Siggraph 02 After a long, but inexpensive flight, I arrived in San Antonio for the third time in my life. I stayed at the historic Menger hotel, right adjacent to the Alamo and the Rivercenter. They ran out of rooms and decided to put me up in their presidential suite. A suite larger than my house used to be. It was to last just for a night, but they ended up keeping me where I was for my three-night stay. Tuesday morning saw me wandering around the very nice convention center, looking vainly for the Newtek shuttle to the college. many heard of it, but no one knew where. By the time the show finally opened it was too late. Siggraph 2002, beyond doubt, was the smallest Siggraph in my recollection, and I've been going to Siggraphs for a good number of years. I hear that it was simply a reflection of the economic circumstances, as well as the, at least for the international traveler, kind of out-of-the-way situation of S.A. Maybe so. Still, the crowds were reasonably good and the floor and booths fairly busy. While I am viewing most of this from the Lightwave perspective, it seems that good information and good networking was being accomplished. The good, bad and maybe even ugly. The heat and humidity was kind of ugly, but bearable. The fact that the Siggraph organizers placed the Newtek and the Maya booths face to face was definitely bad, in my opion, though, most of the time, it did not turn into the speaker volume shoot-out, it happened. I fou8nd the Maya booth to be among the louder ones. Siggraph should know better than to do thart. Back to back would be fine. Face to face, impossible. Something for the Newtek people to watch for, next time around. While the Newtek demoing was good, but not as energetic as I have seen it, I missed that young, long-haired, smoking, fast-burner, who demoed with great humor and in record time and kept the audience truly and constantly entertained (could that have been Dave Tracy? I forget. Last I saw this guy was at the final 3D Expo in San Jose). The stuff on the plasma screens was awesome and should have had more time to run throughout the day. Also, 8 or 10 chairs are simply not enough. Even in San Antonio, where they maybe expected smaller crowds. Plenty of good seating, in itself, is a great crowd-pleaser on any expo floor. Lastly, but that's just my own take on this, there should be two demo areas screens with a larger screen in-between. One should run back to baack LW demos and the other be dedicated to Toaster. The middle screen should run all the flashy demo reels non-stop, there are a ton of them for LW as we all know, as eye-candy. I have to agree with what I just read on the Newtek Forum. When I switched to LW, for the longest time I was actually going between the two booths at the 3D Expo in San Jose, talking to the Max and LW people, watching great demos and cool eye-candy at both. LW, by virtue of their dynamic demoing and great demo-reels won me over, considering a slight bias due to Babylon 5, that already existed. But it was the thick and yelling crowds, something that I saw heard only at some of the other booths at this Siggraph, that ultimately won me over, in spite of Max's brand-new (at that time) fully user configurable interface. At the next Siggraph in LA, I think it was, a good representation of Foundation Imaging and Roughneck references cinched it. Compared to those shows, this one was pale and tedious. Marketing is an art, as much as a science, and demoing done by big studio people and showmen of the likes of Mojo and Brad (where was he?) woo the crowds. As I said, networking was great and lots of good communication took place. Classes at the college, presented by Newtek, were also good, and once the schedules were posted, nicely attended and definitely superbly tought. I have long since quit running around the shows to collect useless plastic trinkets, though occasionally I do get tempted. The Intel cube was kind of cool. Slam it and it lights up with an eerie blue light. Slam it again and it turns off. Cool. Also, Nvidea peppermints were most welcome. I do gather CDs, where I find them useful. Interesting to me was that there was no LW demo at the Intel booth, even though LW is P4 optimized, something that Intel should have appreciated, in my never too humble opinion. AMD, on the other hand did, as did HP and some others. It was nice to see Renderosity there, selling their new magazine. ILM was handing out postcards from E2. Darkling Simulations had their own little organizational slips and I let them know about it. That excellent shader program (link under the picture) available for LW as well as others, now has the LW Simbiont available as a free download. It is also on the Darktree 2.1 CD. Knowing that, my complaint was, why the hell did you not distribute the LW Simbiont from the Newtek booth? They were afraid to ask, fearing that Newtek, apparently like others, would not look kindly on third-party plug-in suppliers. They're young and I gave them a good talking to. Well, it was worse, they didn't even bring any LW Simbiont CDs, and had only the Max Simbiont disk, also free as of right now, available. Here and at other occasions I put my MS in business to good use, I believe. Once, I found myself in a nice long chat with a very pleasant guy, bemoaning the dreadful and frustrating difficulties of character rigging. Before we parted, he gave me his card. I didn't look at it until I got home. I was Christopher Stewart, the steward of Flay.com. He mentioned, and I either forgot or didn't find time to pursue it, that Hash is developing an auto-rigging program that will be made available for LW as well. That is one demo I really didn't want to miss. I needed one more day at this expo. In a thumbnail: Flashiest booth: discreet - black light all over, very cool. Flashiest handout: discreet - a black cardboard box with foam embedded martini glasses inside. Best floor party: discreet - open bar and h'ors deuvres for the Maxxers Most compassionate handout: ATI - they had cute black and red attired water vixens hand out free water bottles, labeled ATI to all who wanted them Repeat visits were encouraged. It was most welcome in the heat of SA Lots of good parties were as usual all over the place. Most with open bars and catered food. Yes, there was a Newtek party and I went, had my one allotted free drink, watched a couple of kids break-dance, and then wandered off. Oh, I love magazines as a handout and Animation Magazine, CGW, and now Newtekpro were all there, giving their current issues away, but my heart sank when I saw tons of Newtekpro and no Keyframe magazines. In fact, that was noticed all around. Finally, after class, Lee Stranahan showed up with a box of them, though, curiously, there were not in evidence at the Newtek booth. It is the LW banner publication, though, admittedly, not as all-encompassing Newtek oriented as Newtekpro. Finally, there were the Wavy Awards. Marred only by low resolution, eye-aching projection, they were still a wonderful event, made special by presentations by Mojo, the MC, and Meni, as well as by John Davis, the creator of Jimmy Neutron. Stange was the final award. It was left up to the audience, only as a surprise, they read them back to us in the reverse order, which I believe, resulted in the unexpected outcome. We were all a little shocked by that. Also, a little water or refreshment might have been appropriate for the long and late-running event, and I am expressing what I've heard all around me, but it was a nice event after all. It can only get better in future. On the last day there I mainly managed to get to the Newtek office, a large hanger-type, single-level, industrial building, where I was once more reminded that one of that biggest benefits of having thrown my lot in with LW are the people behind the scene. A great bunch of employees who seem happy as well as helpful which in turn reflects well on the owner/founder, Tim Jenison. They managed to do a "hot dongle swap" for me in the little time I had available, because of a rather rushed bus schedule, and let me tell you, that USB dongle is shot-hot. I positively love it. A most elegant solution. The fact that we got it all done was in my opinion to the credit of the people who work there. I even managed to get through part of the tour and met some of the marketing and tech support people, in addition to the customer support reps. So, summing it up, I'd go again and do it better next time around, but that's probably true for most of us, Newtek included. I'm very much looking forward to San Diego in 03. I may even manage to get better pictures. Oh, I did find something out, unrelated to any LW development. At one time I was going up on the escalator to the upper level. The only other person on the stairs that time was a Japanese girl in a red Scottish-patterned miniskirt, wearing a little red tam to go with it. I admit, I was looking up, but not until she tripped, was I made aware that thongs are fashionable in Japan as well.