Enduserevent ...finally

From CG Environments

hi, finally i am at the enduserevent in utrecht and can say, that it is very nice and informative here.
..since i arrived as the FIRST visitor (8h a.m.), which was quite "impressive" how it was ratified ;) , i learned things about linear workflow, creating trash planets for robot films, a bit of hard surface modeling and the future of 3dsmax... also i had 2 lunch times and a lot of beer and a lot of talks for free..

linear workflow (Zap Andersson): it IS absolutely useful. and it not only tunes up your renderings, it will display them correctly the first time in your entire CG life.. and with max 2010 it is easy to use. but since i dont understood it in the whole i wont explain it here, to not say something wrong.

trash planets (Neil Blevins):
you can solve them by using pretty advanced displacments for the ground meshes. bang the ground geometry up with low poly (at rendertime subdivided) trash geometry for far distance, then do some semi distant semi worked out geometry for mid ranges and then put some hero geometry (geometry that is seen in the foreground) in the foreground :)
then spice it up with a bit of pixar awesomeness, use cool inhouse software, that nobody outhouse can ever lay hands on, and press the render button....after this wait about 1 DAY for one frame to be rendered..............then wake up out of wet, artists dreams....

also theres a cool technique how to create tilable rubble displacements/normal maps by rendering elements:
create 1 tile of rubbish and copy it four times to get a bigger square of rubbish.
then place a cam above and render exactly the center with the same tilesize like your rubbish. use "elements" and pick zdepth.set the measure distances for the depth lookup in min and max settings of this map, set the cam to ortho and then render.. it is then a perfectly tilable heightmap, of you mesh information.

there have been more than one time, when i really could have used this...damn i didnt find out myself :/

and after this there was the lecture from Cris Robson on hard surface modeling.
after this i first encounter the usefulness of "hinge by edge" to ge cool tube details on mechanical meshes:

also i learned about the hose extended primitive, which i wont explain here, since it slowly becomes too late for me ;)

after this, we had this NDA closed session with Ken Pimentel, where ken revealed future plannings about 3dsmax...which i am not allowed to speak of..otherwise they would cut my tongue out....

so thats it so far.
n8