CG Garage

Avengers: Infinity War is full of wonderful things, but a particular highlight is Thanos, the movie's purple antagonist. In this week's podcast, Digital Domain's Darren Hendler and Ron Miller join Chris to explain how they turned actor Josh Brolin's nuanced performance into one of the most impressive digital characters ever to hit the big screen.

Darren and Ron break down the steps of creating Thanos, from the accurate capture of Josh Brolin's face, the on-set techniques to record his movements and expressions, and the extra work needed to translate everything into a photorealistic CG character. They talk about the numerous systems and human beings involved in this two-year process, as well as the ethics of digital performances and characters. You'll even find out what color Thanos' blood is.

Steve Blakey has been in visual effects since 1989, beginning with animated logos and commercials in New York, and then moving to Los Angeles to work on movies. He and Chris first met at Digital Domain, where they worked on disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow.

Recorded over a bottle of whisky, this podcast covers everything from the megabucks contracts digital artists could command in the early days of CG, to the beginning and end of Digital Domain's infamous Martini Nights, to the rapid evolution of CG software features starting with grouped objects in Wavefront.

Chris and Steve offer some important words of wisdom to young people working in the field, and Steve sets up an intriguing story involving DD co-founder Scott Ross. Hopefully we'll hear more on this in coming episodes...

Jesse James Chisholm's illustrious movie career has spanned work from The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons to upcoming Marvel blockbuster Ant-Man and the Wasp. Along the way, he's done everything from sweeping set floors, to supervising effects shots alongside legendary directors David Fincher, Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg.

In this candid podcast, Jesse reveals all about the pressures of working on set on projects that can cost $300,000 a day. He shares some incredible anecdotes about stars such as Tom Cruise, Hugh Jackman and Brad Pitt. You'll hear about some of the cool parts of his job, like hanging out of helicopters over a closed-down Chicago to get shots for Suicide Squad, and how major sequences in Black Panther and Ready Player One were achieved.

Despite his awesome job and daily brushes with fame, Jesse acknowledges how lucky he is to do what he does, and discusses how he juggles his globe-trotting role with his young family.

Colin Green took the computer graphics skills he learned from his architecture education to help start Pixel Liberation Front. While the company is no longer around, it was one of the first to focus on envisaging movies with an art form known as previsualization. Colin talks about how previs was pioneered in films such as Fight Club, Panic Room, and Minority Report, how it's become an essential part of the filmmaking process today, and how it's forming the backbone of what is becoming virtual production.

Chris and Colin talk about some of the challenges of previs, such as how it can influence choices without locking people into them, and its effects on post production. Colin also mentions the huge respect he has for directors like David Fincher, who use previs to better communicate their vision to those around him.

If you've played any AAA videogame in the last few years, chances are you've seen Allegorithmic's tech in action. Headed up by Sebastien Deguy, the company's Substance Painter and Substance Designer help artists create and fine-tune realistic textures which aren't repetitive or obviously procedurally generated.

In this podcast, recorded at the Vertex conference in London, Sebastien tells Chris how a single mistake lead to the founding of this fast-growing and innovative company, which is branching out into visual effects and architecture. He also talks about the little tricks Allegorithmic uses behind the scenes, the future of the software, and even how we can understand the universe through mathematics.

Rob Redman is a man of many skills: motion graphics and 3D art, guitar and amp building, "The Cinema 4D Guy" on social media. In his current role he edits 3D World magazine, and helped conceive and organize the Vertex CGI event in London — which is where Chris delivered a keynote speech and recorded this podcast.

In this chat, Rob talks about how he and his team have created a unique and all-inclusive gathering for London's well-storied visual effects industry. He also discusses his role at 3D World magazine, the challenges of translating 3D workflows to a 2D page, and its relationship with social media, its online presence CreativeBloq, and its sister title 3D Artist.

This week's podcast is another THU two-parter, recorded with Unity's Josh Naylor and Angus Mackay, and Oculus Medium's Brian Sharp.

As an evangelist for Unity, Josh has one of the best jobs in the world. He travels to global conferences and high-tech organizations — including NASA — to discuss the benefits of the Unity engine. In his three years at the company, he's seen Unity evolve from a game development platform to a tool for research, entertainment and training, and he talks about how its ease of use, versatility and low cost have helped it build a passionate community of users.

One of the fruits of Unity's success is VR modeling tool Oculus Medium. As its engineer and director Brian Sharp explains in part two, Medium was prototyped on Unity's VR platform. Brian and Unity product marketing manager Angus Mackay discuss how they're building a platform which feels familiar to artists, as well as the Inception-like conundrum of creating engines within engines, and the future of rasterization and ray tracing.

Six years ago, Chaos Group developer Boris Simandoff had a dream: that cloud rendering could be as simple as clicking a button. Today, that dream is becoming a reality, with fast and easy cloud rendering seamlessly integrated into V-Ray for Rhino, Revit and SketchUp — and more products coming soon.

In this podcast, Boris tells Chris how he and his team at Chaos Group overcame some of the headaches of cloud computing, such as security concerns and clunky interfaces. You'll find out how CPU vulnerabilities were discovered as a direct result of cloud computing, and how preemptible machines cut the costs of rendering on the cloud. Boris also talks about his vision for the future, including potentially accessing thousands of cores from a simple machine.

A bottle of Trader Joe's Blended Scotch Whisky fuels Chris and Dan Thron for this in-depth discussion of Blade Runner 2049. Like its 1982 predecessor, 2049 is an eye-catching and thought-provoking movie which tackles themes of identity, emotion and mortality in a dystopic, dysfunctional metropolis. And, like its forebear, it's underperformed at the box office — although it's clearly destined for cult status.

In typical Dan and Chris fashion, Blade Runner 2049 is thoroughly dissected, leaving no stone unturned and no replicant unretired. They talk about how the iconography, ideology and characters of Blade Runner are updated to reflect contemporary concerns. Dan discusses his work on the movie, its success in the visual effects category at the Oscars, and how it compares to competing sci-fi films Star Wars: The Last Jedi and The War for the Planet of the Apes.

There are inevitably a few spoilers, but Dan and Chris have some interesting theories about the film's more ambiguous moments. By the end, you'll want to step into 2049's world again.

Chris and Lon jetted off to San Francisco to record this podcast with Adobe product manager Zoana Gee, and engineering director Ross McKegney. They reveal how they've created Adobe Dimension, formerly known as Project Felix, a clever box of tricks which marries photorealistic 3D imagery with Adobe's trademark ease of use

Of course, 3D is notoriously complicated, and Zorana and Ross discuss the machine learning Dimension uses to build and configure 3D scenes from 2D images, and the role of V-Ray's AppSDK behind the scenes. There are knock-on effects from this democratization of 3D: it cuts out human-shaped bottlenecks in workflows, and changes the way artists and designers interact with clients.

Listen to find out how Dimension fits into the bigger picture of Adobe products, and how AI and the cloud figure in its future.