Delve into initiatives aimed at attracting under-represented talent, normalizing mental health support, and leveraging technology to create a smarter, more robust workforce, in collaboration with industry leaders like Women in Animation.

SYNK is an innovative real-time production toolkit that enables content creators to produce linear and virtual content using the same tools and processes used by big studios with decades of experience in animation. SYNK allows assets from traditional digital content creation software and outputs from game engines to be managed in a single accessible environment through an integrated real-time workflow. SYNK manages the data from the early concept phase all the way to final delivery, enabling output to virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR), cinema, animation, video games, and virtual productions.

Intangible heritage, globally, is under threat from aggressive urbanization and globalization, particularly in developing nations like Vietnam. To safeguard Vietnamese oral traditions, social practices, festive events, and childhood play, the project Play to Preserve the Past uses augmented reality (AR) to undertake a nuanced exploration of creative practice methodologies and considerations for creating immersive AR experiences. Central to this pursuit, the research endeavors to explore the question: How can creative practitioners harness the potentials of AR for seamless transmission of intangible cultural heritage?

As technology continues to evolve, the intersection of 3D design and artificial intelligence (AI) presents exciting opportunities for innovation in content creation. In this session, we'll showcase experimentation with innovative techniques—namely, ComfyUI, ControlNet, and Stable Diffusion—to forge a future pipeline that seamlessly integrates 3D rendering with AI-driven processes. We'll outline a visionary approach toward empowering artists and streamlining the content creation process. By using advanced AI algorithms and data-driven insights, we aspire to give artists greater control over their creations as they enhance their efficiency and creativity while using Autodesk tools, specifically Maya and Arnold software. Our vision for the future pipeline revolves around achieving a seamless transition from 3D design to AI render, while empowering artists with unprecedented control over their creations.

Booleans are a foundational part of content creation, yet it was frowned upon to use traditional polygon booleans in media and entertainment projects. To solve this problem, Autodesk rebuilt their booleans from the ground up within 3ds Max software, creating a new, powerful, and trusted solution in the Boolean Modifier that unlocks exciting new workflows and capabilities. In this session, you'll learn about how and why this new system was created for 3ds Max, which benefits it provides, and how you can use it to its maximum potential in your own work to create amazing content for film and TV, games, XR, or 3D printing projects.

This course aims to educate participants on the innovative integration of machine learning (ML) techniques for deformation approximation within Maya software. Using approximations for (part of) a deformation stack can highly improve interactivity when using complex rigs, and can significantly improve the portability between different applications. It is designed for animators, game developers, VFX artists, and any professional interested in exploring the intersection of ML and 3D animation. This course will explore a demo of a rig with computationally expensive muscle deformations that is reduced to a simple, general, black-box neural network that only requires inputs from the motion system. We'll show the entire setup process in detail. In addition, we'll go over best practices, tips, and limitations to help users get the most out of this tool for their production needs.

In the fast-paced world of product design, there's a universal challenge to stay ahead of trends while efficiently bringing products to market. X-Rite has addressed this with innovative solutions benefiting automotive brands and industrial designers alike. The PANTORA application simplifies digital material creation, offering a standardized platform for storing and sharing complex material data to streamline design workflows. The AxF format ensures compatibility and collaboration across platforms. Join us to explore how PANTORA and AxF can transform your approach to material design and 3D visualization.

While professional artists use high-fidelity animation techniques—pioneered and refined by Autodesk's animation products MotionBuilder, 3ds Max, and Maya—in games, film, and design production pipelines, we ask the questions: What if the user is not as skilled? What if their requirements for control are not as stringent Could we leverage new input modalities to allow untrained creators to record and edit 3D motion in just a few minutes? We'll discuss the speed and utility afforded by animating in a completely new paradigm: One that allows you to express intent with your body, fingers, face, gaze, and speech while enhancing presence, storytelling, and collaboration in real-time immersive experiences, and engaging your spatial understanding, reasoning, and memory to author 3D animations. Come and hear what our panel of experts from Meta Platforms, Workshop XR, Entertainment and Media Solutions as well as Autodesk Research have to say.

Designing a virtual reality (VR) environment for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry depends greatly on content building groups. It leads to designing time consumption for the areas that are not the focus of AEC. Correlating with some level generator aspect of the gaming industry, the expense of environment generation could be reduced with highly varied environment design options. Using the algorithms of procedural generation and VR rendering options, a combination of human-generated assets using Maya software or 3ds Max software and algorithms can render an autogenerated and assorted range of VR environments in Revit software or related AEC tools. We will discuss a study of how procedural generated levels in a Spelunky game can be related to the VR environment generation for AEC, as well as how construction and building design can benefit from existing methodologies in the gaming industry.

Maya is a popular 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and visual effects software in the media and entertainment industry. It provides a powerful API that lets users customize and extend Maya software’s functionalities in order to create efficient workflows and become even more productive. This class is an introduction to Maya customization for customers who would like to create automation and/or improve efficiency when using the product. Some programming experience will be helpful. You will learn about the benefits of customizing Maya and gain the confidence to create your first plug-in using the Python API. Note that you can easily reproduce all concepts in the C++ environment as well.

The advances in integrated graphics technology over the past 3 generations of products have been significant across Intel's Core® and Xeon® family of products. Those in the computer-aided design and media and entertainment space have seen Intel's HD graphics pave their way into the entry-level workstation market with certification of products, such as AutoCAD®, Inventor®, 3ds Max®, and Maya® software, and improved performance with key benchmarks. By the end of this class, you will have an understanding of how AutoCAD products can take advantage of all the capabilities of the workstation platform in a desktop environment. In addition, you will learn how AutoCAD LT® software can let users be more nimble and help with collaboration and synchronization of drawings while on the go on a tablet with Intel Core® technology. The AutoCAD® 360 mobile app can further simplify sharing by providing integration between the office and the field, enabling anytime, anywhere access with a compute continuum offering from Intel.

Usually, 3D studios offer all types of services and then work on the ones that the customer chooses. This is highly inefficient and requires a lot of effort on the customer side. A better strategy would be to divide customers into several types and offer each an appropriate service portfolio. In this lesson, we will discuss the most common types of customers and the service packages they buy. We will also show how to find additional services customers need. These methods help to significantly increase conversion rates and customer lifetime value.

This class will cover the creation of deployments of Autodesk products and updates using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (commonly referred to as SCCM). Microsoft SCCM is the most commonly used systems management software product used by Autodesk customers, and with the 2019 releases, we’ve optimized our software for SCCM compatibility. This class is targeted toward customers with a firm understanding of SCCM who want detailed information about deploying Autodesk products and updates. Topics will include using advanced settings such as the Hybrid and application model in SCCM. There will also be a detailed walk-through of how to debug common deployment issues.

This class will present a fast, easy-to-use workflow for creating great-looking textures using Maya software and Substance Painter. This hands-on class has the indie artist and 3D generalist in mind, instead of the big company with an army of specialized artists. Substance Painter has become the industry standard tool for creating textures for games and films, but it's a very complex and daunting software, and its integration with Maya is not always straightforward. This class will cut to the chase and show you how to prepare your model in Maya, set your materials, export, procedurally create the texture in Substance Painter, and then—finally—bring it all back to Maya and render beautifully with Arnold.

A modern VFX (visual effects) rendering pipeline is made up of many materials with detailed descriptions called looks. Looks need to be passed across different software products without loss of fidelity. Current workflows involve duplication across complex pipeline tasks that are hard and laborious to maintain. Arnold software lets you author asset looks in any supported software and then reuse the same looks in another software using the Arnold data format, which is fully extensible. Arnold furthers this approach by capitalizing on open-source back ends like MaterialX and USD, enabling users to build a very flexible, reusable, and connected pipeline. Arnold users can take advantage of this interoperability right out of the box. The data is always live, enabling users to make alterations (major or minor) at any point in the pipeline. In this talk, you will learn about setting up your pipeline to capitalize on reusability of looks. You will also see examples of taking your asset looks through different software.

This class shows you how to use Civil View traffic import tools in 3ds Max Design software to bring in traffic simulation data from PTV Vissim. We examine how to prepare your data in VISSIM, how to bring that data into 3ds Max Design using Civil View, and how to handle conflicts such as overpasses. We then talk about various ways to use this data once it is set up, including how to export from 3ds Max Design to another 3D package such as Maya® software. You also learn how to replace the imported data with actual vehicles from the Civil View Vehicle library and how to use your own car library.

It's 2023 and you've been wondering "WTF is USD?” You're not alone! Software never stops evolving, and it is easy to feel left behind when new tech enters the scene. Funny enough, that is exactly what USD is aiming to address. USD stands for Universal Scene Description, and it is an open-source initiative, meaning it is being built in a public facing manner, without any single company claiming ownership of its development. Rather, multiple companies share the same vision – a world where sharing production assets among programs is consistent, reliable and easy. In this class you will learn USD's origin, where its currently at in the Media & Entertainment Industry, where it is headed, and how these techniques and technologies add benefit to any industry pipeline.

RADiCAL's artificial intelligence (AI) enables 3D motion capture, animation, and content solutions for film, gaming, and live events for everyone, everywhere. Our AI delivers an end-to-end software-only solution, generatively going straight from a single 2D video to 4D skeletal joint rotations, in real time, requiring no coding, hardware, investment, or training. Camera, browser, internet: done. In this product demo, we'll explain how RADiCAL Live works, how you bring real-time, multiplayer, motion-capture data into Maya software. We'll go into RADiCAL's development road map (including feature sets to be released soon). And we'll cover how we continue to partner with Autodesk in the creation of a truly democratized, end-to-end, cloud-based, collaborative content-creation platform that has AI at its heart.

With recent advances in generative models, many industries must adapt to offer more-intuitive solutions to interact with their expert software. The challenge ahead is to combine this expert knowledge with artificial intelligence (AI) to include more-natural ways of interacting with our tools while remaining precise and controllable. In this talk, we will discuss our solution to achieve this for content creation in Maya software. We'll present a high-level overview of the architecture to better understand the integration of the Microsoft Azure OpenAI services in our product. Then, we will discuss how we improved the inference model bridging the gap between research and production. We'll also show a demo of our plug-in in Maya software on a complex scene. You'll leave this session knowing how to prepare a proper data set for code generation from prompt, how to design a structured context improving the accuracy of the generated response, and how to maximize custom embeddings to handle more-complex use cases.

In this talk, we look at the variety of features and toolsets inside Maya that can be leveraged by artists to create compelling and engaging animated performances, in sometimes unexpected ways.