California: The New Frontier
Several exciting updates to post about! The end of August and September have surely been busy.
Unite 2013: Vancouver at it's Finest
Last I left you, I was off to gorgeous Vancouver, Canada for the Unite 2013: Unity Developers Conference. I am pleased to announce, to those who may not know, that I was humbled to have received the award for "Best Student Project" at the Unity Awards 2013 for my cinematography research work with the SmartVCS project. Take a look at my surprised acceptance speech from the award ceremony (I promise to prepare a more inspirational one next time - I was truly caught off guard):
Congratulations to the other nominees! I had an opportunity to speak with the other student award nominees and it is truly inspirational to see what they have been able to accomplish at their respective universities.
Overall, the Unite Conference was very different from the SIGGRAPH Conference, which I attended earlier in the summer. The Unity Community is one of the most welcoming and supportive development communities I have had the pleasure of learning from. The conference structure was laid back with multiple sessions occurring in block chunks separated by complimentary lunch and coffee breaks. This afforded me time to attend talks, visit booths, participate in workshops, and speak to indie developers without feeling overwhelmed. My favorite talks were the Unity Roadmap (a sneak peak into the future of Unity), the Houdini Engine (more on this in a later section), test driving the Oculus Rift (yes, it lives up to the hype), and porting my SmartVCS prototype onto the Windows Phone & Surface Pro with Microsoft:
SideFX: The First Stop on this Journey
After a extremely busy summer, I am pleased to announce that I have taken a short term assignment at Side Effects Software in Santa Monica, California developing procedural previsualization tools for both film and game cinematic applications. My work is being supervised by Senior Houdini Artist John Courte and am receiving industry mentorship from Dreamworks Animation Visual Effects Supervisor David Prescott. This is a very exciting opportunity for me as it is the first big step post-college towards pursuing my passion and one that puts me in the center of the industry in LA.
Why SideFX? I am currently assigned to the Houdini Engine project, an exciting new procedural platform that enables the procedural development pipeline in Houdini to be expanded to other pieces of software such as Maya and Unity. In my eyes, this has the potential to change the way developers create and iterate within a pipeline, and aligning with my interests in preproduction. SideFX has been incredibly supportive in providing me with the tools and resources necessary to explore and create. While I am under serious NDA on the specific projects I am working on, it makes coming into work every day a tad bit adventurous.
As part of my work at SideFX, they have been gracious enough to allow me to continue developing my previz tool, the SmartVCS, at work. With the system now built on the west coast, I have been provided with some very unique opportunities to present my work to people within the industry to gauge their interests and feedback for such a tool.
Last week, I had a meeting with Digital Domain Director of Technology Craig Zerouni, thanks to one of my supervisors - SideFX Senior Production Consultant Judith Crow, to give him a high level overview of the SmartVCS and received feedback from his perspective on how this tool could become useful in a production setting. In addition, I also gathered a better understanding on where he sees holes in the pipeline that could be filled with smart tools for artists. In the coming weeks, I will be giving a presentation at Digital Domain to a select few members of their technology, layout, and previsualization team and be providing hands on demos of the system.
Just yesterday, SideFX hosted the Unity LA User Group to give Unity developers a rundown of how Houdini has the potential to revolutionize the game development pipeline with Engine. As part of this event, I presented some of the work I have done with the Engine thus far (can't show just yet), as well as some new developments of the SmartVCS project. Overall, the event was well received and it is always humbling seeing the reaction to these tools to the people who would be using them.
Next week, I will be giving a talk regarding how SmartVCS fits within a production pipeline at Framestore LA for the Animation and Visual Effects Pipeline Developers User Group. Very excited to speak with pipeline TDs and understand more about how production works from the back end. There are many more events and opportunities coming up over the next couple weeks that I will share with you as soon as they are finalized, but this is just the beginning - and what a beginning considering it has just been couple weeks.
Living the Dream
To me, this is the first step in what is expected to be a long, unexpected, and wild journey. Living on the west coast has proved to be quite different from the life I was used to, but change makes life a bit more exciting to live. Everything here is about new experiences, meeting new people, and exploring a new city. Beyond myself, I have been welcomed with open arms by alums of my university Digital Media program, members of my office, friends from my time in the dance circuit, some people I have known solely as acquaintances, and the nicest group of random individuals. Also, I can't really complain too much since the weather here is pretty much always drop dead gorgeous...
All that being said, I promise to post more frequently - currently planning a weekly update cycle. In between those updates, I will be populating the blog with new videos, articles, images, and music that inspire me every day. These are exciting times in my life and I want to make sure I document each and every step, no matter how big or small.
If you don't already, follow me on Twitter at @_MasterG_ for the latest musings of technology, games, cinema, and the world.
Until next week, keep it classy Internet :]
