CG Garage

Latest Episodes:

Episode 245 - Art Sayan - Blur Studio Oct 07, 2019

Show notes

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 drone sequence for Oblivion (with Chris), a sci-fi cityscape for Tomorrowland and a 10-square-mile urban environment for Supergirl. Art discusses how he organizes his work on these epic shots and how he collaborates with other people.

Art is a humble and laid-back guest, and he offers some great tips on how to balance working on complex, stressful projects with looking after yourself.

Episode 244 - Neil Huxley - Director Sep 30, 2019

Show notes

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 first-class honors degree thanks to his short film.

Recorded ahead of his talk at THU, Neil recounts how his career has taken him through title design for movies such as Watchmen and Gamer, creating holographic displays for Avatar and on to Digital Domain offshoot Mothership and then production company Ruffian to direct spectacular and well-received videogame cinematics, including an epic interactive trailer for Middle-earth: Shadow of War. Now, Neil plans to make a feature film that will take him back to the South London locales where his tale began.

Episode 243 - Ankit Patel - Director of Developer Product Marketing, NVIDIA Sep 23, 2019

Show notes

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 work with numerous APIs and processor architectures, and the bottleneck whack-a-mole developers have to play as hardware and software advances. Ankit also goes into detail on NVIDIA's OptiX and CUDA APIs, how the company balances performance and power consumption on notebooks, and its groundbreaking research in machine learning.

Episode 242 - Cobus Bothma - Director, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates Sep 16, 2019

Show notes

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 company seamlessly manages data and projects across its nine global offices — and a tenth virtual one. Other topics include how Chaos Group's Lavina real-time rendering engine represents a paradigm shift in the way architects create imagery, why Hololens has become the tool of choice for visualizing designs at KPF, and computational design, machine learning and sustainability.

Cobus is a visionary with an ear to the ground, and his insight into the future of technology and architecture is unparalleled.

Episode 241 - Rob Legato - VFX Supervisor and 2nd Unit Director Sep 09, 2019

Show notes

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 rewarded with Oscar wins for Titanic, Hugo and The Jungle Book.

Robert also has a wealth of on-set experience, and he tells Chris about everything from shooting miniatures at his house for Star Trek: The Next Generation to helping renowned cinematographer Caleb Deschanel lens the all-CG world of The Lion King. He reveals the qualities you need to be a good director, how to shoot and edit to evoke styles and emotions — and the difference garlic can make to a film shoot.

Rob is a humble, professional character who is happy to talk about his flaws and how overcoming them has benefited the industry. It's pretty much a complete film school degree delivered in 76-minutes.

Episode 240 - Zap Andersson — Autodesk (Part Deux) Sep 02, 2019

Show notes

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 use via a 3D fractal, as well as revealing some neat 3ds Max tricks.

That's not all. Zap also tells Chris about his experiences at this year's SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, including his thoughts on facial animation and how machine learning could help us cross the uncanny valley. He also discusses his meetings with renowned VFX YouTubers Corridor Digital, how he's developing his Android app Slightly Annoyed Rodents — and even arm wrestling Chaos Group's Co-founder, Vlado Koylazov.

Episode 239 - Marcos Fajardo - Founder and Software Architect, Solid Angle Aug 26, 2019

Show notes

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 development, how it got its name, Sony's investment in the software for animated feature film Monster House, the role it played in bringing Gravity to the big screen, and its recent acquisition by Autodesk.

Marcos comes across as humble but focused, and he's happy to discuss his strengths and weaknesses, as well as the debt he racked up through developing Arnold. He also discusses the ray tracing of tomorrow and the promises of quantum computing.

Episode 238 - Matt Wallin - VFX Artist, FXGuide Podcast Co-Host and Professor Aug 19, 2019

Show notes

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 collaborations with artist Matthew Barney on The Cremaster Cycle and Drawing Restraint 9.

Today, Matt teaches his trade as Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, and he tells Chris about the vast differences between frantic production schedules and the more sedate pace of academia.

Episode 237 - Ondřej Karlík & Jaroslav Křivánek - Corona & Caustics Aug 12, 2019

Show notes

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 realism, but their high computational expense means they are usually omitted.

That is until now. The latest release of the Corona Renderer includes a vastly improved caustics solver — which minimizes resource-intensive overheads. In this podcast, Corona's Founding Partner and Main Developer Ondřej Karlik, and R&D Partner Jaroslav Křivánek tell Chris why caustics are so hard to compute. They also discuss the approach they took to make them work, their vision for the future of caustics — and whether the new solver will make its way to V-Ray.

Episode 236 - Andre Cantarel - Senior VFX Generalist, Scanline VFX Aug 05, 2019

Show notes

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 taken him from flipbook animations to working as a senior generalist for companies such as Uncharted Territory and Scanline on movies including Independence Day: Resurgence, Justice League and Tomb Raider. Andre reflects on how hardware, software and the industry have developed and looks to his upcoming project: a model of Russia's formidable Mi-24 helicopter gunship.

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