Sally Slade. It’s got to be one of the best names in the industry - as Chris remarks, she sounds like a superhero. But the similarities don’t end there - her career has been the stuff that makes origin stories, from her beginnings in a small fishing village, to her acquisition of superpowers (She can speak Japanese! She understands CSS!), to fate intervening and yanking her from a transpacific flight at the last minute.

After getting a foot in the door at the industry via Digital Domain’s work on The Golden Compass, she’s gone on to work on suitably superhero movies G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra, Iron Man 3, and Avengers Assemble. Now she’s moved into a completely different world, creating augmented reality experiences for Magnopus.

In this epic podcast, she and Chris talk about augmented reality, holograms, and the LEIA 3D phone. She also discusses how she went to work for a whole year dressed as Indiana Jones, and how she plans to turn into a unicorn (for certain people) in the near future. Y’know, like a superhero.

It goes without saying that Disney is a huge, multinational corporation with fingers in an increasing number of pies: Lucasfilm and Marvel Studios have both been incorporated into the Disney umbrella, and it runs everything from cruise ships and TV channels.

An interesting offshoot of this is Disney Research. Headquartered in the Swiss city of Zürich, it specializes in creating computer graphics. It makes sense: Disney's cinematic output is now almost totally CG, and advances in technology can be passed directly onto feature films and animations.

In this podcast, Chris talks to Thabo Beeler and Pascal Bérard, who have made some pretty significant advances in digital humans. Including Derek Bradley who was not able to join the podcast, they are all member of the Digital Human League.  They discuss the surprising intricacy of human hair, the oft-underestimated importance of realistic eyeballs, the challenges of capturing actors who can’t stay still for long periods of time, and how their work has influenced different areas, including the Wikihuman project.

Also, Chris reveals that you can buy a Swiss Army Knife after you’ve passed Swiss airport security. Perfect for cutting up that Toblerone.

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.

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.

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.

We sit down with Boris Simandoff, a great developer and product manager of V-Ray Cloud and V-Ray App SDK. Since the issue of Cloud is still a bit foggy to some, we get Boris to break this down and help us understand it. From understanding what a virtual machine is, how do you pay for your time on the cloud, the cost of compute vs. storage, and, more importantly, the security of your data, Boris helps us understand it all and gives us a glimpse into our upcoming Guide to Cloud.

Corey Rubadue and Chris Nichols talk to Dominic Albanese about the diverse and creative world of 3D scanning. From architecture, VFX, Art (both in preservation and creation), to medical; 3D scanning is a very diverse field, and Direct Dimensions has been in this field for nearly 20 years.

While hanging out in Sofia, Chris decided sit down with Vlado to talk about what Chaos Group has been up to. Since we just released the VRscans service, we figured it was a good time to talk about it. We also talk about what is coming soon in the new service pack for V-Ray for Maya, as well as a host of other subjects including VR, realtime, and a video game he created in high school.

Joy and Devon are both environment artists and designers that work in the gaming industry. We talk to them about the challenges and rewards of that area of CG. We also talk about THU, being a student at Gnomon, Devon's recent Gnomon video, the challenges of being a woman in games, both as an artist as well as a gamer, as well as balancing and complimenting each others work as a couple.

Emauele Lecchi, better known as Lele, is a new member of the Chaos Group team, but also a very long time V-Ray user. He was instrumental in the testing and benchmarking the newest service pack of V-Ray. This is such a huge update that Lele and Chris felt it deserved it’s own podcast as the features are something that the users need to be aware of, since it could change their entire workflow.

With the podcast being just over a year old, it seemed like a good idea to take a look back at 2015 and see what had happened at Chaos Group. In this very casual chat, Lon, David, and Chris discuss a lot of the events we have attended, our Partners in Art, Chaos Group Labs project, Virtual Reality, the number of new products that we have released, as well as the many updated we have done. We hope that your 2015 was as fun and fulfilling as ours, and that everyone has a great 2016.

This week we speak to Tim Hanson of Max Depth. Tim’s background started in the early days of the web and has gone through many incarnations, from web designer, to editor, and visual effect supervisor. He has learned to adapt to his changing career quickly. Based on some of his own frustrations with learning tools, he has created his own resources through his website.

Our final episode from Trojan Horse was a Unicorn features Scott Ross and surprise guest Allen Bolden. We talk about how much THU means to us, and about our vision of the industry. We also talk about how we feel we need to preserve the energy we have at THU and preserve it in a special way.

Kevin and Snow Mack are both fine artist that met at Art Center. Kevin has a very long family history in animation and the VFX world where his mother and father both worked at Disney. Kevin, the self claimed reluctant VFX Supervisor, won an Oscar in 1999 for What Dreams May Come. Snow is an amazing and prolific artist that used her skills as a digital matte painter and many major feature films. These days, Kevin has focused his art in the medium that he always dreamed of: Virtual Reality. Together with Snow they have created Shapespace, an abstract, virtual reality, experience that defies description.

An old friend of Dariush Derakhshani, Nozawa Tetsuya is the CEO of Guncy in Japan, a new company focused on bringing tool sets to a Japanese workflow and pipeline. The interview was translated so that it could work for both English and Japanese speaking audiences. We find out a great deal about his past, as well as the the kind of projects and work people can expect as a CG artists in Japan.

Wes Ball is best known as the Director of The Maze Runner and the upcoming sequel The Scorch Trials coming out September 18th 2015. After letting us know that he enjoys the CG Garage Podcast on Twitter, I invited Wes to be a guest. He agreed right away and sat down with us in the garage in Culver City. As a big Lightwave and Modo user, he loves CG and has used it for many of his own projects. We discuss how his career started right out of film school and how he had one of the most amazing weeks anyone in Hollywood could every hope for.

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.

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.

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.

Most people that work in Visual Effects have a story about a person that helped get them in. For me, that person is Eric Hanson. In fact, for a long time he helped a number of people make the transition from Architecture to VFX. He has a long history in VFX, and continues to be a strong advocate in it's education as an associate professor of practice at University of Southern California. Greg Downing and Eric founded xRez in 2006, which has taken extremely high resolution photography and applied it to a myriad of uses. We discuss his career history and find out about some of the very interesting projects that he has been involved in recently.

We recorded this podcast while in San Jose California during the GPU Technology Conference. Sponsored by NVIDIA, the conference is made for developers that are advancing development on the GPU with CUDA. From Deep Learning to Raytracing, the conference covers a lot of different subjects. I went there with several of our developers from our main office in Sofia, including Vlado and Boris, who I did this podcast with. While you probably know who Vlado is, Boris is our product manager in charge of V-Ray Cloud and V-Ray App SDK. We spent the podcast talking GPU development, V-Ray in Motionbuilder, Kevin Margo's CONSTRUCT, Cloud rendering, and other technology.

Jeff Mottle, the founder of CGarchitect.com , has been a very strong voice for the ArchViz and Digital Design community since 2001. He also happens to be a good friend who I have known for years. While at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this last week, we ran into each other. As I started to ask him about what technology he thinks pushes the ArchViz and Digital Design community, we decided to record a podcast about it. Jeff also took the opportunity to tell us about his new the CGarchitect Visualization Conference, which he is running through kickstarter. He explains more about it as well.

Last year Gina Adden, our Marketing Director, and I attended an amazing event in Portugal called Trojan Horse was a Unicorn. We enjoyed it so much that we felt strongly about supporting the event this year. We sat down and chatted with André Luis, one of the founders of the event, and Scott Ross, the Ambassador of the event. Even though the event is happening in September, it is nearly sold out. Make sure to enter the CG Society challenge for a chance to get a Golden Ticket for an all expenses paid opportunity to experience it for yourself.

You will quickly figure out that, not only is Lou Pecora a good friend of mine, but that I think he is one of greatest guys around. He has been been at Digital Domain for nearly 17 years. During that time, he went from working as a compositor on Super Nova to his first full credit as a VFX supervisor on X-Men: Days of Future Past, where he got nominated for an Oscar. True to Lou he remains humble and proud of the team behind the work.

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.

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.

As you may remember from the last episode we decided on a name for the podcast. We also briefly talked about what to do for a theme song. Well Brady Harris agreed to help us write a jingle. Brady doesn't really know much about CG, and we figured it would be entertaining to listen to Daniel and I discuss CG terms and how to make the theme song. Brady is an great songwriter, musician, and singer. We could not be happier in the way that the jiggle came out.

Well, it is our first podcast. So please forgive us as we tried to figure things out. In this podcast Lon Grohs, Daniel Buck, and I discuss the first creative project we did together which was making the V-Ray IRL video for the 10th Anniversary party of V-Ray. Even if the short is over 2 years old, there are still some great stories to be told about it, and we never had a chance to share it with the public.