Hi everyone,

Just thought I'd start the new year out with an overdue blog post. I hope you all had a great holiday season, I spent some time with the family of course and made some great headway on my VW bus project- its finally painted!!  In between that I also spent quite a bit of time playing around with the latest Alpha builds of the next release of Softimage! It's looking like a pretty massive release- I cant wait to spill all the beans in just a couple short months!!

In the meantime, there's plenty of exciting news I can talk about! First I wanted to congratulate Helge Mathee for becoming the latest Autodesk Softimage Master! He was awarded this prestigious title at this years 3December event which took place in Montreal. Softimage had a great showing there so click the link to learn more about it!  If you dont know Helge, he's been pushing Softimage to the limits for quite some time now, but since the introduction of ICE in Softimage V7.0 his work has been off-the-hook!  Exocortex's Momentum plugin which Helgee wrote has actually just been updated to version 3.0 so be sure to check it out and support his fantastic work.

I was checking out Wired's website the other day and read a neato little blurb on Blur Studio's work on David Fincher's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Blur used Max, Softimage (of course) and Real Flow to do the title sequences for Fincher which I have to say looks just awesome!  It sounds awesome too if you like the idea of Zeppelin meets NIN. Do yourself a favor and click the link to see the final sequence, a second making-of video and to read a little more about it. I got a good chuckle out of the always hilarious Tim Miller from Blur, he coined a great new term for Nit-Picking...

So I've been getting some emails lately regarding training resources so I thought I'd mention a few places you can go for some good info. On Youtube you can find the Softimage Learning Channel. This is an officially supported site by Autodesk so there's definitely some good content there. The latest video focuses on Face Robot but there's plenty more.  Vimeo also has plenty of Softimage material. There is a dedicated group of course,  but also if you just search Vimeo for Softimage you'll see plenty of additional stuff. Finally, here is a great link with LOTS of tutorials to check out.  The headline says version 7 but there are many newer videos to look at. 

Speaking of Vimeo, my buddy / coworker Sidd down in our Singapore offices shared a great link to some motion graphics tools that Gustavo Boehs wiped up.  Its still labled as a WIP but for those doing motion graphics or are familliar with Cinema 4D's moGraph Cloners check it out, http://vimeo.com/32825206  Great work Gustavo!  Theres a good thread to follow here on the si-community boards if youre interested as well.

Alright well thats it for now, Hope you're all rockin in the new year and having some fun with Softimage!

mark