CG Garage

We sit down at Siggraph 2015 to talk to Senior Compositor Shahin Toosi about how he has spent the last 2 years pushing V-Ray for Nuke. Based on his self admitted addiction with the product, he explains how having that level of rendering power inside of a composting package opens the doors things to people may not realize is possible.

Based on a request on Twitter, I asked Fausto to come on the podcast. His interesting background coming from São Paulo Brazil to working at Blizzard eventually led him to be a concept artist, now working at Lightstorm Entertainment. We follow his interesting and inspiring story.

Legend 3D is well known for it's work in stereo conversion. Over the years, they have brought this to a new level that has enabled them to expand into the realm of VR. That is where Justin entered the picture. He explains why a stereo conversion house has a unique ability that allows for greater flexibility in creating VR content. Through several projects, he explains their learning process and the evolution on how their workflow is enabling them to create content from advertising to cinematic experiences.

Kirk and Christopher from A52 chat about their work at A52. We learn about the history of the company as well as some of the amazing work, including the Daredevil main title and Nissan #WithDad spots which got them nominated for Emmys this year. They are an extremely creative company which plays of their expertise in Directing, editing, and VFX.

Erik's background in Effects started way back as a director of photography in miniatures. Having done 8 seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Deep Space 9, he claims that he has done more shots of space ships then anyone else. His experience as a DP is what most inspires the people that work with him as a Visual Effect Supervisor today. In doing so, he has earned 3 Oscar nominations for I Robot, Real Steel, and Iron Man 3.

Director Ruairi Robinson recently made the news when Fox picked up Leviathan, based on the teaser that he put out on the internet. Ruairi, a member of our Digital Film League, has a long history in filmmaking and CG. He was nominated for an Oscar for his short Fifty Percent Gray in 2002 and has produced several other great pieces such as his short Blinky.

Rob Nederhorst is a veteran of the VFX industry. He has deep knowledge in compositing, lighting, 3D, 2D, as a supervisor, and even in programming. On top of that, he is also a teacher at University of Southern California. All this led him to his new venture Live Mentor. We talk about his history in the industry, and about his ideas behind the new project.

Dariush has recently joined Chaos Group as part of our education and documentation teams. I have known Dariush for a short time, but we quickly became great friends. He teaches at University of Southern California, and has written several books on Maya and Max. We talk about his past, how he stepped into teaching, and about the education in general.

With Dan Roarty in Los Angeles for E3, we took the opportunity to meet up, have lunch, and record a podcast. Dan, who now works for Microsoft's Game division, has been working in the game industry for most of his career. He is also well known for personal work of CG portraiture. It is because of his work in this area that we invited him to be one of the original members of the Digital Human League, and work on the Wikihuman project.

Craig Shimahara, owns a fantastic Architectural Illustration company called Shimahara Illustration. We talk about his background and how he started at Gensler, and what has also led him to start to become a fimmaker. We discuss the idea of style and story telling, and spend a bit of time talking about new mediums such as VR.