of other fields. Also because a lot of the contractors work remotely from as far as Brazil, communication is key in being able to understand the requirements of the project. Being a contractor for 6 months is also looked as a probationary period, much like an extended interview, if they like you and you work out there is every possibility of them offering you a full time position at the end of the contract.

Thom Ang, the art director at 38 Studios was a very interesting speaker, talking about working to your strengths, if you aren't the best artist out there but are able to manage projects he said work to those strengths, gets you working in a art position but where you can help out the most as an example.

As a side note to the discussions, Brad Porter, who organised the event mentioned that Maya 2010 with a subscription included would be $4100 or a stand alone license of $3500 and this version combines all the versions of the past so no more 3 flavours.

They are also offering an "Entertainment Creative Suite" which is $5000, this includes either Maya 2010 or 3DSM 2010, Motionbuilder and Mudbox.

He highlighted the main advantage of the subscription model, apart from cheaper future upgrades, it allowed the artist to remotely use the license on their home personal computer at no additional cost, which is a great way to play around with the package on your own time.