The apparatus is very interesting to see, the holographic effect is gripping, and the Wiimote manipulation is rather amusing; however, the display flickers and quickly causes a headache (around 30 fps). A brief note, it’s difficult to capture in a photo!

You could also find a project on the interactivity of man and machine via a 3D character who detected your presence and followed you with its eyes. Combined with IA vocals, you can easily imagine the potential “man-machine relation.”

The professional exhibitors portion was a small disappointment as well. As there were few stalls, you could see everything in 10 minutes. But the advantage was added intimacy; therefore, each person was left with time to chat with the participants.

However, certain stalls outshine others. Microsoft, always has a remarkable presence (two stands on the Xbox 360... alright, let’s get serious again!) and above all Side Effect, who was there to show Houdini (http://www.sidefx.com/), a participant that I haven’t seen in other expositions, and finally the Qoobee stall where Softimage was present (http://www.softimage.com) and Pixologic (http://www.pixologic.eu/). First off, it’s always such a pleasure to see XSI evolving in a direction that should inspire others (follow my eyes!). Second, the demos demonstrating the power of Zbrusch always attract so many people (but on the point my opinion is biased!).

A demonstration of Zbrush on a Cintiq 12” by Wacom

To get back to Softimage, they organized a User Group Meeting Monday night where they presented ICE, a new system allowing the creation of super-advanced scripts that only utilize nodes with connections to components and behaviors supplied in the software without writing a single line of code. The tool was dreamed up for graphic artists who aren’t coders! I don’t have the rights to publish the photos, but don’t hesitate to Google it!

In short, the conferences were the strong point of the exposition: almost all the editors and principle actors of the world of graphic art and, most of all, 3D art were there! Check out the agenda (http://www.fmx.de/E.211.html) of conferences if you want to make yourself dizzy!That led to a workshop on some of the finer technical points, like the joint use of 3DSMax with the pass rendering control in Combustion, to betas like the new VRay, which proposes the only effect in the world that simulates real time (actually, Modo did the same thing, but it’s Modo, not 3DSMax!), and to advances in research like the creation of a 3D face based on amazing computations (once more P. Debevec)