Alias San Francisco

Today was sweet, after a long weekend I just had a short day at work! Crazy! I am going to stay later tomorrow night though.

Anyway today was sweet and I left work a couple of hours early to go to visit Alias San Francisco. I met Lilian Chou there and she was totally awesome! She was suuuupppeer nice and amazingly helpful. We just chatted generally about the industry and I also met Mark Bottini, the Business Development Manager for Games. Mark and I chatted about the future of the gaming industry and that was pretty cool. Lilian was totally awesome too and we chatted about Waterloo, about Alias Toronto, talked about how nice Santa Barbara is, discussed all the different studios and the general atmosphere that can be found in production studios, talked about an art gallery that I should visit in San Francisco which is in a building that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and of course we talked about food at some point I am sure.

Lilian was amazingly helpful and a great person to talk to about some of my career goals and how to continue to build my talents and abilities. Also there are lots of possibilities so it is great to talk to someone who knows lots of stuff about the industry too.

After our hour long chat I had to make sure I let Lilian go back to work cause I was so excited and I didn't want to take up her whole afternoon! :) So as I was leaving she quickly rushed off and got me some sweet Alias gear, a nice little sweatshirt thing and some notepads so that was totally sweet and I am sure I'll be sportin' that soon!

Then I had and hour and half until the Alias Maya 6.5 Demo at the Apple San Francisco store so I went shopping!! I also went to the gallery that Lilian suggested and it was a super cool building. I went to the Paul Frank store and again didn't buy anything. I went into a few other places and also to a nice restaurant called Sabra, their website is http://www.adka.org/sabra it is one of the only full Kosher restaurants in San Francisco! Pretty cool stuff. I got a Kebab there and it took like 30 min to make and they gave me fries for some reason! Awesome!! It was totally cool and I was chatting with the owner and cashier while he was answering the phone, fixing the TV and telling the cooks what to make. The cooks didn't understand English, only Spanish, and he said he couldn't speak Spanish. But thankfully they understood the words "Beef" and "Chicken" he said. Hahaha what a great little place, it had so much character!

After getting my Kebab at Sabra I walked to Union Square and had my dinner there and it was really nice there. After that I went to the Apple Store and sat down ready to watch the Maya 6.5 Demo. It was totally sweet. The demo was amazing and the guy giving the demo was outstanding. He really knew the product well and when it came to question and answers he was on the ball. He was really solid and it's good to see that Alias has some sweet sales people too! I asked him a question, "So, if I had Maya 6.0, what would be the benefit of me upgrading to Maya 6.5?" and I suppose I knew generally what the answer would be but I thought it might be cool to hear his reasoning behind the upgrade and also he hadn't covered it yet and I figured everyone might want to hear that too! So yeah his answer was totally solid. He even knew some of the performance increases between Maya 6.0 and Maya 6.5 and that was sweet too. I went up afterwards (as he knew I was an Alias Developer for Maya 6.0 and Maya 6.5) and he said he was worried I was going to ask him a really hard question. :) I shook his hand and told him it was a great presentation and his answers were totally sweet. It was just awesome. The coolest part was that, in 45 min, he showed us Trax, Redirecting Animation, playback, IBL, rendering, IPR rendering, Maya smoke, a scary monster model running into a pool of Maya water with a wake attached to his foot and deforming the water, Maya Hair, Maya Cloth and he even answered a question about Maya Mentor very well. Overall an excellent presentation, and only the best from Alias, as expected. :)

After that I went to the Ghiradelli chocolate store to buy some milk chocolate and a hot chocolate too. Bjorn from work arrived at the Apple store and we walked around for a bit before heading home on the bus.

It was a great day and full of adventure!