Duncan Brinsmead is a principal scientist with Autodesk. He is the creator of Maya Paint Effects, Maya Hair, Maya Toon, and also worked extensively on Maya Fluids and nCloth. Duncan holds an MA in Music Performance from Juilliard and enjoys playing piano as well as creating digital realizations of symphonic works in his spare time. The nuances and sensibilities from his musical background certainly find expression in all aspects of his work.

Autodesk Maya 8.5 Service Pack 1 includes a number of fixes for Autodesk Maya 8.5 across several functional areas including: API, file referencing, Maya nCloth, polygon modeling and rendering (including mental ray).

As the Pirates of the Caribbean films have gone on, they’ve grown far more complex from a visual effects point of view, with the first film’s pirate skeletons being on the tip of the proverbial sword. In the following interview with ILM’s Roger Guyett, he details how some of the last film in the trilogy’s effects sequences came to be.

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