Hi everyone,

Well, It's the middle of summer again which can only mean one thing, Siggraph! (at least for me it only means one thing!) Yup, Siggraph is just around the corner and this year of course it all takes place in the beautiful city of Vancouver. It's hard to believe but this will be my 20th consecutive year going to the show, thinking back it's just incredible to think what has all happened in those years. I still remember oogling at Lasseter's Luxo Jr., watching in disbelief as a terminator melted into liquid metal in our booth and of course how could I forget raging to Vanilla Ice just a few short years ago?!?- Ok, some photos helped my memory on that last one! LOL!!

In order to get ready for the big show there's always a trip to Softimage headquarters in Montreal, this year is no different and in fact I'm here now writing this. I must admit, it is pretty funny at this very moment. I'm sitting in the "WAR" conference room in the Autodesk office with the Max and Maya guys planning on what to show. I used to chuck eggs at these guys back in the day, now we're all good buddies... but we all still try to show each others respective software up... Soft usually wins. ;)

So anyway, I'm chugging away on some great customer material this year. La Fourmi has graciously given me gigs and gigs of data from a spot they did for Subaru using Softimage and ICE, Psyop as always hooked me up with an incredible bird feather rig and Janimation is going to let me show off their sweeeeet facial animation technology which features Face Robot and ICE. On top of the great customer material I also have a boat load of new features from the mid year subscription release I can show. If you do make it out you'll be able to find me all over the show floor. I have a slot in the main Autodesk theater each day and a couple hours in "The-Area community theater." The-Area theater is new this year and will feature all the bloggers here at Autodesk. Finally I have several spots at our partners Nvidia and Intel too. I cant wait to see what ICE will do on Intel's new ten core Xeon 20 cores in one box.. really??

I'd also like to hopefully figure out an evening to meet up with everyone for some drinks. I think a few plans are in the works but I figure I would open it up for discussion. What do you guys think, does anyone want to plan a Softimage Siggraph evening?

Oh, one last thing, don't forget to get your passport up to date if you're not from Canada. You'll need one to get into the country now, birth certificate and drivers license don't cut it anymore.