Highlights of FMX Festival 06

FMX Europe's big Animation and Visual effects Festival was on last week held every year in Stuttgart with Harin & Kayley visiting this year.

Its impossible to see every talk and demo with so much content being shown, but of what was on show here are some of their highlights.

Harin Hirani, Senior 3D Artist at Finish, took the chance to check out the latest tech demos, It was clear to see that VR was high on the agenda this year with an entire gallery and numerous talks dedicated to it. With the Oculus, Vive and Playstation all released this year there were plenty of user experiences available to demo.

The dreamy Longing for Wilderness is an accelerated ride rushing through streets, forests and into open landscapes. Its beautifully rendered and with 4D elements I was momentarily transported to another world- an exact interpretation of what virtual reality should do,

Some of the more interesting demonstrations displayed developments in the use of existing technology. Harin tested out Bullet Train, a first person shooter game. It uses the Oculus with hand gesture control for a thrilling and exhilarating gaming experience! The queues for this one were lengthy but it was well worth the wait.

The clever guys at PresenZ have developed software now allowing pre rendered 360 videos with parallax. This means you can now look around photo realistic scenes using head positional tracking, unlike in real time game engines where quality is a lot lower. The illusion was somewhat broken for Harin with the static reflections that dont follow your movement. Nevertheless,' he says, it is still a great step forward for pre rendered virtual reality content.'

Flying like Superman with Mindride, their talk on Becoming Superhuman explored how their use of technology could be used for artistic purposes and Finish Nuke Artist, Kayley Fernandes was impressed on how creative VR technology is used for art.

The talk focused on a series of their VR own developments, exploring how scenarios can be used as interactive installations. Their latest piece is a VR ride called Airflow. To use it you are literally suspended (like Superman!) and wearing an Oculus headset traverse through a mountain range operated completely by bodily movement. Unfortunately the ride wasn't there to demo and is still in development, but one to definitely keep an eye out for.

Mindride have previously demonstrated The Ascent' using the mind in a meditative state to levitate the user by harness using sounds and Love has no Labels', that featured in an ad that went viral last year. Kayley adds, It's exciting to see artists also taking on VR too and pushing it to very different levels.

Another highlight of Kayley's was listening to the discussion on the Representation of Women in VFX. This was an inspiring panel talk from 4 women of very different backgrounds. It was great to see the strong female presence in the audience and also to see that some of the guys had come along too.

As we know the VFX industry is male dominated but was great to hear how major studios such as Pixar have been actively employing more and more females over the years and having female to female mentoring systems set up. We should finally start seeing this is the form of strong female lead characters in the near future. The overwhelming problems faced by women seem to be by those in technical roles and maintaining those roles too instead of being pushed to a less technical role and having the confidence to make your voice heard. Of all the talks I saw at FMX, this was the only one that had a female panel, maybe next year we'll see some female supervisors leading the talks too.'

LINK:	http://www.finish.tv/news/view/highlights-of-fmx-festival-2016...
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