Stephen Silver was hired by Warner Brothers Television Animation as a character designer and has been working in the animation industry for the past 15 years. He designed hit shows such as Disney's Kim Possible, Nickelodeon's Danny Phantom, and many more. In this class, he will talk about how he launched his career in character designs for animated TV series and share his experiences and view of the industry. Stephen will also discuss the importance of practice, persistence, patience, passion, and concentration. After this class, you will be able to understand how drawing communicates, what steps you should take in order to succeed in the work you do, identify industry standards for artists in the entertainment industry, and discover how to find your true passion.

This class covers the basics of the SketchBook Pro desktop application. You will learn how to create painterly effects that mimic real mediums and textures. We teach these techniques through the lens of character creation and creature design.

This class is a case-study presentation about the use of Maya software to produce a 3D-animated TV pilot for the Brazilian market with almost no money. Although Maya is usually thought of as the software of choice of big Hollywood studios, it can also be very effective in a low-budget context. The TV pilot used as a case study, "Dragao de Aco” (Steel Dragon), was produced with a grant from the Brazilian government in 2017–2018. It is a 22-minute, 3D-animated TV pilot with anime-inspired visuals.

In this class, the speaker will share the Fusion 360 free-form modeling tips and tricks that were used to model the Ironman Suit and the Ironman Armor: Mark XLIV—HulkBuster. The process of making these suits was presented at Autodesk University 2017 and 2018. These two models were also posted on the Fusion 360 Gallery: (https://gallery.autodesk.com/projects/110798/ironman-suit), and (https://gallery.autodesk.com/projects/120141/iron-man-armor-mark-xliv—-hulkbuster)

This class covers the basics of the SketchBook Pro painting and drawing software for desktop computers. You will learn how to create painterly effects that mimic real mediums and textures, and we will teach these techniques through the lens of character creation and creature design.

This class will cover the basics of the SketchBook Pro painting and drawing software for desktop computers. Learn how to create painterly effects that mimic real mediums and textures. Learn about the new brushes in SketchBook Pro software and how to customize them to create your own. Techniques are taught through the lens of character creation and creature design.

Maya software has recently added some significant new tools for character rigging and animation. These include Offset Parent Matrix, which creates an entirely new way to think about rigging characters. Understand how this feature works and how it can simplify rigs to make them both faster and easier to understand. In addition, new utility nodes such as UV Pin, Proximity Pin, and Rivet can help accelerate facial animation and other skinning tasks. Learn how to use these tools to create better rigs for your characters. Animation features include a brief tour of the new Maya Motion Library, along with a number of animation productivity enhancements, which can speed the animation process.

Fusion 360 software is a powerful CAD software system, and one of its most powerful capabilities is the Autodesk Rendering environment. This class will cover how to achieve impressive, photo-realistic renderings. Topics will include everything from basic layout and composition to best practices for using materials, lighting, and environment effects. While this class will focus on examples of product design within Fusion 360 software’s rendering environment, the ideas described can be applied to any rendering situation and any rendering program. Compelling renderings are a key tool for successful storytelling of designs and concepts to a wide audience. This class will help you achieve rendering awesomeness.

This class will present a fast, easy-to-use workflow for creating great-looking textures using Maya software and Substance Painter. This hands-on class has the indie artist and 3D generalist in mind, instead of the big company with an army of specialized artists. Substance Painter has become the industry standard tool for creating textures for games and films, but it's a very complex and daunting software, and its integration with Maya is not always straightforward. This class will cut to the chase and show you how to prepare your model in Maya, set your materials, export, procedurally create the texture in Substance Painter, and then—finally—bring it all back to Maya and render beautifully with Arnold.

Project Sugarhill is a technical preview of virtual reality (VR) conceptual design tools enabling artists and designers to start their creative process directly in 3D. Using simple curve and surface tools, designers can explore form and shape while being fully immersed alongside their design. This introductory class will demonstrate how to use the VR controllers for creation and manipulation of geometry, and how the various creation tools work. Other topics will include how planar and radial symmetry speed up the creative process, how reference images and geometry can be imported to help with the creation of designs, and how to change the color of geometry. Lastly, you will learn how to move geometry from Project Sugarhill to Alias AutoStudio and other 3D software packages.

This class will cover the speaker’s experience in production of monumental sculptures with powerful technologies. We will find out what benefits 3D modeling, animation, simulations, and 3D printing provide to shape creation of the new era, and how advanced visual effects technologies can improve production of classical sculptures. We will show you several examples of actual projects and discuss the future of sculpture.

Join us for a bite of cinematic innovation as David Vickery, Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, shares how their team brought dinosaurs back to life in this summer’s blockbuster film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. This session showcases the combined efforts of the ILM creature effects and visual effects teams and how they used data and leading-edge technology to build the real SFX models to breathe life into the dinosaurs.

A modern VFX (visual effects) rendering pipeline is made up of many materials with detailed descriptions called looks. Looks need to be passed across different software products without loss of fidelity. Current workflows involve duplication across complex pipeline tasks that are hard and laborious to maintain. Arnold software lets you author asset looks in any supported software and then reuse the same looks in another software using the Arnold data format, which is fully extensible. Arnold furthers this approach by capitalizing on open-source back ends like MaterialX and USD, enabling users to build a very flexible, reusable, and connected pipeline. Arnold users can take advantage of this interoperability right out of the box. The data is always live, enabling users to make alterations (major or minor) at any point in the pipeline. In this talk, you will learn about setting up your pipeline to capitalize on reusability of looks. You will also see examples of taking your asset looks through different software.

The media and entertainment industry is faced with increased demand for high-quality visual effects—and shrinking production schedules and budget. Studios need to provide graphics applications for employees and freelancers from any location, foster collaboration, and minimize IT and real estate costs, while ensuring that IP is secure. To provide a native workstation-like experience for artists, companies are looking toward virtual desktop infrastructure powered by NVIDIA virtual GPU technology and Teradici cloud-access software. Learn how two leading visual effects and animation studios are meeting the demands of artists performing computer animation and modeling on Maya software from anywhere, while maintaining a high-quality user experience. See how you can use the latest NVIDIA RTX technology that lets Arnold boost performance for interactive rendering as compared to rendering with CPU only, along with the added security of Teradici PCoIP protocol.

What is the relationship between passion, vocation, and profession? In this talk, Armando Gomez, a multimedia director with the innovative international multimedia studio Moment Factory, shares his approach to creating spatially dynamic experiences. Through pioneering, interdisciplinary methods, Moment Factory tells visual stories in collective spaces, enhancing their unique toolbox of technologies by working in various forms of entertainment. The studio’s large-scale projects require complex workflow and continual interchange between different talents and skill sets. From illuminating the Jacques Cartier Bridge using real-time social media data to creating generative content for a Madonna stadium tour, Armando channels his training in music, architecture, and design into every exciting project. Join us for a discussion of new media design, and learn how Autodesk products used by Moment Factory, such as 3ds Max, Maya, and AutoCAD, are shaping exciting changes in the industry.

BIM (Building Information Modeling) is great for large commercial projects with conventional geometry, but what about modeling an architectural Mayan ruins site that's been excavated, or modeling themed columns with adjacent rockwork, or pulling quantities for a mountain? These are some of the challenges we faced when considering Revit software for our theme park projects. Come and listen as we share the good, the bad, and the ugly of our lessons learned when taking on these unconventional projects, and how we overcame the problems. This is the story of a firm's quest to design a Mayan theme park in Revit, and how that firm used Revit to set in motion best practices for all its subsequent theme park projects.

Get familiar and up-skilled with architectural metalwork detailing using Advance Steel. In this hands-on lab you will learn how to detail a balcony unit complete with custom user sections and glazed panels. I will show all the tools in Advance Steel Revit that can be utilised for architectural metalwork detailing. As part of the lab, we will create all the required fabrication drawings and bill of materials. I will also share my tips and tricks about architectural detailing to help you produce your fabrication details