CG Garage

Of all the podcast guests thus far, Richard Edlund's got to have the most amazing voice. He sounds so bassy and gravelly that he could certainly pick up a second job as a trailer voiceover guy.

Not that he'd need to. As he explains to Chris Nichols, his story includes throwing depth charges off battleships, designing Star Trek's alphabet, driving San Francisco cable cars, making experimental movies, and even inventing the Pignose guitar amp.

Richard later turned his considerable talents to the visual effects industry, where he was nominated for 10 Visual Effects Oscars, winning 4 of them for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Return of the Jedi. He went on to set up Boss Studios, an effects house which successfully made the transition from practical to digital workflows through its work on Die Hard, Ghost, and Alien 3.

Richard is now chairman of the visual effects branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he talks about the challenges modern effects pose to board members. It's an awesome and fascinating 80 minutes - and we recommend turning the bass up to feel the full thunderous effect of Richard's magnificent vocal chords.

While at FMX 2016 we spoke to Jonas Skoog from Bläck Studios located in Stockholm. He was also one of the speakers for V-Ray Days. He tells us about the great work being done at the studio, and how they have created a coalition of VFX studios to maximizes and load balance their resources. Jonas is also the Character Lead at Bläck and tells us about his passion for digital humans.

Two graduates of the Filmakademie, Andreas Feix and Francesco Faranna, talk to us about working on their short Citipati. It was nominated and won a VES Award this year. They also explained to us the unique and interesting education that they got which puts them in the middle of production and prepares them for the real world of post.

Janelle Croshaw, an outstanding Visual Effects Supervisor at Digital Domain, talks to us about her career as a 3D artist, compositor, and supervisor. Her credits include Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, Tron Legacy, Her, and more. We speak about how career took many changes, and the challenges she found taking a leadership role in visual effects as a woman.

We speak to Blake Sweeney, the head of software at Method Studios. His long history at places like Industrial Light and Magic, Weta, MPC, and Digital Domain has given him a rich history in the world of Visual Effects. He speaks to us about what it took him to get to where he is, and what he thinks is important part in the future of VFX, including a lot about cloud rendering.

After waiting a bit to release this podcast, Jacqueline Cooper is ready to unveil her VR project MonarchVR, just in time for Earth Day. She has spent many years as a career VFX compositor and decided to work on a VR piece with Edward Dawson-Taylor to bring awareness to the massive decline in the population of the monarch butterflies. We speak to her about her project, her career, and the different challenges and successes she has had. She also shared great stories about growing up in Los Alamos, learning from her father, and how they would compete in their wildlife photography.

One year since GTC 2015, Jeff Mottle of CG Architect and Chris decided to see what has changed in the world of technology and Architecture Visualization, now at GTC 2016. We speak a lot about VR and to see what has changed in ArchViz and VR in the last year. We also speak of Realtime vs Prerendered and what each of those means in terms of ArchViz. Lastly we speak about GPU rendering and how it has advanced especially in light of the news of the new P100 processor from NVIDIA.

Stephen Parker, a software technical director at Chaos Group, talks about his history and how he got into computers, visual effects, digital humans, and more. We also talk about GTC 2016 and how AI and deep learning became the big focus at Nvidia.

Ben Grossmann talks to us about his interesting career path: from weather man in Alaska, to winning an Oscar for Hugo, to starting Magnopus with his partners, that only fringes on VFX. We talk about the state of the union of CG, VR, VFX, and more in this very engaging episode.

Like many things in CG, rendering on the GPU is a subject that is filled with misunderstanding and misinformation. Blagovest Taskov, the lead developer of the V-Ray GPU team, helps demystify this field by explaining how this type of hardware should be considered. We explore the concept of processors in general and explain the difference between faster, smarter, and working in parallel. This podcast is a predecessor to our visit to GTC 2016 on Apirl 4th to the 7th 2016, and will be the basis for a Guide to GPU coming soon.