So it’s the second day at FMX.

I’m driving down there to Stuttgart right now.

Yesterday, Tuesday, was the first day and it was, well, I mean, the conference itself was a little bit lukewarm.

Everybody I spoke to wasn’t too excited about all the talks that were scheduled yesterday, and it was true.

I mean, there were okay talks, but nothing major or nothing that stood out.

As usual, the main event for me and for a lot of others was to just meet old colleagues and new potential acquaintances and just stand around in the halls and chat and having lunch and going out for a drink afterwards.

I find that each year, the longer I go, the less important or less interesting the talks become, and the more interesting and more important to me personally are the interpersonal connections of meeting old friends and old colleagues and just discussing all the nerdy stuff that we all have in common.

And it’s great to just talk about visual effects and grading and compositing and Oculus and depth recording and VR and AR and all the other stuff that usually you just get blank stares from your neighbors or any other people in your surrounding area if you’re not just living in London.

So that’s great to have an outlet for a week to just extensively talk about all the nerdy crazy shit.

So today, day two, is looking a little bit more interesting.

There’s a virtual humans track in Gloria on the whole morning, which I’m probably going to attend to.

There’s also some talk about using Substance Designer in visual effects production, which I’m trying to catch.

It’s the first thing in the morning.

If traffic flows through as smoothly as it does at the moment, I’ll have no problem catching that, but fingers crossed on that one, because I’m really interested in Substance Designer.

I think I want to use it more for my own work.

I haven’t really used it as much.

I’ve dabbled with it a bit, but texturing and all that stuff is very interesting to me.

So I’m going to check that out and hope that it’s good, and not just a half-hour commercial of how great Substance is, and something with a little bit more meat would be nice.

I haven’t looked at the program this afternoon yet, but experience shows that no matter how you plan out your day, by noon the whole plan gets overthrown anyway, because you talk to people and hear about talks they find interesting, and then maybe also hear about talks you didn’t even notice in the schedule.

And then, naturally, you just reschedule your whole afternoon anyways, or just tag along with other people, just to keep chatting away.

So I’m not too locked in on that yet.