CG Garage

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 with the Vampire, and he went on to work on Apollo 13, Hollow Man and Kung Fu Panda.

Today, Xray helps create immersive gaming experiences for Insomniac Games. In this podcast, he discusses how the company managed to create a living, breathing interactive Manhattan with 60fps 4K HDR globally illuminated graphics for Marvel's Spider-Man on the PlayStation 4. He also tells Chris about his occasional work in education, including helping Paul Debevec with his Parthenon project. The podcast concludes with Xray's vision of the future in real-time and new game engines.

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 Tomorrowland, Doctor Strange, Agent Carter and even the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run ride at Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in Disneyland.

Now, Sonja has crossed the Atlantic to work for Swedish Ubisoft subsidiary Massive Entertainment on video games including Tom Clancy's The Division 2. In this podcast, recorded at Total Chaos 2019 ahead of her inspiring main-stage presentation, Sonja talks about the differences between working in VFX and video games in terms of timelines, teamwork and tools. She also discusses how games subtly direct the player, and why they've become such a lucrative part of modern culture.

If you've ever thought about making the jump from movies to games — or vice-versa — this podcast is for you.

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 thorough examination of how rapid technological changes are revolutionizing the way CG and digital humans are created. Ian talks about his meticulous portrait of Scott and how GPU technology has sped up his workflows, Paul goes into detail on bringing Scott's giant head into VR via light field technology, and Scott himself discusses his experiments with machine learning to create surreal imagery based on his anatomical database.

The trio offers their thoughts on how the convergence of this technology may change the role of the artist — and how this isn't necessarily anything new. Ian also gives some insight into his upcoming portrait of Chris himself.