Many of you probably know who Vlado is, but I bet many don't know Peter Mitev as well. Peter is the CEO of Chaos Group and started V-Ray with Vlado in 1997. For a long time, the whole company was just the two of them. Today, while there are offices around the world, he has tried to make sure that the company maintains the intimate feeling from their early days. He has a passion for experiencing different cultures, talking to all the different industries, and seeing what makes them different and what they have in common.

When Mike Seymour told me that he would be in town for a bit following the Sci-Tech awards at the Oscars, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to hang out, talk about Digital Humans, and do a podcast. As one of the founders of FX Guide and FX PhD, he is at the center of both news and education in the world of VFX. So it was a pretty rare opportunity to turn the tables on him and have him talk about his own background and aspirations.

After chatting and emailing Important Looking Pirates out of Stockholm for a year, I was super excited to hear that Måns Björklund and Niklas Jacobson were going to be in Los Angeles for the VES awards this year for their work on Crossbones. They talk about their past and what led them to start their company back in Sweeden, what it was like to start their studio there, and what has lead them to where they are now. It was great to see them and I can't wait to follow up with them and see what they continue to do.

It will be very clear that Graham and I are good friend, and that Jay and I have known each other for a while. Both Graham and Jay are from the Institute of Creative Technology, and have worked on facial scanning technology for a long time under Paul Debevec. They are both members of the Digital Human League and working on the Wikihuman project. It is a great conversation about all things ICT, virtual humans, Wikihuman, and more.

There are several people at Chaos Group that have actual Architecture Degrees. We figured that since three of us happen to be in LA at the same time, lets have a chat about it. Corey Rubadue is the Director of our Baltimore Office, Lon Grohs is our Chief Commercial Officer, and Christopher Nichols is the Creative Director. We chat about our history, we chat about how the art of architectural illustration. We chat about how CG changed things and now has become the norm. We even chat about the future.

Darren Butler, a long time Blur artist, started his CG career in Archviz. We discuss his background, how he started, and what inspired and pushed him to where he is now a CG Supervisor at Blur. We talk about some of the more recent projects that he has worked on and how is architecture background had an influence on them.

Kevin Margo and Derron Ross have worked together for years, both at Blur, as well as on independent projects. With Kevin as Director, and Derron as an Animation Director, Actor, and even Stunt choreographer, they have both pushed what is possible when it comes to using technology to tell stories. Kevin is also a member of the Chaos Group Labs in the Digital Film League. We discuss their work together on Grounded, CONSTRUCT, and how they have tried to imagine how technology will grow to make the process of going from vision to product a smoother transition.

2014 was a big year. We opened our office in LA, started Chaos Group Labs and released a ton of different V-Ray versions for a variety of platforms, attended a lot of events and showed off a lot of great material. So as we get to the end of the year we figured this was a good opportunity for Lon, David and I to take a look back at what has happened.

In this episode we talk to Vlado. Vlado happened to be in our Culver City office and we decided that it was a good opportunity to talk to him. We talked about new stuff in V-Ray 3.0, we talked a lot about rendering technology in general. We covered topics like Biased vs. Unbiased, new and old rendering technology, used in both V-Ray and other rendering technology.  It is a lot of great information and a lot of fun to get all this insight from Vlado himself.

Besides being a member of the Digital Human League, Steve Preeg has a long history in Visual Effects. In this podcast we have a conversation with Steve about his past, his work, and what he thinks are some of the interesting and challenging parts of Digital Humans. Steve’s credits include Final Fantasy, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, I, Robot, King Kong, The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, Tron Legacy, and much more. He also discusses the CG Tupac at Coachella, the Uncanny Valley, and the ethics of working on Digital Humans.