Total Chaos 2018 Recap

The keynote from Total Chaos 2018 — featuring Chaos Group co-founders Peter Mitev and Vlado Koylazov with special guests Martin Enthed from IKEA, NVIDIA’s Steven Parker and Benjamin Faes from Google Cloud. Vlado announced the release of V-Ray Next for 3ds Max and Adam Hotový highlighted new features coming in Corona Renderer 2. The keynote ends with Chaos Group’s Boris Simandoff and a sneak peek at V-Ray Cloud.

Vladimir Koylazov, Chaos Group
V-Ray Next is the brand new, hugely exciting version of V-Ray. It’s packed with new and improved features, and in the backend a super smart engine renders faster than ever before. In this talk, you’ll hear some behind-the-scenes tales, and find out about the development of the Next iteration of one of the most popular renderers for 3ds Max.

Ondřej Karlík, Render Legion
Corona Renderer was commercially released little more than three years ago, but it's already made some big changes in the architecture visualization industry. Corona introduced some previously exotic workflows to the mainstream, such as interactive rendering, path tracing without irradiance caching, and denoising. In this talk, Ondřej reviews the original vision of Corona, where it succeeded, and the challenges yet to conquer.

Ian Spriggs, 3D Artist
Ian's work is concerned with creating emotional connections with digital humans, and in his presentation he talks about the techniques used to achieve this how we can overcome the uncanny valley, and the new challenges we face in a digital age. Many years ago, the masters created realistic portraits of their subjects using little more than a paintbrush. Today Ian uses similar ideas with a new set of tools to create 3D portraits.

Martin Enthed, IKEA
In this presentation, you’ll gain insights into how IKEA is embracing the future of virtual, augmented and mixed reality, and how new possibilities are explored in IKEA Digital Lab — a space to experiment, innovate, and build on these technologies. Martin explains how photorealistic computer graphic renderings are created for IKEA's printed and online productions in large volumes. And you’ll even learn how iconic meatballs fit into the equation!

Adrian Graham, Google Cloud
The process of rendering generates data. Useful data. And LOTS of it. What can we learn from this data? How can we extract useful information from it? This talk will explore the potential for using Convolutional Neural Networks to solve some very difficult problems related to resource usage, management, and artist expectations.

Barbara Marshall, HP & Albena Ivanova, Chaos Group
Mars Home Planet is a programme from HP and NASA aimed at imagining life on Mars for one million humans. Anyone can participate in a number of projects involving designing buildings, transportation, clothing and robotics which will be used to create a complete virtual experience of the red planet of tomorrow. Chaos Group and HP are joining forces to support the Rendering stage of the competition.

Bozhidar Stanchev, Nemetschek Bulgaria
Learn how to improve your model and optimize the modeling process with the help of some simple ideas and solutions. Bozhidar will explain the problems he and his team have faced with their digital terrain — and how they’ve solved them.

Blagovest Taskov, Chaos Group
GPUs are a different beast to the traditional CPU architectures we’re used to working with, and they require different approaches to solving problems. Figuring out how to program for them can be challenging and (mostly) fun. In this video Blagovest shares his experience with what worked and what didn't while developing the V-Ray GPU render engine.

Andy Thomas
Inspired by the beauty of nature and extensive travel to some of the world’s most ancient rainforests, Thomas fuses together images of flora and fauna into evolved abstract forms. Intricately layered compositions of plants and animals make a strong statement of technology’s impact on planet earth and how advancements in society are affecting the natural systems of life. Andy Thomas discusses fractal theories in nature, visualizing sound using 3D software, and what inspires him.

Phillip Miller, Chaos Group
This year is an excellent time to reflect on how the graphics industry has evolved, where it is set to go, and how Chaos Group’s offerings are evolving to exploit it. Using 3ds Max as an example, we’ll discuss the evolution of platforms, functionality, and hardware, while tying in the way V-Ray Next makes us of CPUs, GPUs, and cloud computing. Personal anecdotes will fill the talk as first-hand accounts and insights are shared.

Kevin Margo, Director and VFX/CG supervisor
Kevin’s quest for interactive, immersive experiences focuses on the creative benefits for artists, and the resulting emotional impact on audiences. In his presentation, Kevin will discuss how rendering advances can facilitate new collaborations through virtual production, as demonstrated by his short film CONSTRUCT. He’ll also demonstrate how a desire for photorealistic visualization throughout the production process guided a recent investigation into VR.

Miguel Ortega & Tran Ma, half M.T / Spy Films
Miguel will showcase the entire process of making a Hollywood-quality short film in his own home. He'll talk about initial conceptual designs, story influences, crowdfunding, story-boarding, set creation, filming, and VFX. He'll finish with an update on the status of the film today, and the doors it's opened for him.

Camille Lymer & Michelle Obayda, Squint/Opera
Squint/Opera’s forte has always been finding the best way to tell a story. As all stories are different, so is the media used to depict them, from CG, live action, motion graphics, VR, music and even video games. By not defining itself as a CG company, Squint/Opera’s borders have expanded considerably, and it finds new ways to bring stories to life.

André Matos, 3D Artist, Porsche
André’s decision to allocate rendering to the GPU won him a dedicated, detail-focused client: Porsche AG. In his presentation, André will talk about his ideal GPU-farm back-up for projects which require him to provide mind-boggling image quality and last-minute changes to next-to-impossible deadlines.

Brendan McCaffrey, Bmcaff Studio
Brendan presents an overview of his evolution as a digital artist of the past 22 years. He outlines his approach to communication of form and surface value using light and materials, how his workflow has changed, and what has stayed the same. You’ll find out how he's used HDR Light Studio over the past 10 years in his work on videogame key art, virtual product photographs, and 600 illustrations for a book.

Attila Cselovszki & Péter Sárhidai, Brick Visual
Architectural visualization as an industry is still in its infancy, and we’re still in the process of defining industry standards to make it easy for both our clients and ourselves. In 2017 Brick established a standalone research and development department. In this presentation, we’ll introduce their activity through some case study examples. We believe that all participants should be involved in the creative process, and we invite you to work with us!

Marek Denko, 3D Artist, NoEmotion
In this presentation, Marek introduces some of his award-winning pieces of 3D art. He gives a few insider tips on how to make your pieces look stunning, and where to find those vital sources of inspiration. You’ll find out about the pros and cons of being a full time 3D artist, the ideal career path to follow, and how to build a winning portfolio.

Viktor Kirilov, Game Developer
The inability to iterate quickly in C++ is one of the biggest killers of productivity. This talk will provide insight into why compilation and linking take so long in the programming language, and show you how to mitigate these problems. I’ll cover tools and infrastructure such as hardware and build systems, techniques including unity builds and precompiled headers, source code modification, and modules.

Tomasz Wyszolmirski, Dabarti Studio
Founded in 2009, Polish studio Dabarti has produced nearly 3,500 clips and turns around a massive amount of footage — from a team of just five people. To manage demand, Dabarti has optimized every element of its workflow, especially the time-intensive process of rendering.
Director Tomasz Wyszołmirski explains how Dabarti’s GPU-based pipeline ensures jobs are handled quickly and efficiently.

Jan Kokol, CEO & Founder, IMAGO Design
Jan's work covers a wide spectrum from large scale paintings, architectural design, virtual reality environments, hyper-realistic digital imagery, parametric jewelry design up to documentaries about classic sports cars. He talks about his refusal to be defined by the idea of a profession, how leaving your comfort zone can reward you, and how the fear of failure can lead to new knowledge and experience.

Hristo Velev, Bottleship VFX
In this presentation, Hristo Velev will take you on the thrill ride of forming Bottleship. You’ll find out about the ups and downs, joys and hardships, and hard work and harder parties Hristo has experienced while setting up his world-renowned company. And he’ll go into detail on the explosions, destruction, water and magic he’s created for recent projects.

Martin Georgiev, Co-Founder, NU Boyana FX
As VR grows in popularity, Nu Boyana FX team delves into the challenges that a modern day VFX facility faces while working with 360° footage. You’ll find out about the tools and techniques which help you keep to deadlines – and keep your grasp on reality.

Alessandro Cannava, Senior 3D Artist, Venini
Alessandro demonstrates how it is possible to combine the traditional skills of glass handicraft with cutting-edge CGI. He exhibit the results of using both, and covers everything from the designer's first sketch to the final render. Light is of vital importance in this process, so he demonstrates the techniques he uses to render reflections and refractions.

Asen Atanasov, Chaos Group
Take a look behind the scenes of V-Ray’s new Adaptive Dome Light. This portal-free, fast and memory efficient algorithm accounts for occlusion, and results in considerable speedup in production scenes. The presentation will also cover basic concepts such as image-based lighting, the scattering equation, Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, and multiple importance sampling (MIS).

Martin Krastev, Chaos Group
At the heart of every programmable computing system sits a programming interface known as an instruction set architecture (ISA). Every conceivable task that a system has to execute needs to be described in terms of the ISA. But, over the past decade, general-purpose computers may have reached a stage in their evolution where ISAs don't matter any more. Martin gives his take on this subject via a series of micro case studies across today’s dominant ISAs: x86-64 and ARMv8.

Jaroslav Křivánek, Lead of R&D Render Legion
Computer generated images have become a natural part of our lives, and 3D printing technology is maturing and becoming more widespread. In this talk, Jaroslav shows how these two seemingly unrelated topics share the same basis: accurate simulation of the behavior of light. The fascinating origins of this computational problem can be traced back to the development of first nuclear weapons in the Manhattan project, and to names like von Neumann, Fermi, and Ulam.

Arsène Pérard-Gayot, Saarland University
The high-performance sections of a physically-based renderer are usually optimized for a particular use case. In particular, the ray traversal engine is typically vectorized for a specific instruction set (e.g. SSE, AVX, AVX512). For this reason, developers typically have to maintain several versions of the same algorithm. In this talk, we present the architecture of a renderer in which the performance-critical parts have been implemented using the AnyDSL compiler framework.