Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been to conferences before. Notably, I’ve been to the Game Developer’s Conference. The thing that SIGGRAPH does that GDC doesn’t seem to do as well is to focus on pushing the envelope, not just of game art, but of computer art in general, with a great spillover into game graphics. That difference means that the caliber of presenter you get at SIGGRAPH, as well as the caliber of artist, seems to be a bit higher, and because of that, I found the conference very rewarding and inspiring.
I did spend a lot of time in Max master classes, which I would recommend to all my fellow Max users. It was particularly nice to have a class with Andy “Lots of Robots” Murdock, talking about scripted animation. Yeah, I know, it’s complicated and makes your eyes glaze over, but if you can use that end of Max, you can get a LOT more done.
Luckily for all of us, Andy is collecting a lot of the techie stuff he uses, and will be packaging it up and selling it as Automatron, a scripted animation solution for Max. Very exciting.
