CG Garage

Over the past few years, the John Wick movies have breathed new life into action filmmaking, marrying balletic big-screen violence with the intricate world-building and compulsive storylines of a quality TV series. Joining Chris this week are returning podcast guests Alex Nice (concept artist) and Robert Nederhorst (VFX supervisor), who talk about their work on John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum ....

In light of the unexpected passing of our beloved colleague Jaroslav Křivánek on Sunday, today's podcast is one from the archives. Episode #176 was recorded in Sofia, Bulgaria, in May 2018, as a discussion about the Corona and Chaos family. Talking alongside founding partner and main developer Ondřej Karlík, Jaroslav Křivánek talks in detail about the technology that makes Corona fast and efficien...

A passion for animation and computing landed Andrew Gordon a job at Pixar just after the release of Toy Story , the first of many mega-hits for the studio. From here, he helped bring some of the studio's most famous characters to life: Toy Story 2's Prospector, Mike from Monsters, Inc. and Edna Mode, The Incredibles' fashion designer. Today, Andrew has taken his experience from Pixar to DNEG, wher...

Recorded at the American Society of Architectural Illustrators' "Architecture in Perspective" event, this week's podcast is a panel discussion on architecture and imagined environments. Taking part are The Lion King and AR Wall CG Art Director Joy Lea, 3Marks and KitBash3d's Mike Golden, Luxigon founder Eric de Broche des Combes, Star Wars: The Force Awakens concept artist Nick Hiatt, Architectura...

User experience is an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of modern technology and software — particularly in the field of video games, which have to introduce complex ideas without intimidating players. In this week's podcast, Chris is joined by UX Director, Celia Hodent, who put her PhD in psychology, specialized in cognitive development, to good use in helping create Fortnite .  Celia explains...

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a critical and box office success on its release last year, garnering critical praise and even an Oscar for its vivid, touching and inventive take on Spidey's origin story. In this podcast, co-director Peter Ramsey tells his own tale of going from a humble, blue-collar upbringing in South Los Angeles to co-creating one of the best-animated movies of all time....

To say John Chalfant could turn his hand to anything would be an understatement. Over the past 20 years, this multi-talented creative has served as a 3D artist, director of photography, game developer, VFX supervisor and art director on movies and games including The Day After Tomorrow , Diablo II , Warcraft III , Nosgoth , Batman: Arkham City , Wolfenstein , Hellgate: London and Final Fantasy . ...

After dabbling with acting and music, Greg Downing found his true calling in all things photography related — and the world is a better place for it. His passion for the medium took him from home experiments with plaster casts and turntables to create panoramas of European landmarks to building a new HDRI camera for effects house Rhythm & Hues. At the same time, Greg has indulged his passion for d...

A lot has changed in Joy Lea's life since she last appeared on the CG Garage podcast in 2016. The former games environment designer was hired by MPC LA as an artist on Disney's The Lion King , which broke new ground in terms of virtual production pipelines. Continuing the trend, Joy has taken on another game-changing role: CG Art Director at augmented reality virtual production company ARwall. As...

Despite an original desire to be an architect, Arutyun Artur "Art" Sayan has pursued a career in VFX — and the industry's all the better for it. Art has contributed incredible work to movies including Oblivion , Tomorrowland , as well as the TV series Supergirl and Love, Death and Robots . In this podcast, Art talks about some of the shots he's helped create — including a complex 417-frame, all-CG...

Chris's guest this week is Neil Huxley, a director whose story is worthy of its own movie. Early exposure to The Terminator inspired Neil to follow a career in the film industry but fighting back against bullies at his South London school almost lead him off the rails, until his bouncer-artist dad intervened. In a spectacular comeback, Neil studied multimedia at university and graduated with a fir...

Over the past 25 years, NVIDIA has gone from gaming hardware specialist to a major player in CGI, automotive technology and even healthcare. In this podcast, Director Ankit Patel joins Chris to reveal how huge innovations in GPUs and AI have helped the company become ubiquitous with fast, smart computing. It serves as a great little explainer on the world of GPUs, how they have to be configured to...

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Cobus Bothma has gone from industrial designer to architectural visualization artist to one of the most important players at Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF). Having helped create the international architecture firm's mile-long Abu Dhabi airport — and managed its enormous data set — Cobus now serves as director of applied research. In this podcast, Cobus tells Chris how the...

This week's podcast features a true pioneer of modern cinema: Robert Legato. He's worked with directors such as Martin Scorsese, Neil Jordan and John Favreau as a second unit director and VFX supervisor, but he's also helped bring traditional techniques and technology into CG filmmaking. Crucially, he did it in a way that directors and cinematographers can understand, and his hard work has been re...

One year after his lively appearance on Episode #190, Shader Wizard Zap Andersson is back — and this time he's talking all things Open Shader Language (OSL). Now a fully integrated part of 3ds Max's viewport, this open-source language makes it quick and easy to use shaders across multiple rendering platforms, and tweak and develop your own. Zap discusses the development of OSL and how he put it to...

Back in 1999, a short film called "Pepe" introduced the ray-tracing renderer that would become Arnold. Joining Chris for this podcast is Marcos Fajardo, the guy who built the software and helped make the short film after studying SIGGRAPH papers and shareware software.  Chris shares some questions from Vlado, and gets a fascinating history of Arnold, as Marcos breaks down the renderer's developmen...

If you listen to fxguide's VFXShow podcasts you'll recognize Matt Wallin's voice — and now, you can hear his story. Recorded at SIGGRAPH, this podcast Matt reveals how Star Wars inspired him to pursue a career in the movies and why his first VFX job involved driving a backhoe. He talks about his work on films including The American President , The Matrix sequels and King Kong , as well as his coll...

Caustics are everywhere. Defined as concentrations of light refracted or reflected off a specular surface, common examples include the patterns you see on the bottom of a pool and the bright curves of light in a wine glass's shadow. But they also affect the way you see through windows and the reflections cast by any shiny surface. Turning on caustics in ray traced renders can add subtle levels of...

Last month, Andre Cantarel's CG model of the White House caught the attention of the CG industry thanks to its meticulous attention to detail. In this podcast, Andre tells Chris how this passion project came to fruition, the secrets he discovered in researching the building and what he plans to do with the construction. Creating presidential palaces isn't all Andre does. His career in VFX has take...

Craig "Xray" Halperin has worked on everything. His career began at the tender age of 13 when he contributed graphics to the TV show The Fall Guy , and as he grew up he became accustomed to projection mapping, motion graphics and non-linear video editing techniques. His big break in VFX came courtesy of a desperate Stan Winston who needed him to digitally improve Brad Pitt's face for Interview wit...

The uber-talented Sonja Christoph's career path has been a twisty one. After graduating from film school in Miami, she worked as an assistant director on-set on Hollywood movies and TV shows. During the 2008 writer's strike, she was inspired to take a VFX course at Gnomon School in Hollywood, where she discovered a knack for matte paintings. She went on to create environments at ILM for Tomorrowla...

This year's Total Chaos conference brought together three of the biggest names in the art and science of CG: 3D portrait artist Ian Spriggs, lighting pioneer turned light field specialist Paul Debevec, and anatomy expert and AI exploratory artist Scott Eaton. Each presented compelling talks on the Total Chaos stages, before heading to Chris's mobile booth to record this podcast. What emerges is a...

WeWork has become one of this decade's biggest success stories. This New York-based firm offers flexible shared workspaces for anyone from freelancers to large enterprises, complete with health insurance, an internal social network and events. Its approach has helped businesses thrive, and its model has rolled out to 738 locations in 39 countries with more than 13,000 employees. Two of those emplo...

Mike Hill's enviable career has seen him wear many hats on big projects in film, TV and games. He designed the formidable Retribution spaceship for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare , helped conceptualize some of Game of Thrones' most iconic sets and scenes, created the intricate Memory Orb device for Blade Runner 2049 , and worked out how to unite 18 disparate episodes of Netflix series Love, Death...

Victor and Chris first met at the THU festival a few years ago, and at Chaos Group's Total Chaos event earlier this year they were finally able to sit down and record this podcast. What follows is a retelling of Victor's journey from humble 3ds Max user to one of the most revered and distinctive 3D character artists on the planet. There's lots of sound advice for artists here, including how Victor...