This post is about two conferences that might not be as familiar to readers of this blog as SIGGRAPH and GDC.
FMX is an annual conference run by the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, held in Stuttgart, Germany at the beginning of May. This year is the 15th one for FMX, and the content appears quite promising.
There are a bunch of game talks, including talks about Split/Second, Heavy Rain, Fight Night 4, Alan Wake, Habbo Hotel, two talks on God of War III and one on Arkham Asylum (the last three are repeats of GDC talks). However, most of the talks relate to film production, including presentations on The Princess and The Frog, Tangled, 2012, Alice in Wonderland, Ice Age 3, Iron Man 2, Clash of the Titans, Sherlock Holmes, District 9, Shutter Island, Planet 51, Avatar, A Christmas Carol, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, How to Train Your Dragon, and Where the Wild Things Are. FMX 2010 also has various master classes on the use of various DCC applications and middleware libraries, recruiting talks, presentation of selected SIGGRAPH 2009 papers, and more. Attendance fees are quite reasonable (200 Euros, 90 for students) so this conference should be good value for readers in Europe who can travel cheaply to Germany.
The Triangle Game Conference is held in Raleigh, North Carolina. Its name comes from the “research triangle” defined by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. This area is home to several prominent game companies, such as Epic Games, Red Storm Entertainment, and branches of Electronic Arts and Insomniac Games. I first heard of this conference last year, when it hosted a very good talk by Crytek on deferred shading in CryEngine 3. This year, the content looks interesting, if a bit mixed; the presentations by Epic and Insomniac seem to be the best ones. Definitely worth attending if you’re in that area, but I wouldn’t travel far for it.