SIGGRAPH 2012: Los Angeles

Well, yet another SIGGRAPH has come and gone.   Like every year, it was busy as hell, yet it was a good show!  Mudbox absorbed most of my time in-and-around SIGGRAPH and I had the opportunity to work with the Wacom guys at their booth showing the Mudbox Multi-Touch Tech Preview on their Cintiq Touch 24HD.  I was also at the 2012 HP and NVIDIA Production Advisory Council working with more Multi-Touch Mudbox on some new technology with people from all over the industry.   The "Infuse Your Own Tequila Bar" was a nice break!   The Autodesk booth featured many customer stories and the use of Mudbox in their daily pipelines.    Be sure to check out my blog post PIXAR: OpenSubdiv with Mudbox and Maya on the very cool OpenSubdiv project by the guys at Pixar using Mudbox and previewing the high-res ToadKing model in Maya Viewport 2.0 with deformation!

Pixar's Manuel Kraemer presenting the OpenSubdiv project:

A Mudbox discussion with Daniel Simon

While showing some Mudbox and Maya workflows at the BOXX booth on some insanely powerful hardware, I had the chance to meet Daniel Simon and discuss some of his design workflows.   We had a very cool discussion about painting in Mudbox.   I even had a sneak peak of some future stuff he has coming out soon.   Mind blowing.  I'm a huge fan of Daniel's work and it was very cool to have the chance to meet and talk with him. 

Mudbox Hard Surfacing Demo

This year, I spent a little bit of time focusing on some Hard Surface workflows in Mudbox 2013.   The topics covered include: building up initial forms and structure; refining with Flatten; plenty of simple back and forth polishing with Smooth and Flatten; and some tips and tricks that go along with achieving some tightened edges using: Orient to Surface, Pinch, Curves as sculpt guides; and Vector Displacement stamps as sculpt tools.  The 30 minute stage demo wraps with some discussion of producing quick render previews directly out of Mudbox with images and turn-tables.   At the side-stage of the Autodesk booth, in the Autodesk University & AREA Community Theatre, I went into a little more in-depth discussion of sculpting in Mudbox and the creation of custom Vector Displacement stamps for sculpting workflows using Maya and Mudbox.   I'll be posting a few videos discussing some more in-depth look at Hard Surface workflows, custom VDM creation, and using Ptex with Transferring Paint Layers, in the coming days.  I'll also provide a link to grab some simple stamps I created for nice hard-edging techniques in Mudbox. **UPDATE: you can find the VDM video/post and some VDM stamps here!**

Here's the Main Stage Hard Surfacing demo in Mudbox for Siggraph 2012:

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