This week, Zap Andersson returns to the CG Garage podcast — and he’s brought a whole new theme tune with him. Nestled among Klein bottles, Nixie tubes, and Kung Fury posters, Zap reveals his latest passion: streaming live music sessions on Twitch, and tells Chris how it’s given him a new approach to the creative process.
Zap also delves into new open-source standards in computer graphics, such as OSL, USD, and Material X, and details the methodology behind his advanced wood shader. It’s great to catch up with Zap and hear his tales of surviving COVID-19, as well as some of the workarounds he and Chris made in the world of pre-raytraced VFX.
NB. In the podcast, Zap mistakenly claims that the USD open source project is under the governance of ASWF (Academy SoftWare Foundation), but he was misremembering and this is actually incorrect.
Links:
5:19 Welcome to Zap’s universe
10:29 “I, Robot” connection
16:11 Autodesk update
19:19 The Material X files
28:09 Creating a procedural wood shader
34:47 How the industry’s matured
39:29 Metalness and shaders
46:03 Zap’s new music streams
58:07 Zap’s office and returning to traveling
Chris is a CG industry veteran and Director of Chaos Labs. He can also be heard regularly as the host of the CG Garage podcast which attracts 20,000 weekly listeners. With a background in both VFX and Design, Chris has worked for Gensler, Digital Domain, Imageworks and Method Studios. His credits include Maleficent, Oblivion and Tron: Legacy.