Joining Chris for this podcast are Brick’s CEO András Káldos, Chief Development Officer Attila Cselovszki, Product Development Specialist Péter Sárhidai — and a bottle of Pálinka, Hungary’s favorite fruit brandy.

As András explains, Brick Visual was founded in Budapest in 2012, among the perfect storm of a financial crisis which resulted in a surplus of unemployed architects. The company was able to compete with international arch viz studios thanks to its low prices, and after a trial-by-fire debut project, it’s established itself in the premier league.

But, as Peter explains, incredible architectural visualization for firms such as Snøhetta and SOM is not all Brick does. Its research and development department is dedicated to exploring solutions for age-old problems such as managing distributed rendering, and the new worlds of AR and VR.

V-Ray for Houdini made a spectacular debut last year — via the music video for Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do. Behind the visual effects of the video — and most of Swift’s promos — is Ingenuity Studios, and its Creative Director Grant Miller.

In this podcast, Grant talks with Lon and Chris about how Ingenuity has embraced V-Ray for Houdini, from its early days as a GitHub project to full commercial software. Grant discusses how it’s streamlined workflows and joined the dots of Ingenuity's pipeline, making it faster and easier to create content.

Grant also goes into detail on how V-Ray for Houdini fits in with Ingenuity’s agile approach to technology, and how the small but successful company makes use of V-Ray for Nuke and V-Ray for Unreal in many different mediums. You’ll find out how the Ingenuity’s gone from making five cheap music videos a week to five megabudget videos a year, what it’s like to work with Tay and James van der Beek, and the effects it contributed to Oscar-winning movie Get Out.

Softly-spoken VFX supervisor Bill Spradlin currently works at Zoic Studios on TV shows such as Arrow, Iron Fist, and Legends of Tomorrow, and his previous credits include Oblivion (with Chris), Transformers, and Iron Man 3.

In this podcast, he talks about how his childhood fascination with Star Trek helped him choose his career path, as well as his early ventures in computing and MMOs. He highlights the many differences between working in TV and film, how both are seeping into gaming and VR, and what it’s like to work with industry personalities such as Joe Kosinski, Eric Barba, and Jeff Baksinski.

It evolves into a deeper discussion of the relevance of working in VFX today, and why the industry is about so much more than getting your name in the credits of a big movie. An essential listen if you’re considering a career in VFX.