CG Garage

Over almost 25 years, Phil Miller has helped bring products such as 3ds Max, Combustion, Dreamweaver, and NVIDIA's commercial rendering solutions to market — and dabbled in his own software and his original vocation of architecture. Now, Phil has brought his wealth of experience and knowledge to Chaos Group where he serves as vice president of product management. This podcast is a treasure trove o...

Artificial intelligence has gone from sci-fi subject matter to part of our day-to-day lives via assistant services such as Apple's Siri and machine learning which helps 3D artists create better work more quickly. But is this merely another technological leap forwards, like photography or computer-aided design, or a genuine threat to lives and livelihoods? That's the question Chris posed to an expe...

Virginie Bourdin's astonishing career whisked her from a small town in France to art director on blockbusters including X-Men: Days of Future Past, Harry Potter movies, and the upcoming Captain Marvel. In this podcast, recorded at the THU festival, Virginie explains how she's become one of the most sought-after art directors in the VFX industry. Virginie talks about her work on the otherworldly vi...

Few people have seen the rise of VFX like Kelly Port and Matt Butler. Over the course of 25 years, they've risen from digital artists to VFX supervisors at effects powerhouse Digital Domain. The watershed moment for both was their work on Titanic , and they discuss the million-dollar computers used to generate the 2TB of effects in the film. Of course, software and hardware have moved on a great d...

Games have compelling narratives worthy of Hollywood movies — so it should come as no surprise that cinematic talent is swapping cameras for controllers. Joining Chris this week are two men who've made the leap and now work on EA's blockbuster Madden sports franchise. Producer Robin Cowie went from Nickelodeon idents to box office phenomenon The Blair Witch Project , which taught him how to tell a...

This is the 200th CG Garage Podcast — and the first Martini Giant spinoff episode. To commemorate reaching this huge milestone, Chris, Dan and Erick look at films about reaching huge stones: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey , and Peter Hyams' sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact . The first is a true masterpiece of cinema, with Kubrick employing then state-of-the-art visual effects, smart...

One of the best things about THU is having so many world-class experts in one place — something Chris took advantage of when he assembled this panel for a discussion on digital humans. The superstar lineup consisted of digital Rembrandt Ian Spriggs, CG pioneer Paul Debevec, ILM's chief re-animator Hal Hickel, acclaimed anatomy artist Scott Eaton, and Naughty Dog lead character artist Frank Tzeng....

You may not have heard of Donna Smith — but she's one of the most important players behind the scenes in Hollywood. Over the course of almost 40 years, she's been instrumental in the production of 157 movies, including Raging Bull , The Terminator , Back to the Future , Jurassic Park, Schindler's List and The Matrix . She's also the first woman to serve as President of Physical Production and Post...

Recorded at THU, this week's podcast guest is ILM Animation Director Hal Hickel. Inspired by Star Wars and Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion work on King Kong , Hal became an animator on hugely successful California Raisins advertisements of the 1980s. Despite initial reservations, Hal switched clay for computers on Pixar's breakthrough CG movie Toy Story , then moved to ILM for the Star Wars prequels...

Alex's early career combined his passion for architecture with his love of theater, but an early experience with an Oculus Rift inspired him to move into the virtual arena. His company, Agile Lens, produces everything from quick virtual sketches to immersive photorealistic visualizations for the AEC industry. In this podcast, Alex tells Chris why it's important to fasten your headset early on in t...

THU festival is a wonderful place filled with inspiring things; among them this year was this deep-dive panel discussion on the relationship between artists and their tools. The superstar participants include famed traditional-leaning Visual Artist Phil Hale, visionary Gnomon School Founder Alex Alvarez, and prestigious Hollywood Concept Artist and Production Designer Dylan Cole. Representing the...

Geoffrey Baumann's career has propelled him around the world on some of Hollywood's biggest movies, including his most recent role as VFX supervisor on Marvel's record-breaking Black Panther . Having spent time in Europe and America as a child, Geoffrey majored in public relations before becoming a PA at Digital Domain. His linguistic skills landed him a job in on-set survey and digital integratio...

At Google's Cloud Next '18 event in San Francisco earlier this year, a small team of CG artists and Google technicians took part in an audacious experiment: to create a Hollywood-quality animated short film in just three days. Fortunately, the team had a little help from Google's Cloud Platform, a scalable and versatile system which gave them a huge amount of remote computing power. In this enligh...

For a short film, Construct's production has taken a long time. But, as Director Kevin Margo explains there have been many good reasons for the delays. Conceived as a way to push the boundaries of ray tracing and virtual production, Construct become a perfect test subject for cutting-edge VFX techniques. It's been cloud rendered via an NVIDIA cluster some 500 miles away, rejigged as a VR experienc...

This week, Chris, Dan, and Erick finally get round to discussing Alien . It's one of the most-requested topics for the podcast, and it's not hard to see why: Ridley Scott's 1979 movie is still terrifying today, and it gave birth to one of the silver screen's most memorable monsters. But Alien also gave us Ripley, the plucky, punky feminist hero who rises up against both the xenomorph and the patri...

Recorded at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, this podcast features self-taught rendering expert Zap Andersson. Zap's career in CG began early, with the modification of a Swedish ABC 80 computer so it supported higher resolutions, ray tracing, gaming, and even image editing and music sampling. His passion for computing propelled him into a career in CAD, then back into ray tracing, where he earned his "Shade...

Our host Chris Nichols is joined by his name twin Chris Nichols from Digital Domain. After reminiscing about working at DD at the same time (and accidently getting each other's emails and phone calls), they dive into Chris's role in the look development of Thanos on Avengers: Infinity Wars. The Chris' discuss the detail and thought that went into Thanos, and how Chris had to imagine so much of his...

Fresh off a tour of America, INK Founder Dave Macey joins Chris and Lon to talk about how two unemployed arch viz artists started one of the UK's most distinctive creative studios. As well as working with everyone from BMW to Wired to Asics, the company has created side projects which range from the beautiful (stark Le Mans sportscars) to the bizarre (inflating 1970s vehicles). While its Workshop...

Joining Chris for this podcast are Brick's CEO András Káldos, Chief Development Officer Attila Cselovszki, Product Development Specialist Péter Sárhidai — and a bottle of Pálinka, Hungary's favorite fruit brandy. As András explains, Brick Visual was founded in Budapest in 2012, among the perfect storm of a financial crisis which resulted in a surplus of unemployed architects. The company was able...

V-Ray for Houdini made a spectacular debut last year — via the music video for Taylor Swift's Look What You Made Me Do. Behind the visual effects of the video — and most of Swift's promos — is Ingenuity Studios, and its Creative Director Grant Miller. In this podcast, Grant talks with Lon and Chris about how Ingenuity has embraced V-Ray for Houdini, from its early days as a GitHub project to full...

Softly-spoken VFX supervisor Bill Spradlin currently works at Zoic Studios on TV shows such as Arrow, Iron Fist, and Legends of Tomorrow, and his previous credits include Oblivion (with Chris), Transformers, and Iron Man 3. In this podcast, he talks about how his childhood fascination with Star Trek helped him choose his career path, as well as his early ventures in computing and MMOs. He highligh...

In this podcast, Chris is joined by Neoscape's Evan Buxton and Bryan Holmes, as well as former Neoscaper - and now Chaos Group CCO - Lon Grohs. The innovative Boston-based studio has been on the podcast wishlist for some time, and it's peppered with amusing anecdotes about when Evan, Bryan, and Lon worked together. The podcast also features some great advice on running a modern arch viz company, i...

Creative studio Squint/Opera has many talents: as well as creating playful, story-driven arch viz films it has produced kids TV series Messy Goes to Okido, and it even runs a bar in south-east London. Recorded at Total Chaos, this podcast features three of the company's 3D artists: Michelle Obayda, Camille Lymer, and Zlatina Pancheva Drawing from their experience working with Bjarke Ingels (BIG) o...

This podcast features Aaron Kupferman, an expert on the intertwined fields of CGI and photography. He's served as compositor on movies such as Avengers: Infinity War, Alice in Wonderland, and upcoming Statham vs. Shark film The Meg. But he's also an unbelievably talented photographer, effortlessly shifting between shiny automobiles, expansive land and cityscapes, and dwarfing time-lapse photos of...