Bill Bottorff
Austin Business Computers, Inc.
bbott@ausbcomp.com
512-328-4747
Everyone, here is a summary of last weeks meeting and some infomation about our next two meetings.
The presentations started with Josh Squires' students from ITT
who show their first projects and who also expressed their
interest in participating as interns in new projects. James Shipman
showed his work along with Dave Nash
and Geobonni Ramirez Dave is aiming at the works of 30 second commercials
and Geobonni showed some
nice concept work for a spaceship/space station envirionment for a proposed
game.
Kevin Minke, Digital Media Design Instructor, Texas State Technical
College Waco, Texas (254)867-3346 kevin.minke@tstc.edu brought two of his
students from TSTC Waco's Virtual Reality Program were Brian McLeland
and Evan Gill. A former TSTC student, Patrick Beyers, who
now has his own business, The
Vision Company showed some of the Architectrual Rendering
he has been doing for clients in Waco.
Randy Polk (Metaman
Productions) started the main presentation with a set of slides
defining the difference between concept art and the art developed for the
project and showed how one could flow into the other. He stressed the ART
component of the concept art, how the look and feel could be illustrated
using traditional methods and then used by importing into Max to develop
models and environments.
Randy showed how his company MetaMan developed the concept and proposal
for a game based training system to be used to train workers on offshore
drilling platforms. Everyone grimmaced when one of the trainees walked into
the tail rotor of a helicopter and lost an arm. I'm sure he'll remember
that lesson!
John Funk present his developmental work on his new proposed television
series and briefed the audiance on his approach to character development
and preparing a first episode with real actors.
Gary Walker (TexFX) (Austin
Business Journal article) then shared the building of the "Trailer"
for High Moon a soon to be filmed (as finding becomes available) Austin
Werewolf Western. The trailer was all animatic based on story boards with
5 seconds of action built with Combustion. Pretty impressive!
Everybody, our January 26 meeting will kick off a series of three meetings
that will have the general theme of: "Starting Up". They will
feature "start up" artwork.
We have had several requests from members for information on how to start
up new projects, both art work and financial. We will concentrate on showing
the art work we will talk about the other facets including financial.
The January meeting will be at ITT Tech Center (see map below) and Joshua
Squires of ITT will have lots of his students in attendance. His students
are Interns-In-Waiting ready to sign up for duty. Also, Bob McGoldrick of
ACC has students ready for duty as interns.
Johnathon Vought is organizing these meetings which will be held January
26, February 23 and March 30. The January meeting will show small startup
projects and will feature lots of images and art from our membership. If
you have material you would like to show from your projects please contact
Johnathon at 512-636-9269 or: Jonathan Vought <jvought@austin.rr.com>
We would like to feature mid sized projects at the February meeting. Contact
Johnathon Vought if you would like to be a presenter.
For the March 30 meeting we have signed up Gary Gaber who spent 10 years
at Lucas Arts.
Six years as an artist and then as a project leader. Gary will share the
startup art from some of his projects so everyone will see how the big boys
do it.
Location:
The meeting will be held at ITT Technical Institute They have a large classroom
that will accommodate what we expect to be a fairly large crowd of over
a hundred guests. Soft drinks and snacks will be available.
Josh Squires, Faculty Chair at ITT and director of Visual Communications
has made the arrangements for this meeting and we greatly appreciate his
enthusiastic help Sharon Mieher, head of Career Services is our other contact.
The location is:
6330 Highway 290 East, Suite 150
Austin, TX 78723
(512) 467-6800 or Toll Free (800) 431-0677
This is at I35 and 290 East as show below.