That is right Cineversity is taking the next step with Live Q&A’s starting off with the new Release 11.5. So feel free to hang out here you can see it below, click chat to post your questions, or if you want you can go to the Cineversity Live Page

This Presentation has now been moved to a new dedicated Cineversity Live page here at Kai The Stuff Guy.

Make sure to be here at 2pm PST today to see a live QA with Cineversity where you can ask your own questions about Release 11.5 and the Broadcast edition. I’ll be a host of course.

If you can’t make it, no worries we’ll be doing at least one more Thursday morning at 11am PST, so clear your schedule think up some questions ahead of time post them here tweet them to me or @maxon3d or just bring them with you to the QA and take your chances that we will be able to answer them for you. Cineversity Live will also be streaming our Siggraph 2009 presentations so you can see what you might have missed if you couldn’t make it to New Orleans.

Ahh and why not lets play with a little MoDynamics right:

What a crazy week, finishing one assignment and starting the next, getting into the FXPHD groove which is also helping me get back into CineMan, Cinema 4D’s RenderMan connection. Why spend all this time getting back into RenderMan with all this other stuff going on you ask? It is because Pixar has asked us to present at their booth again this year, and despite having barely touched it in 8 months there is just no way one can turn down an opportunity like that. SO that means reviewing everything to make sure I’m up to snuff on it all again.

So that means SIGGRAPH is a week away, and a lot of preparation still left for me to do. I’m not doing any demonstrations myself at the Maxon booth, just the Pixar demo so I’ll be a little more free than typical trade shows which is nice. It’s extra nice as it also means we have some really kick ass artists demoing at the MAXON booth again, just like at NAB, and I have to say I really like this approach to getting more studios involved in the main theatre presentations instead of mostly feature demos.

And Just like NAB MAXON and Kai the Stuff Guy will both be trying to keep everyone a little more in the loop via twitter so make sure to follow both of us.

Anyways here is Stewie shoveling

New Assignment and I feel good about this one. Stewie is meditating and then gets realizes he has a neighbor, good ol Tailor who startles him and scrambles to back away. the assignment I chose was to get up from sitting on the ground with the Stewie that has no arms (there fore no arms to assist in getting up making it more difficult.)

Planning for this was fun, a few near misses with my fireplace mantle but a lot of great off balance poses that I stumbles and managed to correct myself. Made for some great posing that I did over and over and over again with Stewie.

I’m now making heavy use of both the TweenKey and Anim Curve 3D plugins provided to AM students. The anim curve is like a much cooler version of the basic animation curves in C4D. Both have advantages and disadvantages. The main one in animcurve is that it often can corrupt the animation interpolation and if not caught before scrubbing, can freeze Maya. It is BETA after all.

I like that it can color the curves and show them all the time, and that when modifying keys along the 3D curve in the editor you have the actual axis gizmo to move along X Y and Z with more control. That said they are really slow and can often get in the way. Still I’d love to see MAXON developers take some time for once to enhance this feature which they’ve had for about a decade now with little or no change. (Bad as that may sound most apps don’t have such a feature built in at all really, including Maya)

Tween key is a handy little plugin for recording poses inbetween two other key poses, its pretty basic and simple I’d much rather be using tradigitools, but I will have to wait for them to get it working with Maya 2009. Basically these plugins let you record a pose at a specified fraction between the nearest two key poses. This offers a much more traditional type workflow like using drawings and favoring one key or the other. I love this workflow.

Back from NAB it was a very fun show, slower than previous years of course with the Econmy where it is at, but the people that were there were very serious dedicated people which meant if you were talking to someone it was business it wasn’t just curiosity or passing by, or because we have some comfy chairs at our booth.

The real cool thing about this show imo was for the the first time we tried to cover a bit of the show using the MAXON3D Twitter account http://twitter.com/maxon3d. It was also nice to see a retweet from our sister product VectorWorks regarding ISD’s presentation. There were however, questions regarding where users could see video of the presentations. To be honest while we had discussed this a bit for SIGGRAPH last year and again early on for NAB, we simply had too many other things goig on with the new booth to add on a proper filming pipeline for the show.

We’ll continue to consider filming presenters for future shows but what I did try on the last day since we has such cool presenters, was to film a few of the sessions with my Panasonic LX2 which is actually a still camera. Being back home now I can see the quality just isn’t there really, particularly audio wise. I’ll look into whether I can clean up the audio enough, but I can’t promise anything.

Thanks to our good ol buddy Adam and Sebastien for some really great nights of Black Jack too. Distractions from AM assignments have never been so profitable before.