3ds London Member's Web Presence

I hope everyone enjoyed last night; thanks to everyone at Hayes Davidson for hosting, all the presenters and everyone else who's come along this year and made the evenings worthwhile.

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 1st February 2012 at The Plough. Hopefully, Neil Hazzard will be able to make it! We have a number of great speakers lined up already, if you're interested in talking next year let me know.

Peter Guthrie's presentation was brilliant, as is his blog. If you have one, let me know so we can start a blogroll here on the site; leave a comment on this post, or email me directly, use Twitter or Linked In.
To get things started, here's mine. See you all next year!

Neil Hazzard & Peter Guthrie @ 3ds London, 7th December

From 7pm

HayesDavidson

Studio A

21 Conduit Place

London W2 1HS

Map and Directions

It’s the last 3ds London of 2011, and to wrap up the year we have a busy event planned. If you squeezed into The Plough last month, thanks, I hope you were squashed up against someone nice. Happily, we’ll have a bit more space this month, Hayes Davidson have kindly opened their doors (figuratively, you’re going to have to knock) for us to enjoy their hospitality again. There’s going to be a couple of short presentations first from members whose work has been in the news recently which will be great, please bring along some of your own work to show the group too.

Neil Hazzard, Autodesk M&E, is our first presenter; Neil is the development lead on rendering and interactive viewports for 3ds Max, and is coming along to discuss Nitrous and perhaps Iray, time willing. A great opportunity to discuss everyone’s favourite 3D program with one of the key developers!

I’m very happy that Peter Guthrie will be the second presenter. A freelance visualisation artist with a background in architecture, Peter studied architecture in Edinburgh, Scotland and worked as an architect for several years before making the switch to visualisation. Peter recently presented at the SOA Academy Days in Venice and enjoys sharing his findings via his blog. There’s no way you haven’t heard of Peter if you’re involved in Arch Viz, he’s travelling a long way to make the evening so don’t miss it!

It’s going to be a brilliant evening so do come along, everyone is welcome. Remember, please bring along some of your own work to show the group too! Next year, as usual, we’ll skip January, then back at The Plough for February. Details posted at www.3dslondon.blogspot.com, LinkedIn and Twitter, follow @3dslondon.

Kind regards, Simon

Vray @ 3ds London on YouTube

Hi Everyone,

I hope you enjoyed last night if you came along. I knew it would be busy, but I think it was the highest attendance the group has ever had. It certainly felt like it in that room! So if you were stuck at the back, sorry. My colleague recorded the presentation on his iphone, and it’s actually pretty good. Thanks Krish!

Next month is shaping up to be another good evening (at Hayes Davidson's studio) so put Wednesday 7^th December in your calendar. Remember, details posted at www.3dslondon.blogspot.com and on Twitter, follow @3dslondon.

Vray @ 3ds London Wednesday 2nd November

For 7pm

Upstairs at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A

map

Hi everyone,

This November Teddy Ilieva and Jimmy Krastev are flying over to show us some of the latest Vray features. It will be a great chance to catch up with some of the Chaos Group team in the usual relaxed setting of 3ds London. Some of the areas they’ll be covering:

V-Ray® 2.0 for 3ds Max - the latest trendsetting rendering technologies by Chaos Group

1.    Memory efficiency with Render time subdivisions
2.    Displacement geometry - cool tricks
3.    Rendering heavy geometry with V-Ray Proxy
4.    V-Ray RT accelerating the shading process
5.    Creating advanced layered shaders
6.    Light Cache improvements - retrace threshold
7.    V-Ray stereoscopic rig - shade map optimizations for rendering stereoscopy
8.    Distance texture - use procedurally generated textures to create a wide range of effects based on the distance between various objects in the scene
9.    Lens analysis tool - easily match the distortion of your real world and your virtual cameras
10.    Multi-sub texture – assign different textures based on object ID
11.    Light select render element – extract the contribution of each light to the scene, change their intensity in post-production and compose them back together
12.    Adding realism to your refractive materials with light dispersion
13.    V-Ray RT running on CPU vs. GPU

As always, please bring some of your own work to share with the group, and I’m looking for some short presentations for DECEMBER. If you are interested or know someone who is, please email me.

Remember, details posted at www.3dslondon.blogspot.com and on Twitter, follow @3dslondon. If you’ve been along recently, you’ll know it gets busy…  So get there early if you want a seat!

Kind regards, Simon

Vray at 3ds London 2nd November

Chaosgroup have confirmed their presentation, further details in just a few days!

Wednesday 5th October

3DS Max London User Group

Wednesday 5^th October

For 7pm

Upstairs at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A

map

 Hi everyone,

This Wednesday 5^th October we’ve lined up a brilliant presentation from Pete Addington. Check out Pete’s great site first, www.lonerobot.net. Pete will be presenting Creative character systems for studios great and small: The presentation will highlight some of the character-focused pipelines integrated into Impossible TV's framework over the last few years. Pete will talk about Lonerobot's modular design pattern and how this can be adapted to different types of character-based projects without modification. He’ll demo some custom tools written with dotnet and maxscript and perform a real-time demonstration of developing a character layer control system for production.

 So a little different from the past few months, I hope you’ll come along to enjoy it. As always, please bring some of your own work to share with the group, and I’m looking for presenters for DECEMBER. If you are interested or know someone who is, please email me.

Remember, details posted at www.3dslondon.blogspot.com and on Twitter, follow @3dslondon. If you’ve been along recently, you’ll know it gets busy…  So get there early if you want a seat!

Kind regards, Simon

Factory Fifteen @3ds London Wednesday 7th September

3DS Max London User Group

Wednesday 7^th September

For 7pm

Upstairs at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A

map

 

First up next Wednesday 7^th September, evening regular Sebastian Burdon, creative director at Urban Digital, will be showing us how he helped create an animation currently showing at Ron Arad's stunning Curtain Call at the Roundhouse.

After Sebastian, Paul Nicholls and his colleagues from Factory Fifteen are going to present their recent works, consisting of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and  6 minute films. Factory Fifteen use both film and animation to communicate social, political, and fantastical futures. These highly experimental shorts are accompanied by 'chronographics' which visually narrate and stylistically envision their films. Paul’s presentation last year was brilliant, this year he will include a look at the making of his film Golden Age, which recently won the Best Architectural Animation Award from CG Architect in 2011.

As always, please bring some of your own work to share with the group, and remember we’re also looking for presenters for the next few months. If you are interested or know someone who is, please email me.

Remember, details posted at www.3dslondon.blogspot.com and on Twitter, follow @3dslondon. If you’ve been along recently, you’ll know it gets busy… I’ll be organizing the room a bit more ruthlessly to cope next week, so get there early if you want a seat!

3ds London 3rd August

Hi everyone,

Next Wednesday we’ve got two great presentations. First, Alex York is going to talk about the amazing body of work Atelier York produced for “The House”, over 15 minutes of animation and more than forty stills over the last four years.

Jamie G from Autodesk is coming too, to talk about Motion Capture workflows, discuss the new viewports, and share some tips and give an overview of SLATE, the node-based material editor.

As always, please bring some of your own work to share with the group, and remember we’re also looking for presenters for the next few months. If you are interested or know someone who is, please email me.

Remember, details posted at www.3dslondon.blogspot.com and on Twitter, follow @3dslondon. See you upstairs at The Plough, Museum Street for 7pm.  Thanks!

Kind regards, Simon

Taylor James @3DSLondon Max User Group next Wednesday 6th July

3DS Max London User Group

Wednesday 6^th July

For 7pm

Upstairs at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A

map

Hi everyone,

Next Wednesday Keith and Mark from Taylor James are presenting some of their recent work, including a look behind the scenes of their stunning Turkish Airlines project, above. They’re always generous sharing their experiences with the group, a benefit of having so many professional and talented members who attend regularly! I look forward to seeing everyone to enjoy their presentation and a summer drink, perhaps outside if sunny, who knows?

As always, please bring some of your own work to share with the group, and remember we’re also looking for presenters for the next few months. If you are interested or know someone who is, please email me. Thanks!

Kind regards, Simon

Allies & Morrison @ 3ds London Wednesday 1st June

3DS Max London User Group

Wednesday 1^st June

For 7pm

Upstairs at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A

map

Thomas Horsley, head of the internal 3d studio at Allies and Morrison Architects, will be showing us their latest film produced for the Rambert Dance Company.

This recently completed project was their first requiring the integration of live actors within a CG environment and the presentation will cover their workflow, lessons learned and some tips on what not to do on your first greenscreen shoot.

As always, please bring some of your own work to share with the group, and remember we’re also looking for presenters for the next few months, if you are interested please email me. I can't make it unfortunately, so Joe Robson has kindly offered to compere for the evening.

Kind regards, Simon

Meet the Met @ 3ds London this 4th May

3DS Max London User Group

Wednesday 4^th May

For 7pm

Upstairs at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A

map

On Wednesday 4^th May we have an excellent presentation;  Mark DeGiovanni is a 3D modeller and Analyst at the Metropolitan Police Service Computer Aided Modelling Bureau. The small team is recognized as one of the most experienced in the world, reconstructing crime scenes as 2D plans and 3D computer models since 1992. They use a range of surveying, photogrammetry and modelling techniques to analyse geometric variables within crime scenes for use in Court Presentations. Mark will be presenting three real cases showing some of the elements of their work, and of course how the team use 3ds Max.

As always, please bring some of your own work to share with the group. I’m also looking for presenters for the next few months, if you are interested please email or speak to me on Wednesday. Thanks, see you then!

Kind regards, Simon

RIBA Viz Exhibition & CityEngine @ 3ds London this Wednesday 6th April

3DS Max London User Group
Wednesday 6th April 7pm

The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A
map




Neil Clark, founder of Eyelevel, has curated Visioning The Future. An exhibition currently taking place at the RIBA, it aims to inspire visitors and highlight the role of architectural visualisation in realising great modern buildings, from epic cityscape to fine detail. Neil will be talking through how he (and other members of the 3ds London User Group) use Max to do so!

Marcel Reimer from Procedural is coming along to show the group their latest version of CityEngine, and to show us some recent projects and talk about future developments.

As always, the group always enjoys other people’s projects, so bring something along!

Kind regards, Simon

Do you want to meet with the 3ds Max/Design Development team?

Autodesk’s Soho Office

Ingeni Building
15-17 Broadwick Street
London
W1F 0DE

Hi All

• - Do you want to meet the 3ds Max/Design Product Manager?
• - Do you have questions for the Lead Product Developers of 3ds Max/Design?

Register now to attend this exclusive free event and put your questions, ideas and suggestions directly to the 3ds Max/Design development team.  Both Shane and Pierre-Felix are over from the US and Canada and want to hear what you have to say! You will even get to meet Neil, our very own UK lead developer of viewport technologies.

• When:                  Thursday 24th March
• Where:                 Autodesk London office
• At:                       7 - 9pm (6.30 arrival)
• RSVP:                  via Jamie's Blog

The evening, organised in conjunction with the Autodesk, will be an informal gathering to help steer the future direction of 3ds Max/Design. Due to the sensitive nature of data being shared with you, a NDA (non-disclosure Agreement) may be required. Please note, priority will be given to existing London User Group members.

Everyone welcome, I look forward to seeing you all, regards, Simon

March Meeting

I hope everyone had a great time! Sorry it was a bit squashed, we'll organize the room a little better next month, see you then.

3DS Max London User Group, Wednesday 2nd March Confirmed!

3DS Max London User Group

Wednesday 2nd March
from 7PM
 

The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A

map

Ben Cowell is the head of 3D at Nexus. Ben’s coming along to show the group their fantastic work on the Honda Jazz advert, using Max and Krakatoa, and some of their other recent work. Of course, you’ll be bringing along some work to show everyone too, won’t you?

Please note the new venue; it was very hard to convince the landlord of a central London pub to give us a space for free. The Plough has a newly refurbished room upstairs with a large screen so I hope it works out, but we need it to be full! So do come along and catch up with everyone after the recent hiatus.

Good News / Bad News

Hello everyone,

Please note there will be no meeting next week for February, I couldn’t arrange a venue unfortunately. Happily though, from Wednesday 2^nd March we have a new permanent home for the evenings at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A. It’s pretty close to the old venue (The Black Horse, which has now closed) five minutes walk from Tottenham Court Road Tube.

Thanks for the encouraging emails, I’m sorry the meetings have been disrupted recently, but we should be back on track in March!

Kind regards, Simon