At Autodesk, we have a friendly bike-to-work competition to see which Autodesk city could save the most carbon emissions. Last year, we [Montreal] beat our nearest competition, San Rafael by a factor of 1.5 and we saved almost 2000 kg in carbon emissions, showing how environmentally-conscious and biking-friendly Montreal is.

Me, I just like to bike;-) and I’ve got a pretty nice 28k commute (some pics here).
Last year, I got the bragging rights for most “commute miles”, with 3274 miles (5269 km).

This year’s challenge started on Monday, but the season is not off to a great start, weather wise, in Montreal:

If you’re wondering about the changes to the Animation Editor, or about Send To, …
Autodesk’s 2012 strategy: it’s all about the suites | CG Channel.

Here’s the doc downloads for some other Autodesk products:

• Maya>
• MotionBuilder
• 3ds Max
• Mudbox

Interesting. This company uses a smiley-face rating system for their customer support. And they publish the last 100 results.

After every interaction with our support team, a customer is asked to rate the experience by clicking one of three ratings: “It was great” (happy face), “It was OK” (flat-line face), or “It wasn’t good” (frown face).
via 37signals: Customer Support Happiness Report.

At Autodesk we use a scale from 0 to 10, which is broken down like this:

0-6 )-:
7-8 |-:
9-10 (-:

Thanks a lot for interest and the great response regarding the Subaru “Car Parts” Commercial. I will try to give you some insides about our workflow in addition to the info Sebastian allready gave you More…

Florian Bruchhaeuser, ceo/founder/TD of Lafourmi Postproduction.

via Subaru “Car Parts” Commercial – Softimage Mailing List Archive | Google Groups.

Volkswagen: The Making of the “Black Beetle” Commercial

Softimage sightings at 1:29 and at about 1:33-35

via YouTube – Volkswagen: The Making of the “Black Beetle” Commercial.

Something I found the other day: 3ds Max has this Small Annoying Things forum on autodesk.com. It’s kinda neat because you get a certain number of votes, so you can vote for what annoys you most. I assume that Big annoying things are covered in the regular user forums, just like for Softimage.

Instructional Standards for Maya, 3dsMax and Softimage

via Instructional Standards for Maya, 3dsMax and Softimage | AWN | Animation World Network.

via Car rendered with MentalRay in Softimage on Vimeo.

Here, I use FinalGathering with a system of bright cards for the lighting. For the first time, I also used a bright large cylinder that surrounds the car for added reflectivity and better lighting.

I then found that the lighting looked off and tried to understand why. It was because the car was getting lit via FG by the large cylinder but the “car shader” wasn’t receiving any “traced light” information in that area. This would be especially useful for the “speculars” in the car shader.

I then made a cylindrical light with the same dimensions as the FG cylinder (In area light, chose “geometry”). Now the paint looks more like it’s lit by the cylinder and doesn’t just reflect it.

The effect in the beginning is a “diffuse glow” added in the Softimage Compositor.