This year again, I attended the FITA 08. FITA stands for Forum International des Technologies de l'Animation, International Forum of Animation Technologies in english. It's one of the rare events of the small town of Angoulême, really. That's how they do it, nothing happens the rest of the year (the streets are dead at 12 on the week end...), and suddenly we have those big international events. You may not know it but it quite important though: people come from all over the world (USA, Japan, Europe), talks are given by famous people of the industry (Paul Debevec, Jordan Mechner, Bill Plympton, Richard Williams, etc).There are so many things to see and so many people to talk to, that these three days go way too fast. Plus we always have a lot of work to do at the same time on our projects.
I couldn't attend today's talks because of the work, but here are my big moments of yesterday:
- Jordan Mechner talked about the convergence of medias (internet, video games, books, films) through the example of the Prince of Persia franchise adaptations
- Emmanuel Laurent from Allegorithmic, a french company of experts in procedural texture showed us their technology. I already new that it would be very impressive, but it was really amazing. Their tool MapZone allows to draw textures that you would swear need SVG or bitmap parts to be achieved, but they do it fully procedural. Just go visit their website and watch their demos (Allegorithmic Demos) and checkout what kind of level of UT3 they can build with only 270Ko of data...
- David Barton and Emily O'Brien from Image Metrics: do you know the Emily project? Watch the video at Emily Project if you don't. It was a more detailed making of the project that what you can see on the net.
- Allegorithmic again, master class: "How to create a non-linear work pipeline". That gave us lots of clues about how to manage our project, how to organize team work, and we saw how tools like Zbrush or MapZone allow to build non-linear pipelines (for example: people can start working on what you've done even if it's not finished). Very inspiring.
I wish I could have gone to every talk...