Survived 3december Austin and new projects

While this years Austin 3December event was a little smaller turnout the actual event was amazing. Like last year I was responsible for getting the speakers lined up, scheduling and Emceeing the live event (we ended on time so that was good). All the presenters did a fantastic job and the audience participation was really up, lots of good questions.

Also we had great prizes to give away from Autodesk like Mudbox and sketchbook pro. Mixamo a new company in the mocap space has some really cool web based Human Ik retargeting tool for retargeting their moves on to your skeleton...they gave away 5 free moves for download. Rigging Dojo(my new company) gave away a free rigging review/critique session as well as a copy of the Animator toolkit for Motionbuilder.

In case you don't know there is a very active Autodesk user group in Austin, the AAUGA http://3daustin.org/ and we meet the last Wednesday of every month. So bring a friend, spread the word and get active in your local community.


With that out of the way, the other big news (you might have read on other sites by now) is

I have decided to co-found a new online education project especially for character artists wanting to learn more about character setup, scripting etc... with two great guys, Chad Moore and Josh Carey.

http://www.riggingdojo.com/

You can find out more at the site, so I won't bore you with that. (We are still in beta but it looks like we are on track for our first full class early next year.)

I did want to talk a bit about how this all happened. First was that last few years two of my friends and I separately were all talking but not with each other about having a really hard time finding good character technical artists and talk of training and mentoring and schools came up...well I said "hey I we are all talking about this separately, lets join forces" and then here we are.

And to be fair, as we were working on the details a few things happened. One some other amazingly talented people had the same idea and http://www.td-college.com/ was born and kind of kicked the wind out of us for a bit. After talking it over we re focused on what our original goal was; Wanting help fix the disconnect happening for people that read the rigging books and post questions on forums and watching all the video training but were still struggling, and create a place for them to get real guidance and production based training no matter what their experience level. The other issue was the huge number of people needing help learning MotionBuilder and dealing with pipeline and character rigging issues that adding motion capture to your workflow brings.

So if your a reader of the Inspired rigging books or have watched all the amazing Jason Schleifer masterclasses or your working in production all ready but want to learn more or are in school learning modeling and want to see it ready to be brought to life (yes we are a bit like DR. Frankenstein) or are struggling with motion capture and MotionBuilder, then come over to the Rigging Dojo site and see if it is right for you and let us know what you think.

Brad