Hi everyone! Well it's time for me to pack my bags again and hit the road. This time it's off to Vancouver for a free, two-hour Softimage 2010 demonstration. The demo will take place in the screening room at Rainmakers Studios on December 9th from 6:00PM to 8:00PM! Rainmaker has generously offered up the space with our friends from Annex Pro who are coordinating the event so make sure to thank them all when you see them. I will focus the demo on Softimage of course but I'll also give the Maya fans a little demo of a really slick way of bringing particle effects from Softimage ICE into a Maya scene. It's easy to setup and quite impressive! If you are interested in attending you can register with this easy to remember link:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/event/view?event_id=14078667&siteID=123112&catID=3831701&id=9455141#registrationForm
 

The Vancouver demo will also be my first outing with Dell's new M6500 mobile workstation. It was launched just a couple days ago, but Dell was kind enough to get me a pre-release machine several weeks in advance to get my impressions and make sure Softimage worked properly on it. The verdict? In a word, Wow!
 

Cosmetically the M6500 is similar to the current M6400 model, but the performance under the hood has been massively improved. I was lucky enough to get the "Covet" version of the machine which has a sweet "blood-orange" colored aluminum skin with a stunning edge to edge RGB LED lit display. While the blood-orange color is sexy when its closed, it's the color of the display when its opened that continues to blow me away. Not only can it recreate 100% of the Adobe color gamut but it does so with a brightness and intensity I have never ever seen before... It's really something to behold if you're doing any type of art or graphics work. The M6500 is also the first laptop to use the new Nvidia Quadro 3800M GPU and Intel's mobile Core i7 chip so the performance is just ridiculous. In just about every test I threw at it the laptop is faster than my full-blown, ten month old desk-side workstation. The new Intel Core i7 chips have 4 physical cores but hyper-thread out to 8 which Softimage ICE will of course take full advantage of. And as usual, Nvida ups the bar again with the Quadro 3800M with extremely solid drivers, even on Windows 7... Geez I've written a paragraph about it and I haven't even mentioned it has 16 gigs of RAM, Two 500 gig RAIDed hard drives for a full terabyte of storage, AND a wicked fast 64 gig Mini-PCI SSD card, its just like another hard drive but silly fast. I'm telling you, for 3D or any DCC work, this thing is sweeeet!!
 

Over the years now I have gotten lots of amazing hardware to test and play at Softimage...er Autodesk. Now that I have a blog I'm going to try to share more of that information with you all so hopefully you find it useful when thinking about hardware. One thing a lot of you probably don't know is how much feedback vendors like Dell, HP, Nvidia etc.. take from us when designing products for the 3D DCC market. I have to say I was rather honored when Dell approached me almost a year before the first M6400 was launched to make sure they were on the right path to what our customers wanted in a mobile workstation. I told them I wanted workstation graphics in sexy case, I got aluminum skinned, blood-orange. I wanted crazy storage, I got 16gigs and a RAID... on a laptop!  Early on in I even had little covert dinner with the product designer of the M6400 at a Cheesecake Factory in Redondo Beach where I live. He pulled out some wood mockups to get my opinion on the sleek new orange shell. Very cool indeed. Dell's not the only vendor I work closely with but they obviously care about what our DCC customers need.
 

Another thing many of you probably don't know is usually before hardware is even released all of our products go through a rigorous certification program. I used to have this responsibility when we were Softimage but I've passed that torch to the Autodesk Certification team in Montreal. They have a great group up there who work round the clock testing drivers, reporting bugs to the hardware vendors, everything to make sure all the Autodesk products work properly on "Certified Hardware". I know the certified hardware generally costs more than the consumer counterpart but trust me, there's a lot of good reasons why.
 

If you want to see a video of yours truly with the original M6400 Covet, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chWt8xHaGqw
 

Well that's it for now, hope to see you in Vancouver!!

Oh, Steven Roselle had a little photo shoot talking about the new M6500, I'm sure he'll talk about it on his blog but here's a link anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O2gI97y34A&feature=player_embedded