CG Garage

As one of the biggest advertising agency in the world, Saatchi & Saatchi has to have an intimate understanding of the products it sells. It's even located its LA offices just across the street from Toyota's offices, possibly so it can have first-hand access to car designs before they hit the road. Michael Wilken, Saatchi and Saatchi LA's director of 3D, joins Chris for this fascinating podcast. Bo...

In 1979, George Miller's directorial debut Mad Max shocked cinema audiences around the world. It existed at a perfect intersection of blockbuster and Australian new wave cinema, knitted together with a punkish spirit and comic book aesthetic. Its sequel, 1981's The Road Warrior, heightened the action and established Max as a true action hero, while 1986's Beyond Thunderdome explored the fringes of...

Two time VFX nominee and member of the Academy, Bryan Grill of Scanline VFX speaks to us about his impressive career working from the ground up to be one of the top people in the field. His long career at Digital Domain and Scanline have been blessed with many great stories. He recently finished supervising Independence Day: Resurgence.

Regular listeners will recognize Executive Producer  Lisa Beroud 's name - she served as producer on a number of movies with Chris at Digital Domain, including TRON: Legacy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Oblivion. But, more than that, she made the intense working environment a lot more pleasant by employing masseuses and laying on decent food. Lisa's career began as a freelance producer in...

  Herzog & de Meuron is an architecture firm best known for its incredible glass and steel structures such as the Beijing National Stadium, The Perez Art Museum in Miami, and the Allianz Arena in Munich. The Swiss company has also dramatically repurposed existing space to create London's Tate Modern and Serpentine Gallery. But within Chaos Group, the company is more famous for its exhilarating and...

Sally Slade. It's got to be one of the best names in the industry - as Chris remarks, she sounds like a superhero. But the similarities don't end there - her career has been the stuff that makes origin stories, from her beginnings in a small fishing village, to her acquisition of superpowers (She can speak Japanese! She understands CSS!), to fate intervening and yanking her from a transpacific fli...

It goes without saying that Disney is a huge, multinational corporation with fingers in an increasing number of pies: Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios have both been incorporated into the Disney umbrella, and it runs everything from cruise ships and TV channels. An interesting offshoot of this is Disney Research . Headquartered in the Swiss city of Zürich, it specializes in creating computer graphics....

Of all the podcast guests thus far, Richard Edlund 's got to have the most amazing voice. He sounds so bassy and gravelly that he could certainly pick up a second job as a trailer voiceover guy. Not that he'd need to. As he explains to Chris Nichols, his story includes throwing depth charges off battleships, designing Star Trek's alphabet, driving San Francisco cable cars, making experimental movi...

While at FMX 2016 we spoke to Jonas Skoog from  Bläck Studios  located in Stockholm. He was also one of the speakers for V-Ray Days. He tells us about the great work being done at the studio, and how they have created a coalition of VFX studios to maximizes and load balance their resources. Jonas is also the Character Lead at Bläck and tells us about his passion for digital humans.

Two graduates of the  Filmakademie ,  Andreas Feix and Francesco Faranna, talk to us about working on their short Citipati . It was nominated and won a VES Award this year. They also explained to us the unique and interesting education that they got which puts them in the middle of production and prepares them for the real world of post.

Janelle Croshaw, an outstanding Visual Effects Supervisor at Digital Domain, talks to us about her career as a 3D artist, compositor, and supervisor. Her credits include Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, Tron Legacy, Her, and more. We speak about how career took many changes, and the challenges she found taking a leadership role in visual effects as a woman.

We speak to Blake Sweeney, the head of software at Method Studios . His long history at places like Industrial Light and Magic, Weta, MPC, and Digital Domain has given him a rich history in the world of Visual Effects. He speaks to us about what it took him to get to where he is, and what he thinks is important part in the future of VFX, including a lot about cloud rendering.

After waiting a bit to release this podcast, Jacqueline Cooper is ready to unveil her VR project MonarchVR , just in time for Earth Day. She has spent many years as a career VFX compositor and decided to work on a VR piece with Edward Dawson-Taylor to bring awareness to the massive decline in the population of the monarch butterflies. We speak to her about her project, her career, and the differen...

One year since GTC 2015 , Jeff Mottle of CG Architect and Chris decided to see what has changed in the world of technology and Architecture Visualization, now at GTC 2016 . We speak a lot about VR and to see what has changed in ArchViz and VR in the last year. We also speak of Realtime vs Prerendered and what each of those means in terms of ArchViz. Lastly we speak about GPU rendering and how it h...

Stephen Parker , a software technical director at Chaos Group, talks about his history and how he got into computers, visual effects, digital humans, and more. We also talk about GTC 2016  and how AI and deep learning became the big focus at Nvidia.

Ben Grossmann talks to us about his interesting career path: from weather man in Alaska, to winning an Oscar for Hugo, to starting Magnopus with his partners, that only fringes on VFX. We talk about the state of the union of CG, VR, VFX, and more in this very engaging episode.

Like many things in CG, rendering on the GPU is a subject that is filled with misunderstanding and misinformation. Blagovest Taskov, the lead developer of the V-Ray GPU team, helps demystify this field by explaining how this type of hardware should be considered. We explore the concept of processors in general and explain the difference between faster, smarter, and working in parallel. This podcas...

We sit down with Boris Simandoff, a great developer and product manager of V-Ray Cloud and V-Ray App SDK. Since the issue of Cloud is still a bit foggy to some, we get Boris to break this down and help us understand it. From understanding what a virtual machine is, how do you pay for your time on the cloud, the cost of compute vs. storage, and, more importantly, the security of your data, Boris he...

Corey Rubadue and Chris Nichols talk to Dominic Albanese about the diverse and creative world of 3D scanning. From architecture, VFX, Art (both in preservation and creation), to medical; 3D scanning is a very diverse field, and Direct Dimensions has been in this field for nearly 20 years.

Eric Barba sits down with Christopher Nichols and Stephen Parker to discuss his career that ultimately led him to his new position as  Creative Director at ILM in Vancouver . We discuss his background at Art Center in transportation design, his nearly 20 years at Digital Domain, which included a longtime creative partnership with David Fincher and Joe Konsinksi , and an Oscar for his work on The C...

While hanging out in Sofia, Chris decided sit down with Vlado to talk about what Chaos Group has been up to. Since we just released the VRscans service, we figured it was a good time to talk about it. We also talk about what is coming soon in the new service pack for V-Ray for Maya, as well as a host of other subjects including VR, realtime, and a video game he created in high school.

Corey Rubadue and Christopher Nichols talk to Shane Scranton about the work of VR in Architecture design. We talk about the work that is being done at IrisVR , a company that he help co-found. We also discuss how VR will change the design process and that different flavors of VR serve different needs of the design and presentation process.

Starting a new CG Garage series, Dan Thron and Christopher Nichols discuss movies. We start with an in depth look at the Star Wars saga. We discuss why we each think that Empire is the best of all present 7 movies. Daniel also tells us his version of that Episode 6 should have been and why they have been trying to correct from their "mistake" ever since. We hope to do many more of these.

Curious as to what goes on in our Baltimore office? We talk to Brian Russell, Fernando Rentas, and Ted Vitale about the many ways that V-Ray has helped the design market: from Architecture design, building information modeling (BIM), industrial and product design, and more.

We chat with Hristo Velev and Martin Naydenski from Bottleship VFX about theyir company based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Coming with a history of visual effects work, they founded the company with an expertise in FX work. They have a strong understanding of fluid dynamics which we discuss along with starting a small VFX company in Eastern Europe.