Bill Bottorff
Austin Business Computers, Inc.
bbott@ausbcomp.com
512-328-4747
Everybody, this is a reminder that our monthly meeting of the Austin
3d Users Group. Our meetings are on the Last Wednesday of the month, which
is next week, not today! Another more detailed announcement will follow
next week.
Our meeting next week will be a preview of the new 3ds Max 7 from Discreet.
For most of you this will be your first opportunity to see up close what
this new version brings to your desktop. Discreet will have technical and
marketing people at our meeting to show the new release and to tell what
is new and important about it. Be sure to mark your calendar for next Wednesday
night.
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.
Meeting September Austin 3d Users Group
Everybody,
first let thank all of the people who contributed to an exceptionally good
meeting on Wed. night last. To ITT who supplied the giant multimedia room
and equipment. To BOXX computers who brought their new GO BOXX so we could
show our members work.
To our Show and Tellers, credits as follows:
Ken Thomson showed his reel with Battlestar Galacta et al
Student work (not in order)
Chris Vela - space ship
Craig Perkins -the devil
Josh Jensen - light saber battle with the robots
James Shipman - the worm hole and man juggling
DaveNash - the funny Blorb movie at the end
To Ruben Garza for his demo showing how quick and easy it is to develop
Max Scripts to increase your productivity.
To Discreet for sending Kelcey Privett to do a knock-out presentation of
some of the new features of 3ds Max 7.
For those of you who missed it, Kelcey took a very detailed monkey hand,
with veins and wrinkles and bumps, made up of a 30,000 polygons and simplified
it down to about 900 polygons. She used a new feature to simply brush away
the polys from some areas and leave polys where needed for detail around
the fingernails etc. Then she used the new Normal Mapping function to automatically
produce a texture map that preserves bumps in 3d, projects the map onto
the lo-poly hand that is now visually indistinguishable from the hi-poly
hand.
A lively discussion continued throughout the presentation along with cheers
and hurrahs for each new feature.