CG Garage

Allan and I both started our podcasts around the same time. And while he and I have similar audiences, history, and friends, we were inspired by different motivations. At the age of 33, Allan has been doing visual effects professionally for 20 years. Besides his strong drive, he feels a strong need to give back to the community through his new mentorship program.  I had a great time talking to All...

This week we talk to Ben West, a Creative Director at Framestore, and Director. His unique and interesting upbringing, combined with his strong creative education in both Architecture and Film School, led him to create interesting projects such as  Fugu and Tako . Based on it's success, Ben has launched a  kickstarter project  to expand the story into a graphic novel form. He tells us about his pa...

Most people that work in Visual Effects have a story about a person that helped get them in. For me, that person is Eric Hanson. In fact, for a long time he helped a number of people make the transition from Architecture to VFX. He has a long history in VFX, and continues to be a strong advocate in it's education as an associate professor of practice at  University of Southern California .  Greg D...

Scott Ross is an extremely important person in the world of Visual Effects. He was the general manager at ILM when they started to go digital. He also founded Digital Domain with James Cameron and Stan Winston. He later made great efforts to be an advocate for the visual effects industry based on his strong knowledge of how the business is run. Most recently, he has become an ambassador for  Troja...

Jonathan Litt has a long history in the world of VFX. We cover a large number of subjects in the podcast with Jon. From his first job at ILM, his work on the Matrix series, digital humans at Digital Domain, we even dive into his new passion for virtual reality. Jon offers insight into every part of the process.

How often to you hear people say: "It was so much better in the old days of special effects, now it is just all done on computers." There is a perception that VFX is easy, and that we, the artists, simply push a few buttons and it is all done. One of the places I often hear this is a place I actually have a huge respect for:  the Nerdist podcast . I'd like to call on our listeners to listen to thi...

We recorded this podcast while in San Jose California during the  GPU Technology Conference . Sponsored by NVIDIA, the conference is made for developers that are advancing development on the GPU with  CUDA . From Deep Learning to Raytracing, the conference covers a lot of different subjects. I went there with several of our developers from our main office in Sofia, including Vlado and Boris, who I...

Jeff Mottle, the founder of  CGarchitect.com   , has been a very strong voice for the ArchViz and Digital Design community since 2001. He also happens to be a good friend who I have known for years. While at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this last week, we ran into each other. As I started to ask him about what technology he thinks pushes the ArchViz and Digital Design community, we de...

Last year Gina Adden, our Marketing Director, and I attended an amazing event in Portugal called  Trojan Horse was a Unicorn . We enjoyed it so much that we felt strongly about supporting the event this year. We sat down and chatted with André Luis, one of the founders of the event, and Scott Ross, the Ambassador of the event. Even though the event is happening in September, it is nearly sold out....

You will quickly figure out that, not only is Lou Pecora a good friend of mine, but that I think he is one of greatest guys around. He has been been at Digital Domain for nearly 17 years. During that time, he went from working as a compositor on Super Nova to his first full credit as a VFX supervisor on X-Men: Days of Future Past, where he got nominated for an Oscar. True to Lou he remains humble...

Many of you probably know who Vlado is, but I bet many don't know Peter Mitev as well. Peter is the CEO of Chaos Group and started V-Ray with Vlado in 1997. For a long time, the whole company was just the two of them. Today, while there are offices around the world, he has tried to make sure that the company maintains the intimate feeling from their early days. He has a passion for experiencing di...

When Mike Seymour told me that he would be in town for a bit following the Sci-Tech awards at the Oscars, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to hang out, talk about Digital Humans, and do a podcast. As one of the founders of  FX Guide  and  FX PhD , he is at the center of both news and education in the world of VFX. So it was a pretty rare opportunity to turn the tables on him and have him tal...

After chatting and emailing  Important Looking Pirates  out of Stockholm for a year, I was super excited to hear that  Måns Björklund and  Niklas Jacobson were going to be in Los Angeles for the VES awards this year for their work on Crossbones. They talk about their past and what led them to start their company back in Sweeden, what it was like to start their studio there, and what has lead them...

It will be very clear that Graham and I are good friend, and that Jay and I have known each other for a while. Both Graham and Jay are from the Institute of Creative Technology, and have worked on facial scanning technology for a long time under Paul Debevec. They are both members of the Digital Human League and working on the Wikihuman project. It is a great conversation about all things ICT, vir...

There are several people at Chaos Group that have actual Architecture Degrees. We figured that since three of us happen to be in LA at the same time, lets have a chat about it. Corey Rubadue is the Director of our Baltimore Office, Lon Grohs is our Chief Commercial Officer, and Christopher Nichols is the Creative Director. We chat about our history, we chat about how the art of architectural illus...

Darren Butler, a long time Blur artist, started his CG career in Archviz. We discuss his background, how he started, and what inspired and pushed him to where he is now a CG Supervisor at Blur. We talk about some of the more recent projects that he has worked on and how is architecture background had an influence on them.

Kevin Margo and Derron Ross have worked together for years, both at Blur, as well as on independent projects. With Kevin as Director, and Derron as an Animation Director, Actor, and even Stunt choreographer, they have both pushed what is possible when it comes to using technology to tell stories. Kevin is also a member of the Chaos Group Labs in the Digital Film League. We discuss their work toget...

2014 was a big year. We opened our office in LA, started Chaos Group Labs and released a ton of different V-Ray versions for a variety of platforms, attended a lot of events and showed off a lot of great material. So as we get to the end of the year w e figured this was a good opportunity for Lon, David and I to take a look back at what has happened.

In this episode we talk to Vlado. Vlado happened to be in our Culver City office and we decided that it was a good opportunity to talk to him. We talked about new stuff in V-Ray 3.0, we talked a lot about rendering technology in general. We covered topics like Biased vs. Unbiased, new and old rendering technology, used in both V-Ray and other rendering technology.  It is a lot of great information...

Besides being a member of the Digital Human League, Steve Preeg has a long history in Visual Effects. In this podcast we have a conversation with Steve about his past, his work, and what he thinks are some of the interesting and challenging parts of Digital Humans. Steve’s credits include Final Fantasy, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, I, Robot, King Kong, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...

As you may remember from the last episode we decided on a name for the podcast. We also briefly talked about what to do for a theme song. Well Brady Harris agreed to help us write a jingle. Brady doesn't really know much about CG, and we figured it would be entertaining to listen to Daniel and I discuss CG terms and how to make the theme song. Brady is an great songwriter, musician, and singer. We...

Well, it is our first podcast. So please forgive us as we tried to figure things out. In this podcast Lon Grohs, Daniel Buck, and I discuss the first creative project we did together which was making the V-Ray IRL video for the 10th Anniversary party of V-Ray. Even if the short is over 2 years old, there are still some great stories to be told about it, and we never had a chance to share it with t...