I am off to a wedding this week in Vancouver so this is my last update before I hit Los Angeles. Everything on the MotionBuilder side is lining up really well, with some exciting new demos, some really good customer meetings booked, and the MotionBuilder VIP Cocktail invite list is packed.

This year will be the tenth consecutive Siggraph conference that I have attended. My first was Siggraph 1999 in (of all places) Los Angeles. Attendance for this show was upwards of 42k attendees and a whopping 337 exhibitors. By contrast, last year’s conference pulled in 24k attendees and 230 exhibitors, which made for a much more intimate show.


Siggraph 1999 had some big announcements by some big names in the industry:

- Alias|Wavefront Maya Complete, Unlimited & Builder
- Avid “Sumatra” Beta
o I took the hands-on training on interactive rendering and was blown away!
- Discreet Logic
o I can’t remember exactly what was announced, but it was something big as I had a large bag of goodies from their booth


And some smaller, yet pretty exciting in hindsight, announcements:

- Kaydara FilmBox v.1.5
- Nothing Real Shake


Vendors at the show covered a wide spectrum of software, hardware and services. Big players such as Adobe, Intel , Sun and SGI were spending millions of dollars on booths, parties and swag. And man did they love to give away swag…..I still have boxes full of t-shirts stuffed in my closet.

One company not on the attendance list that year? Autodesk! Pretty amazing how the industry has changed in the past 10 years. This year Autodesk will be hosting one of the largest user groups ever, with events, demos, customer advisory boards, and just about everything else you can think of planned for the week of Siggraph 2008. Check out all the events here: http://area.autodesk.com/Siggraph

And we will see you on the show floor!


Cheers,

Curtis