I headed over to Utrecht for the End User Event this week. The event is held in the Florin Pub where the rooms for the talks also are. A total of 5 rooms made it difficult to decide what to see or not. Luckily a lot of the speakers presented their talks more than once. I arrived in the afternoon on Thursday and started with the 3ds Max Expert Panel which was made up of of Neil Hazzard, Zap Andersson, LouisMarcoux, Alex Horst and Jamie Gwilliam. In this session we could ask anything we liked about 3ds Max and any issues we had, this was a great start to the event.
Next up I saw Ted Boardman's workshop, Ted Gets Push-y where Ted demonstrated a range of modifiers that often get overlooked, most of which I had not used before. The Volume select, Push and Slice modifier all got shown and the Snapshot and the Shape Merge tool also look like something that I can introduce to my workflow.
The evenings were great with an open bar and a tasty dinner included, this was a great time to meet fellow 3D Artists and discuss workflow, tools and anything else. My ‘to check out list’ has quadrupled.
First thing on Friday I saw the Unity guys present ‘Doing Magic with Unity in Architectural and Design Visualisation.’ Here they showed how Unity could be used as an interactive architectural visualisation tool. Next was Jamie Gwilliam, from Jamie’s Jewels, presenting an interesting discussion on ‘What Makes a Good Render.’ I learnt a lot of valuable lessons from this talk and enjoyed hearing from everybody about what they thought made renders look good or not.
After lunch Joshua Newmanfrom Meshroom presented his 15 Do's and Don'ts of Visualisation. Again I learnt a lot from this presentation and also had the opportunity to discuss issues I was having in my workflow. One of my favorite talks was from Evert Vandenberghe called Meeting Insane Insane Deadlines! I think the title appealed to a lot of the community and some of the tips and workflow were incredible, a lot of ideas that I can hopefully take into my workflow. Evert went through how he worked using basic examples but they can be used for more complex things. The day finished up with Master Zap and Neil Hazzard talking about the renderers that ship with 3ds Max.