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.

While at FMX, I had the opportunity to visit Luxx Studios, an interesting small studio that does some really great Visual Effects work. I sat down with Andrea Block and Christian Haas in their very warm and inviting studio to talk about their work. Besides the work on White House Down and Grand Budapest Hotel, we also talked about the feature animation that they are producing called Manou the Swift. They talk about their inspiration in making the film, as well as what it takes to get something like this to happen.

Paul Debevec's contributions to the CG field are well known. As the Chief Visual Officer at University of Southern California's Institute of Creative Technology, he has broken ground with technology in many different ways for over 18 years. He may in fact be the godfather of Image Based Lighting, and probably the person that enabled HDR environment lighting to be as essential as most people consider it to be today. In doing so, his team help create a variety of Light stages, which over time also became high res facial scanners. They even used this technology to scan the President of the United States. He is also a member of the Digital Human League, which is why ICT helped provide us with the data that we needed to get our Wikihuman project started.