Skyrim Mod Team Looking For Concept Artist

If anyone knows of a concept artist who'd be interested in helping out on a Skyrim mod please let me know. Unpaid but potential for a percentage of contest winnings. Primarily fantasy weapon and armor designs with the possibility of character work.

Webinar with ZBrush Guru Ryan Kingslien

Recently Image Metrics hosted a facial sculpting and anatomy webinar with ZBrush Workshops founder, Ryan Kingslien. Ryan is one of the industry's most sought after artists and it was a pleasure to hear his take on how to tackle learning facial anatomy.  He has even recently started a new class on his website based on the content of the webinar.  Check out the video below.

Sculpting The Face - Anatomy & Form

You can find videos of some of the other webinars we've done at Image Metrics in the right-hand side column.

Webinars & Videos

Script Swell now has a widget with links to the webinars and tutorial videos I've been working on the last couple of months. So far they are all in the realm of facial animation and rigging, along with my Faceware demo from GDC this year. As I make more videos I'll keep the links updated. The links take you to YouTube, though you can also find them all on Vimeo if that is your preferred site.

E3 Expo 2011 - June 7-9 - Los Angeles

The 2011 E3 Expo begins tomorrow in LA! It's always a fun and semi-relaxing expo for us. Although we have our fair share of meetings and biz-dev going on, for the most part we spend a lot of the time actually enjoying the event and getting to see all of the new games! Usually we're stuck in a meeting room all day doing stuff...not this time! This week we'll be out and about enjoying the talks, trailers, videos, events, etc.

I'm really excited to see some of the new trailers and get up to speed on this year's releases. I work too much and haven't really been paying any attention to gaming news. That's part of the irony of the gaming industry I suppose. It's a bad habit and something we should all strive to avoid. :)

Hit me up if you'll be in town for the expo. Plenty of parties and cool stuff going on. Hope to see some of you guys here.

In some other un-related news, I suck at updating the blog. I'll try to fix that.

Facial Rigging Webinar - Balancing Quality and Control - Part I

I'm doing a free facial rigging webinar next Monday on April 4th from 2-3pm PST as a part of Image Metrics' Faceware 3.0 Weekly Webinar series.

"Facial Rigging - Balancing Quality and Control"

It's a three part session that will eventually lead to an attempt to answer the common question, "What's the best way to build a facial rig?".

This coming webinar will start us off with a discussion on the most common rig types I see in both the game-space as well as film and commercial, what our experiences have been with them in both quality and usability, and issues we've had to deal with in production using these different types of assets. We'll go over what types of rigs tend to work best for different types of productions. I'll be discussing the most common things that character riggers tend to leave out or don't polish enough when building facial rigs. I'll also answer some common questions regarding joint placement, use of blendshapes and curve-based rigs, and skinning techniques.

For more info, visit the IM forums.

Hope to you see everyone there!

MEL/MAXScript Tutorial Requests

I've been wanting to write another MEL and/or MAXScript tutorial lately, but I'm not sure yet what topic(s) I want to cover. There's plenty of MEL commands and techniques and other stuff I could do but I figured I'd put out a call and see if anyone had some specific requests. Leave a comment if you have an idea for a tutorial that you'd like to see.

Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2011

Hey Scriptahs! Apologies for the lack of updates lately. I started a new job in December and with the holidays and such it's been a busy, busy couple of months. I did get to take another trip to Scotland though to visit a client last week and I'll be all over North America this year, including being in San Francisco for GDC.


Nick Ramsay and I will be doing a Live FACEWARE™ demo at GDC on Thursday (3/3) at 10:30am (Room 309, South Hall). Image Metrics' facial animation software will soon be released to the public and we'll be showing you what it does and how to use it.

There is also a technical artist meet-up brewing (looking like Wednesday evening). Seth Gibson is organizing. For more details check out this thread at TAO. (http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1303)

There are plenty of technical artist sessions at GDC this year, it should be great fun. If you'll be at the conference leave a comment below., maybe we can meet up and grab a beer!