These two groups are very much different in concept, but very alike when it comes to who should attend.  I want to see EVERYONE there.  As per our titles, we may be rooted in After Effects, Motion Graphics and VFX, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want other apps like Nuke, Fusion and Motion, or are discluding genres like 3D, matte painting, compositing, and whatnot.  The big point of these groups is to get all the artists in Seattle and the surrounding areas together once a month to talk shop, hang out, see some presentations, learn, network, and hopefully get ourselves more knowledge and work!

After Effects Seattle

This is the User Group where we are going to have presentations, presenters, lots of giveaways, demo reel critique, group projects, and much much more.  Think of this like AENY, or DMALA…. more of a formal user group.  The Art Institute of Seattle has been gracious enough to let us use a room on the 4th Wednesday of every month, and that means our first meeting is going to be the 25th of August (date still pending).  You can find AESeattle on Facebook HERE, on Twitter HERE, and on the web HERE.  Be sure to Join the Facebook group even if you aren’t in our area, and share the link with your friends… some of them might be close!  We want to make this a huge user base!

Seattle Mograph and VFX

These will most likely be unconventional type of meetups, where we all meetup at a bar or a restaurant once a month, bring some business cards, get some beers and talk about the projects we have been working on.  More of a social networking meetup for the Seattle post crowd.  Maybe down the line we can all pitch in and rent a room with a projector and hang out and show demo reels or projects we have worked on, but for right now, we are just going to do a nice little meetup in the middle of the week, probably towards the end of the month.  Expect this first meetup to be sometime in the 23rd-27th of August.  Join the Facebook Group to be notified of when our events are going to be!

I would greatly appreciate it if you all RT’d this, joined the groups, and followed AESeattle on Twitter.  Feel free to cross promote this on your user group sites, and also your blogs.  Let’s spread the word about the Seattle Post scene, because it has really been kind of underground for a while.  There are some great artists in our community, let’s bring them out of the woodwork!

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this video we’ll take an advanced look at UDK’s mesh painting features (often called vertex painting). We’ll go in depth with instructor, Ryan James Smith on how to create several advanced blending materials such as snow icing over stones, puddles that react to light, and cracked and weathered concrete. We will also discuss how to create mix maps in Photoshop which will allow us to blend our materials in unique and interesting ways.

There isn’t a post about it on the DMALA site, but here is a link to the event over on LA3D.com

You can watch Gizmodo and all these other tech blogs for their coverage on E3 this year, or you can tune in the G4 and watch Kevin Pereira (@kpereira), Olivia Munn (@oliviamunn), Adam Sessler (@AdamSessler), and Morgan Webb (@MorganWebb) as they cover everthing imaginable happening at E3 this year.  New games, new systems, whats to come next year… such as sneak peaks at new systems… or whatever the hell… we don’t know yet!

All I know is that this is the one network you have to watch if you physically can’t be at the convention yourself.  The hosts don’t disappoint, they are hilarious, and most of all THEY KNOW THEIR SHIT.   You can follow the network @G4TV, follow E3 @e3, follow their gaming show XPLAY @Xplay, and follow my favorite… Attack of the Show @aots.

Make sure to watch the website as well to catch all the trailers news and features as they come about, and they also just released an iPhone app if you wanna watch some stuff on the go!

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OH! and a side note… I am gonna have a roundup this week over on CGtuts+ of all the badass new trailers that get debuted this week!  See keep an eye on that!

From CGSociety’s CGNews:

Next Limit Technologies is announcing the customer release of RealFlow 5. This new version represents another huge leap forward in simulation software, and includes an enormous number of fantastic brand-new features and improvements, including:

· Hybrido, the revolutionary new hybrid technology, which makes RealFlow 5 the only product on the market which enables users to simulate large bodies of water with sophisticated secondary effects, like splashes, foam and mist
·         Caronte,  a cutting-edge body dynamics solver, which offers unmatched capabilities for large-scale, complex simulations
·         A highly- accelerated particle-based solver, which means that simulations with standard fluids are now up to 20 times faster
·         Each standard license of RealFlow 5 now comes with a free copy of the RealFlow Renderkit v2 for mental ray or Renderman (Windows/Linux only)

The new version is currently only available for existing clients, but in the coming weeks we will also open up version 5 to new clients.

RealFlow 5 is available for purchase from Next Limit’s customer gateway, (link below) and from authorized RealFlow resellers. New customers will soon be able to place their order at the secure online shop, (link below).

Current customers can already download a demo version from the customer gateway, and a public demo will shortly be uploaded.

New resources
In an effort to continue offering RealFlow customers the best possible learning resources and support, a special RealFlow tutorials website has been created, (link below), offering a series of specific tutorials for all levels for the RealFlow plug-ins and components. In addition, a new RealFlow Resources website has been set up to provide users with a wide variety of scripts, RealFlow scenes, and presets.

Related links:
Next Limit Customer gateway
Secure online shop
Tutorials
Resources