Media & Entertainment at AU 2025

Explore the fundamentals of creating expressive facial animation in Maya with Alex Ferreira Simoes, Founder of Animation Flow. From understanding key facial shapes to enhancing emotions with nuanced details, he’ll break down essential techniques that bring characters to life. He’ll also discuss how strong posing, clear silhouettes, and exaggeration contribute to readability and charm, ensuring that every expression feels intentional and engaging. 

Open Shading Language (OSL) in 3ds Max empowers artists to craft custom procedural materials, enabling intricate control over textures and surface properties. However, developing or altering OSL shaders traditionally demands a solid grasp of scripting and shader logic. In this session, learn how to use AI tools to assist in the creation of OSL shaders. Discover how to generate shader code using natural language prompts, refine scripts, and seamlessly integrate them within 3ds Max projects.

Quickly develop and tweak essential game animations such as idle, walk, run, jump, and die. CAT also supports integration with custom motion data, making it ideal for both original content creation and iteration. Whether you're a game developer or an educator working with students, CAT empowers you to produce polished, expressive animations full of personality and emotion. In this session, we’ll walk through the fundamentals, from rigging a mesh to exporting animation-ready FBX files.

This case study will provide a complete overview of the motion picture workflow process, using various Autodesk tools to facilitate production from submitted script to final delivery of a film. Using Twisted Pictures' recent feature "Trust," Post Production Supervisor Kevin O'Neill will examine the process of guiding the film from preproduction through production and post production and to the final delivery of all materials to the distributor.