Today we start our adventure with a business breakfast with the guys from NPower Software. Besides enjoying the Breakfast Buffet, I had the opportunity to hear some of their future plans for translating data for 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design.
 

From there it was off to the Intel booth where I was demonstrating 3ds Max Design and Autodesk Showcase on an HP Z800. You guys, seriously, 12 dual core i7 processors and 14 megs of ram. I did everything I could to get one sent to my office for “evaluation” purposes. Even as I tell it here, I’m not buying my request either. Check out 24 cpu’s during a Final Gather calculation.
 

Thanks to everyone for sitting through my theater demonstration, slicing through a typical Design Viz scenario.

From there I had to run to the 3ds Max 20th Anniversary Press luncheon. A few minutes late, I walked in on Ken “Maxed Out” Pimentel giving the Press Core a quick history of 3ds max and a quick look at some of the plans to keep 3ds max going for the next 20 years. He was followed by Tim Miller from Blur Studios. Tim has been passionate about using 3ds max in his pipe line for many years. It was truly inspiring to see their journey to becoming one of the premier cinematic house’s on the planet. Watch for us to post some interviews with Tim as a part of the celebration coming soon.

After the luncheon, it was my turn to “Meet the Press”. I had a chance to talk with Nancy Johnson from Cadalyst Magazine. I think we spent more time talking about how important Cadalyst was to me as a former Cad Manager than we did talking about Autodesk initiatives. If you haven’t read Cadalyst in a while, time to check it out again.

From there, it was another run across the L.A. Convention Center to attend Ken and Shane’s Beta discussion. Here I met people who use 3ds max to create assets for feature films like Avatar, epic video games and of course Design Visualizations. We had A LOT to talk about, but as always Ken and Shane are putting together another great story.
 

Of course that meeting ran long so we were a little (very) late to dinner with the folks from Turbosquid. We talked about a number of topics and I couldn’t help but tease them about a 45,000 dollar model available on the site. We agreed that the vast majority of the models are affordable and hey, an artist can dream right?
 

So what do you think? And that was just the first official day of the conference.