Lucky 7 Tour

This past Monday the Triscari producers, my wife and I got to sit in on an Alias users group meeting held in Rockville, MD that was hosting the Lucky 7 tour. Not being much of a 3D artist myself, I still was able to piece together enough to know what they were talking about thanks to Dan's random rants about Maya. Some of the coolest products technology has ever dished out (in my opinion) were demoed before our very eyes. The Sensable Phantom haptic device as well as the newest Wacom Cintiq tablet.

Dan and I actually got to use the Sensable Phantom. Oooh man. This thing looked like a pen attached to a robotic arm that sits on your physical desktop next to your monitors. You open up Maya or their custom 3D modeling software "Clay Tools" and sculpt your model with this pen. You move it around in 3 dimensions (X, Y & Z) at the same time and when you hit the surface of the model your pen stops giving you the illusion that your actually touching the model! I ran the pen over the models teeth and it was bumpy I could even go around the back of the head and feel what I couldn't see! It was amazing.

The Cintiq was in another world of amazing all of it's own. We've all seen these tablets before where you can draw on it's monitor and it shows up in Photoshop or whatever. But this one was huge, pressure sensitive and check this out: a guy in the audience raised his hand and asked if it could sense through paper. The host said "What's that you have there in your hand?" (It was a notepad) "..Let me see that" This guy took the notepad, (probably half an inch thick) placed it on the Cintiq and drew over top of the notebook and it showed up on the projected image we were watching! That impressed me.

All in all it was a great time for everyone even Lindsey! I will definitely try to attend more of these events in the future.