CG Garage

Joy and Devon are both environment artists and designers that work in the gaming industry. We talk to them about the challenges and rewards of that area of CG. We also talk about THU , being a student at Gnomon , Devon's recent Gnomon video , the challenges of being a woman in games, both as an artist as well as a gamer, as well as balancing and complimenting each others work as a couple.

Brandon Davis stops by the CG Garage to talk about his very diverse careers. Having worked in CG for nearly two decades, he also happened to be part of Special Forces in the United States Army at the same times that he was making visual effects. Having worked at major facilities like Digital Domain and Weta, he has worked on Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Godzilla, D...

Daniel Lay, also known as VFX Soldier, stopped by the CG Garage to talk to his old friends, Christopher Nichols and Stephen Parker, about what is going in his life. We talked about his career, what happened when he was VFX Soldier, why he left the industry, and what he is doing now.

Emauele Lecchi, better known as Lele, is a new member of the Chaos Group team, but also a very long time V-Ray user. He was instrumental in the testing and benchmarking the newest service pack of V-Ray. This is such a huge update that Lele and Chris felt it deserved it’s own podcast as the features are something that the users need to be aware of, since it could change their entire workflow.

With the podcast being just over a year old, it seemed like a good idea to take a look back at 2015 and see what had happened at Chaos Group. In this very casual chat, Lon, David, and Chris discuss a lot of the events we have attended, our Partners in Art, Chaos Group Labs project, Virtual Reality, the number of new products that we have released, as well as the many updated we have done. We hope...

Having known and been friends with David Stripinis for a very long time, this was the first time that I actually met David in person. Having worked on many major feature films including Avatar, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and Man of Steel, David is a long time VFX industry veteran, having focused a lot of his attention on virtual production, motion capture, and animation, while s...

Doug Roble has been at Digital Domain longer than anyone else as he was one of the first hires. He is the Creative Director of Software, and has helped develop many major tools over his career there. Having won both a Technical Achievement Award and a Science and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he has now  joined the Science and Technology Council . We talk...

Had an amazing opportunity to be a part of the 3D Symposium panel in Cancun hosted by Jeff Mottle from CG Architect. They agreed to let me record the panel and make it a Podcast. It is a great opportunity for all of you to hear some of the great conversations and discussions that are happening in ArchViz these days. Even if you are not part of that specific industry, you will mind many familiar th...

This week we speak to Tim Hanson of Max Depth . Tim’s background started in the early days of the web and has gone through many incarnations, from web designer, to editor, and visual effect supervisor. He has learned to adapt to his changing career quickly. Based on some of his own frustrations with learning tools, he has created his own resources through his website.

Our final episode from Trojan Horse was a Unicorn   features Scott Ross and surprise guest Allen Bolden. We talk about how much THU means to us, and about our vision of the industry. We also talk about how we feel we need to preserve the energy we have at THU and preserve it in a special way.

Last week we spoke to Norman Seeff about his response to our discussion on the Uncanny Valley. This week, we spoke to Oleg Alexander , a member of the Digital Human League about his work at the  Institute of Creative Technology  and his response and feelings on Norman's point of view of the subject. We are also joined by Stephen Parker who is also a member of the Digital Human League.

There are those moments in your life where you feel lucky to have met someone special. I got a chance to sit down with  Norman Seeff one on one for over an hour which was was one of those moments for me. While many people may not know his name, everyone knows his work. He has made his fame through the most honest and real photographs he took of celebrities over the last several decades . He manage...

Alex Alvarez started the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, Games + Animation in 1997 when the industry itself had few resources to find talent. His motivation came from his own frustration of the current education system in the United States, and its lack of support for the arts, or art education. Today, Gnomon continues to be one of the leading schools for Visual Effects by keeping its enrollment...

Kevin and Snow Mack are both fine artist that met at Art Center. Kevin has a very long family history in animation and the VFX world where his mother and father both worked at Disney. Kevin, the self claimed reluctant VFX Supervisor, won an Oscar in 1999 for What Dreams May Come . Snow is an amazing and prolific artist that used her skills as a digital matte painter and many major feature films. T...

An old friend of Dariush Derakhshani, Nozawa Tetsuya is the CEO of Guncy in Japan, a new company focused on bringing tool sets to a Japanese workflow and pipeline. The interview was translated so that it could work for both English and Japanese speaking audiences. We find out a great deal about his past, as well as the the kind of projects and work people can expect as a CG artists in Japan.

Our second podcast from THU 2105 features two great artists. Jose Alves da Silva and Andrew Hickinbottom . Both have a love of character, have an amazing sense of humor, are great friends, but live in very different styles. We talk about their inspirations, and about our love for THU where we all became great friends.

Lon Grohs and I talk to  Kim Baumann Larsen , a licensed Architect and 3D artist for 20 years from Norway, about his experience in Virtual Reality. Kim has been working in the VR space since the early 90s. So when the new wave of VR happened a few years ago, he was ready. With all three of us coming from architecture we decided to talk about where we see how VR fits in the architecture world. We t...

David Prescott will kick off the first off a series off conversations we had at Trojan Horse was a Unicorn this year in Troia, Portugal. I first met David 13 years ago when we both worked at Digital Domain . We talk about his journey from South Africa to DD and Dreamworks . As a seasoned veteran, David has a great ability to balance logic, perception, reality, and inspiration. These ideas are what...

Blur Studio  has always been a good friend of Chaos Group, but we were still lucky to be able to get Tim Miller, one of the founders of Blur, on the podcast. Tim is in the middle of directing the upcoming film  Deadpool , due out in 2016. We talk about what it is like to get your first big feature film directing gig at age 50. We also have a very honest talk about running a studio like Blur, a ver...

My first real job out of Architecture School was at   Gensler  back in 1997. This year Gensler is celebrating it's 50th anniversary. I have very fond memories of my time there. This year, while at Siggraph, I ran into Scott DeWoody and Alan Robles who are now looking at a lot of new technology within the company. I figured it would be a great time to see what they are doing and help me see what ha...

Wes Ball   is best known as the Director of  The Maze Runner  and the upcoming sequel  The Scorch Trials  coming out September 18th 2015. After letting us know that he enjoys the CG Garage Podcast on  Twitter , I invited Wes to be a guest. He agreed right away and sat down with us in the garage in Culver City. As a big Lightwave and Modo user, he loves CG and has used it for many of his own projec...

While at Siggraph we sat down with Kevin Baillie from  Atomic Fiction . We speak about his interesting career starting on the Skywalker ranch, which, after a few extra stops along the way, led him to start Atomic Fiction with his childhood friend  Ryan Tudhope . Kevin and his company are not shy of trying new things. While most people think that eventually people will possibly be rendering on the...

We sit down at Siggraph 2015 to talk to Senior Compositor Shahin Toosi about how he has spent the last 2 years pushing  V-Ray for Nuke . Based on his self admitted addiction with the product, he explains how having that level of rendering power inside of a composting package opens the doors things to people may not realize is possible.

Based on a request on  Twitter , I asked Fausto to come on the podcast. His interesting background coming from São Paulo Brazil to working at  Blizzard  eventually led him to be a concept artist, now working at  Lightstorm Entertainment . We follow his interesting and inspiring story.

Legend 3D  is well known for it's work in stereo conversion. Over the years, they have brought this to a new level that has enabled them to expand into the realm of VR. That is where Justin entered the picture. He explains why a stereo conversion house has a unique ability that allows for greater flexibility in creating VR content. Through several projects, he explains their learning process and t...