Thanks to our sponsors Avid/Softimage, Jellyfish Pictures and XTFX. Thanks also go out to Rosa Mulraney and Ismini Sigalia for helping to prepare for the event and Richard Nash for assistance with the website.

Event Summary:

Presentations by Grahame Andrew of Lola Post
Maggie Kathwaroon of CG-Soup
James Rogers of Softimage and Alan Jones

Beginning the evening's proceedings Grahame Andrew kicked off with a presentation of Lola Post's work on 'Supervolcano'.
He emphasised the company's lo-fi approach, taking the simplest approach possible to achieve photo-realistic results. This included using a cloud tank shot against black to mimic the columns of ash, with lighting matched to the backplates. 3D was used for extra dust and smoke elements as well as birds and a helicopter to create a sense of scale. Compositing these elements together was a mixture of shake, flame and combustion.

Click on images for larger versions.

Next up Maggie Kathwaroon, the MD of CG-Soup, provided an in-depth look at the company she founded with Kim Aldis and Bradly Gabe. She took us through the backgrounds of the various members, the levels of assistance they offered to studios at various price ranges, and the differences between CG-Soup and the support provided by Softimage themselves. This last point was handled with a great deal of tact and diplomacy considering Patrick and James from Avid were watching the proceedings! They stressed the amount of real world production experience that they could offer and the pipeline management and creation expertise. Kim Aldis concluded the presentation by demonstrating a soup-er (sorry!) rig that Bradley Gabe has been working on for their company website, which contained a spine capable of switching between hierarchical and independent control just by selecting the various components.

James Rogers from Softimage UK stepped up to present a tech preview of Softimage 64-bit, running on windows 64, on a duel core Intel machine with 8 Gig of ram and a nvidia 3400 graphics card to boot. Hardware problems unfortunately prevented him from showing a scene containing 500 high-poly characters, though he still managed to rotate around a respectable 33 million polys on a dino rig provided by the Refinery in South Africa, which rendered blazingly fast once it had been loaded into memory, and once this had been done the camera could be rotated retaining the scene in memory, so that rendering re-commenced immediately, a neat trick. hints were made that the next version of mental ray would be included in the release, though at this stage nothing can be confirmed or denied.

Alan Jones, at very late notice, was able to present some render tree techniques that he found useful in production and weren't well known. He covered the creation and control of anistropic reflections on sub-div surfaces, how to set bump to only appear in reflection (really useful in final gathering to speed things up), and answered an audience question on mixing 2 environment maps together. In a couple of days we should be uploading some example scenes from Alan's presentation.

XSI London are investigating ways to make feedback on the meetings easier to provide and more interactive, but a variety of suggestions were put forward for the next program, and will be taken notice of. Thanks to everyone for coming, and see you next time!

Matt Morris, co-organiser of XSI London, will be running a 10km in July for charity, and would really appreciate sponsorship from anyone who has found these meetings useful/got pissed on the free beer...
You can donate on-line at: http://www.justgiving.com/mattmos