Vitaly is often a guest in Belgrade.
As a Regional Sales Manager from Foundry, we were, obviously, curious about him. We’ve asked him about his experiences visiting Serbia and the latest Foundry’s developments.
What is Elara?
Elara is a cloud-based service for post production that gives an edge to independent professionals and small to medium-sized studios. Offering a cloud service gives users the freedom to spin up a virtual studio with a global team, central pipeline and resources with just a few clicks, and without having to worry about high capital expenditure and management complexity. You don’t need any expensive infrastructure locally, as even a basic laptop will provide the same experience of using a powerful workstation.
Elara centralises infrastructure, creative tools and pipeline in the cloud, giving users fast and flexible access to Foundry and third-party applications, integrated cloud rendering, scalable storage and compute all in one place.
Elara presents the opportunity for freelancers working around the world to share one source of data that everybody can work from, leading to greater input to the creative process. From the comfort of their own homes, remote locations or anywhere in the world, emerging talent will have the tools to work with global post-production houses as the industry benefits from a higher level of quality in VFX work.
vfxserbia
What can we expect from Foundry in the closer future?
We’ve recently announced a number of exciting updates to our existing product portfolio. In the past few months we’ve unveiled Nuke 11 and Modo 11.1, with more to come soon!
Looking ahead, we’ve just launched the open beta for Elara at SIGGRAPH, where we’ve also been showcasing another product, Bunsen. Bunsen is a new product focused on the architecture, engineering and construction space that provides the foundation for building unified and scalable enterprise visualisation pipelines. Bunsen aims to reduce the complexity and pain often associated with scaling up the quantity and fidelity of VR, AR, and pre-rendered 3D content produced in CAD pipelines.
Nuke is becoming more a 3D application, are there any plans to merge Katana and Nuke?
We’ve just launched Nuke 11 with a host of features and updates that will boost artist performance and increase collaboration. We’re always working with our customers to improve and expand our product features, to bring ease and efficiency to their workflows.
Real-time engines have become more popular and film industry is starting to use them more. Are there any plans to integrate real-time engine and compositing software in the future?
Modo and Mari already connect to game engines very well, with matching shaders and simple export to Unity and Unreal engines. Beyond this, we’re also investigating real-time techniques from an R&D perspective. For instance, Dreamspace was a project that brought together universities, industry and creative professionals to work together to research and develop tools that allow creative professionals to combine live performances, video and computer-generated imagery in real-time, and collaborate to create innovative entertainment and experiences. This virtual production system used real-time versions of Nuke and Katana in the pipeline.
The advantage of this real-time digital production is that it becomes possible for directors, designers and artists to blend live action and virtual content together on-set or in a performance space, and see the results immediately. It also has some interesting crossover when it comes to VR and AR production. We’re always open to opportunities to improve our software and will continue to investigate this space in the future.
When someone is starting to learn Nuke, which way would you recommend to start, self-learning or workshops?
For residents of Belgrade and Serbia, who would like to learn Nuke, I would strongly recommend Crater VFX Training Center’s course Digital Compositing. They are responsible for a number of the top young talent coming out of Belgrade. Their alumni have gone on to work at big names such as WETA Digital, Double Negative, MPC etc.
For those who aren’t in Belgrade, the first port of call should of course be the Foundry website and social channels. We hold regular webinars which touch on new capabilities of all our tools, whilst the Foundry Community page is a great place to get to grips with Nuke and our other products by seeing other professionals’ great work:
https://community.foundry.com/learn
You’ve come to visit Serbia on the Open Day in Crater Training Center. When are you coming again?
I love Belgrade, so when Miljana invited us to take part in the Open Day at Crater Training Center I jumped at the chance and booked my tickets. I had worked with Serbia in the past, before changing regions for two years, so attending the event was a great “welcome back”; it was great to meet so many new faces and catch up with old friends.
I am planning to be back in Belgrade for the Computer Graphics and Arts Conference that is being held on the 24th and 25th of November.
Foundry is much more present in Serbia than just couple of years ago, what are your thoughts on Serbian VFX Industry?
We try to support as many regions worldwide as possible. This year, Foundry restructured the sales team in order to help us to reach and support more countries, customers and communities.
I have worked with Serbia in the past and was excited to get the opportunity to work with old friends again. When I returned to Serbia, it was awesome to see how far the region has come in the last few years, and I am now excited to be a part of the next chapter of that growth.
There is a lot of talent here: studios like Crater Studio, BunkerVFX and DigitalKraft are always exceeding expectations and pushing the local industry to new heights.
Talented artists that once left Serbia for greener pastures and more interesting projects are now returning home, bringing with them a wealth of knowledge and experience and ultimately raising the bar for the quality of post-production locally. There are also ex-pat CG heroes who have stayed abroad, but are still active players in the community, like Milos Milosevic, who in his free time helps keep VFX Serbia buzzing and keeps the community ticking.
As I mentioned, this year Foundry will also have a presence at the Computer Graphics and Arts Conference. I will be attending with my colleague Pedro Guimaraes and our Creative Specialist, Richi Paramo, who will be showcasing Mari 4.0 – our updated and upgraded 3D texturing and painting tool. In addition, we have invited Mikhail Lesin, CTO of Main Road|Post, to the event, who will be providing an in-depth look into the VFX production for the Russian blockbuster “Attraction”. This event is not to be missed!
Thank you for your time Vitaly and see you on CGA conference in Belgrade on 24th and 25th of November!