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Rigging Summit 2004
Wednesday May 19 2004 — 7:30 PM
The Rigging Summit 2004 featured two character rigging experts who went head to head in a battle to see who can build the best character rig in town! Javier “Goosh” Solsona of Electronic Arts showed us his killer Maya rig, while Ron Martin of Mainframe Entertainment dazzled us with his rigging powers in XSI.
BIOS
Ron Martin started working in computer animation 17 years ago, while studying his Masters in Fine Art Education at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Working on an Amiga, utilizing rudimentary 3D and 2D packages, the digital medium was still quite new to the art world. When the power of a Personal Iris 20-4D (a whopping 12.5 mHz) wet his appetite, Ron realized there was a pool for artists in the computing realm! Ron dove right in and hasn’t come up for air since.
Through the gorilla-tactics of on-air graphics creation, TV show openings and feature films, Ron has been working to build efficient animation pipelines incorporating characters and effects. Several years working with SoftImage gave Ron the opportunity to work with customers interacting with techniques of the international animation marketplace in North America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Ron is currently working with Mainframe Entertainment Inc. and previous clients include UbiSoft, Media Principia, SOFTIMAGE (Montreal), Microsoft, Kaydara and the CBC. Ron continues to make art in his studio, working to further animation tools and techniques.
www.mainframe.ca
Javier Solsona (a.k.a. Goosh) is a wanderer, a traveler, a “Citizen of the World”. He was born in Argentina and grew up in Patagonia. From an early age, he started doing graphics on his Commodore 64 at home, painstakingly painting pixel by pixel. Many years later still in front of a computer he got a B.Sc. in Computer Sciences from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. During his last year at university in 1995, he was introduced to Multimedia and 3D and there was no looking back ever since.
After finishing his degree, he moved to Brazil where he carried on studying 3D animation on his spare time while taking part on various 3D courses. Later, he moved to London, UK where he worked for three years as a freelance graphic artist for various hi-tech companies, including Cisco Systems.
He finally moved to Vancouver, BC where after working for a year as a creative director in a small company, decided to leave his secure position and go back to school to complete his education. He studied for six intense months at the Vancouver Film School in their Character Animation program. After his completion, he was awarded a scholarship for his efforts in his final film.
Once out of school, he got a position at Lost Boys Studios in Vancouver working on their 3D department as a visual effects artist doing Commercial Ads, Game Cinematics and Music Videos. He can now be found at EA Canada. He was one of the cinematic animators on Def Jam Vendetta and is now working on other upcoming games.
On his spare time, when he is not climbing mountains, he does freelance jobs in rigging and animation. His work can be found in digital-dreams.net.
www.digital-dreams.net (no longer active)
www.rigging101.com
© 2005 · Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH · info@siggraph.ca
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