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Meetings Archive
Thursday, October 7th, 2004

Thanks to our sponsors Softimage, Jellyfish Pictures and 3d connexion.

Presentations by Marc Craste of Studio AKA, Bruce Steele of Glassworks and James Rogers of Sofitmage.

Event Summary by Tekano There was a 'making of' with Bruce Steele which was an interesting 'aussie' flavoured talk about Glassworks propriety particle system. This thing was getting very close to fluid simulations with the amount (many millions) of particles available and the relative motions and interactions between them all. He also showed how they extract z depth info from a stereo pair film image which then interacts with their Particle system. So eg a tree and actors clothing in the original footage being blown by the wind managed to convincingly emit 3d particles! Their particles were also demonstrated with that Bjork embryo video and the recent stella comercial featuring a pilot shot down over France. Top class R&D.
James from Softimage also showed some new enhancements in 'Behaviour' the AI driven crowd simulator system where it is now possible to have dynamic simulations on every actor as well as controlling each actors relative motions, these can also be determined with rules, ie mixing an arm waving animation with the dynamics as the ragdoll is thrown in the air and then as he is heading groundwards the animation changed to a tuck but still had rigid body dynamics when he landed. James also showed how Behaviour can control other objects like thousands of tall grass objects deforming in the wind and being bent over as an actor walks through it. There was some good demonstrations of continuous rule based simulations of hundreds of street 'actors' interacting with buildings, traffic lights and cars.
After the break there was a showing of Studio AKA's Jo Jo in The Stars.