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It was pretty cool, they really eloborated on the normal mapping movie and showed us the entire process of getting a normal map into a world texture in the halflife 2 engine,, they also showed us the process of making layered HL2 textures (example was getting rust patches to block a reflectivity map,, looked very nice), as an in depth look at the facial animation stuff
I did get to see some stuff that wasnt in any of the movies or pics released,, but they were basically parts of the city map and the normal map example map that weren't seen on the video
as for the SDK (or in their case,, softimage EXPHL2 included with the sdk), they could only say soon,,,, soon,,, soon,, (lol I'm going nuts )