Past Meetings (2008-2009) - 2007 - 2006
Meeting #28, Monday June 22, 2009
Our April 2009 meeting was canceled due to a scheduling conflict with the training room at Crywolf, and our May 2009 meeting was canceled because it fell on the Memorial Day holiday.
Our June 2009 meeting was dedicated to exploring the recently released modo 401! We viewed a collection of online videos from Brad Peebler and Andy Brown and we discussed the most interesting features and the wealth of new stuff to learn. Hopefully this group experience inspired our members to explore this latest release and share what they learn in future meetings!
Thanks to 8 returning members: Bob, Calvin, Dennis F., Eric, Jeff, Jim, Kevin L. and Terry!
Meeting #27, Monday March 23, 2009
The topic for this meeting was UV mapping techniques. The presentation was in the form of a Q&A session. Members/attendees asked questions and also answered those questions with tips, ideas and short demonstrations.
A most notable moment was when Scott Blinn discovered the "Tear Off" option when moving selected polygons inside the UV space...
Thanks to 10 returning members: Bob, Calvin, Jeff, Jim, Keith, Kevin L., Michael, Paul H., Scott and Terry!
Meeting #26, Monday February 23, 2009
For this meeting we had a quick slide/video presentation highlighting the new modo 401 features that have been publicly revealed so far - followed by a general modo Q&A session.
The questions ended up centered around an interesting project from one of our members - Jim Lennon - who is experimenting with architectural modeling, texturing and lighting using modo...
We focused on modeling questions for this meeting - using the Drill/Stencil function and some general Sub-D box modeling techniques. Everyone got involved and made this an enjoyable experience for all. So we decided to continue this format into our next meeting - focusing next on UV mapping techniques.
Thanks to 7 returning members: Bob, Calvin, Jeff, Jim, Keith, Kevin L. and Terry!
Meeting #25, Monday January 26, 2009
In April of 2007 professional digital arts artist/educator/author and sdmodo member Stephen Burns presented and demonstrated to our group how to import modo 3D models into Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. Now that the new Photoshop CS4 Extended is out, Steven returned to share the latest 3D features with us. Photoshop CS4 Extended now allows you to paint directly on 3D models! Stephen demonstrated this process and stepped through nearly all of the 3D features in CS4. The 3D capabilities really have come a long way since CS3 - and Steven did a fantastic job sharing it with us!
In addition to his extensive professional digital arts career (including the publication of several popular Photoshop Books that include integration of 3D rendered elements), Stephen also provides private and small group training in Photoshop and 3D, and he is the leader of both the San Diego Photoshop User Group and the San Diego LightWave User Group.
A visitor to our group (Bruce) also shared with us an interesting and very versatile device (PivotLok) for physically mounting projects for machining and photography...
Thanks to 10 returning members: Bob, Calvin, Jeff, Jim, Keith, Kevin L., Paul H., Stephen and Terry!
Welcome 2 first-time visitors: Bruce and Richard!
Meeting #24, Monday October 27, 2008
This meeting Jeff Rutan shared techniques for designing Lego models using modo. He demonstrated the design process and showed the actual physical Lego models he has built so far from design plans he generated in modo.
Links to sources for individual Lego pieces:
Official Lego Factory Pick A Brick
for all new pieces,
Unofficial Lego Marketplace Brick Link
for eBay-style buy/sell used pieces, and
The Lego Club House inside Legoland California
in Carlsbad for new pieces by the quarter pound.
Thanks to 6 returning members: Bob, Gardner, Jeff, Kevin L., Mook and Paul H.!
Meeting #23, Monday September 22, 2008
This meeting member Bob Lackey delivered a very well prepared presentation demonstrating what he has learned in recent projects importing DAZ Poser models into modo. He plans to publish the presentation online as PDF files, so when he does we will link from here to this very detailed work that will save many hours for anyone who will try this Poser to modo task. Thanks Bob! 8-)
Thanks to 9 returning members: Bob, Calvin, Dennis F., Glen, Jeff, Keith, Kevin L., Terry and Victor!
Meeting #22, Monday August 25, 2008 - 2nd Anniversary
This meeting marked the second anniversary of our group!
To help us celebrate we had a special guest presenter - Jerry Hambly - Director of Education and Training for Robert McNeel and Associates - makers of Rhino 3D CAD software. Jerry demonstrate the basics of NURBS modeling and many unique and powerful features of Rhino. He also demonstrated a technique for porting sub-d models into CAD NURBS using the T-Splines Rhino plugin.
We had a great turnout of 25, some freebees and prize drawings to help celebrate our anniversary, and we took our annual group photo (our 3 visitors were camera shy and the camera was about half shy of Michael)...
Thanks to 15 returning members: Bob, Brom, Calvin, Dennis B., Gardner, Glen, Jeff, Jeffrey, Keith, Kevin L., Michael, Paul H., Scott, Terry and Tim!
Welcome 6 first-time members: Dennis F., Frank Mitchell, Frank Mutascio, Jack, Kevin B. and Mook!
Thanks for attending to our 3 unnamed visitors!
And BIG thanks to our special guest speaker Jerry!
Meeting #21, Monday July 28, 2008
This meeting Terry Oyama presented highlights from his career as an industrial product designer. Terry has designed a number of successful products over the years - including the original Apple Macintosh Computer enclosure. He has used everything from pencils and paper to traditional manual drafting boards to the latest CAD software - and now some modo in his design work. We also gave us some tips on products and how to port CAD files in to modo for rendering. Thanks Terry for an excellent presentation!
Links to some products Terry recommended:
Okino Computer Graphics PolyTrans and NuGraf 3D file format converters
Ambient Design ArtRage -
a simple, fun and cheap 2D natural media painting application
MecSoft Visual Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software tools
Jeff Rutan also presented some tips on porting modo models out to rapid prototyping and CAD/CAM applications - from experience with his recent product development projects.
We had 12 in attendance and 4 of us went to Applebee's after.
Thanks to returning members: Bob, Calvin, Gardner, Glen, Jeff, Jeffrey, Kevin, Terry and Victor!
Welcome first-time members: Michael, Scott and Shayne from High Moon Studios - driving down from Carlsbad!
Meeting #20, Monday June 23, 2008
This meeting Jeff Rutan shared lessons learned in modo and Photoshop during the building and painting of his Virgin Galactic / SCALED Composites WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) and SpaceShipTwo (SS2) models for the Rutan Aerospace Celebration group project. Many lessons learned were thanks to a half-day one-on-one training session provided by Paul Hartsuyker. These models were featured in a LightWave animation produced by a friend of Jeff's in England - Mark Hennessy-Barrett. The video was shown at the meeting along with some "making of" images and information.
Thanks to returning members: Bob, Jeff, Kevin, Paul H. and Tim!
Welcome to first-time member: Darren!
Meeting #19, Monday May 19, 2008
This meeting member Jeff Rutan demonstrated some of the tricks he was learning while modeling and texturing the interior of his house and its major furnishings. Jeff showed several tips and trick for modeling and UV work in modo as well as preparing UV images using Photoshop and Luxology's ImageSynth. As it turned out, due to a change of date to avoid the Memorial Day Holiday and a scheduling conflict at Crywolf on the new selected date, this meeting was held at Jeff's house. So attendees had the opportunity to compare the presented work to the real thing! ;-)
We also marveled repeatedly over Khalid Muharraqi’s latest amazing work - "The Return of the Great Talon" work in progress thread and demo video...
We had 8 in attendance - a very good turnout for this atypical meeting - on a different day of the month - and a change of location announced only a few days ahead of time.
Thanks to faithful members: Bob, Gardner, Jeff, Jeffrey, Keith, Kevin, Paul H. and Terry!
Meeting #18, Monday April 28, 2008
This meeting member Glen Keith shared some of his industrial design work history and the really cool design work he does now for Aqua Lung using a variety of 2D and 3D tools - primarily Autodesk SketchBook Pro. As a beginner in modo, Glen has consulted with member Paul Hartsuyker to do some 3D work in modo for Aqua Lung. So Glen turned the presentation over to Paul to demonstrate some of that collaboration.
Paul showed how he experimented with various modeling techniques to begin building a swimming mask. He finally settled on spline patch modeling to get the complex curves he needed in a manageable form. Paul shared several useful tips and tricks along the way and helped us all understand some of the ups and downs and ins and outs of spline patch modeling.
This was a very interesting presentation and hopefully the first in a series of "getting to know your fellow members" sessions where individuals share what they do in computer graphics in general and their specific interests in modo.
We had 9 in attendance and 4 of us went to Applebee's after.
Thanks to faithful members: Bob, Calvin, Gardner, Glen, Jeff, Keith, Kevin, Paul H. and Terry!
Crywolf Anniversary Celebration, Saturday March 29, 2008
Jeff Rutan represented our group and presented modo at this Crywolf special event. The emphasis was on demonstrating the incredible performance of the latest Apple Mac Pro computers using modo 301 rendering in comparison to older Mac computers. For the demo we pitted an Early 2008 top-of-the-line 8-core 3.2GHz Intel Mac Pro against a Late 2004 top-of-the-line 2-core 2.5GHz G5 Power Mac. Of course the Mac Pro won at consistently well over 11 times the performance of the Power Mac! A test scene provided by Luxology (shown below) rendered in 9 minutes 15 seconds on the G5 and only 43.6 seconds on the Intel - over 12.7 times faster! WOW! We also demonstrated OpenGL performance differences between the systems - both with high-end graphics cards for their time - Early 2008 nVidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB vs. Late 2004 nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB. Using a scene with over half a million raw polygons all in sub-d The late 2004 card could barely manage 1 frame per second (fps) while the early 2008 card handled 6-8 fps with ease.
Thanks to members Don, Jeff, Kevin and Roger for coming out and helping support this event!
Meeting #17, Monday March 24, 2008
The topic for this meeting was New Features in modo 302. We showed a set of prerecorded Luxology.TV videos from Brad Peebler highlighting some of the most dramatic additions. Paul Hartsuyker (our local modo beta tester) then demonstrated some of these features to us live and he answered some questions from the group about this significant-but-free release from Luxology (free to licensed modo 301 users and due out before the end of this month).
We had 12 in attendance and 6 of us went to Applebee's after.
Thanks to 11 returning members: Bob, Calvin, Gardner, George, Glen, Jeff, Jim, Kevin, Paul H., Ray and Terry!
Special thanks to our first-time visitor from Montreal, QC Canada - Les Streeter! 8-)
Meeting #16, Monday February 25, 2008
This meeting Victor Hernandez presented a very interesting workflow using Apple's Shake to composite multiple video layers produced in modo. He explain and demonstrate rendering multiple passes of animation in modo and the ins and outs of compositing those layers using Shake. Victor has done an EXTREMELY impressive amount of work with this with the goal of completing the animation for our San Diego Air & Space Museum group project fly-through video. The compositing concepts apply to other programs - including still image compositing using Photoshop and such programs. So this presentation was educational and inspirational to us all - even if we don't have access to Shake or other video compositing tools.
Thanks Victor for a fine presentation! We had 9 in attendance and 5 of us went to Applebee's after.
Thanks to 9 returning members: Bob, Calvin, Gardner, Glen, Jeff, Keith, Kevin, Paul H. and Victor!
Sub-D Mechanical Modeling Basics Workshop Part 1, Saturday February 9, 2008
A small group of our members (mostly those with a CAD background and just starting to get into modo) met at Jeff Rutan's house for an all-day workshop. The project was box modeling a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. We covered modo setup and configuration issues, bounding box, backdrops, box modeling the rough car body and the tires/wheels. If there is sufficient demand, we will have additional workshops to complete this project and share and learn more about this box modeling technique (just one of many techniques possible in modo).
Thanks for participating in this fun and educational experience: Bob, Glen, Jeff, Terry and Victor!
Meeting #15, Monday January 28, 2008
This meeting Jeff Rutan demonstrated some of the techniques he used in modo to create the vehicle models for the Rainy Day Race group animation project.
You can see Jeff's work in progress (WIP) for this project in these forum threads: Jack's Charger, Molly's Bugatti, Theo's Mustang and Molly's Princess Carriage.
We also discussed our new Rutan Aerospace Celebration group project and showed the new Virgin Galactic WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipTwo animated video.
It was ironic that it was a very rainy day in San Diego for a "Rainy Day Race" presentaiton - but we had a good time with 11 in attendance and 5 of us went to Applebee's after.
Thanks to 10 returning members: Calvin, Gardner, Glen, Jeff, Jeffrey, Kevin, Musa, Paul H., Terry and Victor!
Welcome first-time member: Jim!