Digital Domain Creates the Character Connection in ‘The Electric State’
Digital Domain contributed 61 robot builds and 859 shots to The Electric State, based on Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel, developing the main characters and essential environments.
Industry veterans Sarah Essam and Jonny Vale join as Business Development Producer and Head of Marketing and Communications, building the studios’ reach and market presence.
Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment 2026 updates incorporate Golaem crowd tools, integrate AI and improve Flow-connected workflows for modelling, animation, FX and OpenUSD.
Nuke 16.0 has new features for compositing and review workflows that speed up review and reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks to make pipelines more efficient.
The new SynthEyes 2025 release adds AI masking for fast object isolation, customisable multiple-exports, a head mesh asset and a dedicated exporter for virtual production workflows.
Wētā FX has appointed VFX executive, Daniel Seah, as new CEO, after serving as CEO, Chairman and Executive Director of major VFX companies including Digital Domain for the past 12 years.
V-Ray 7 includes native support for ray-traced Gaussian Splats, and improves shading and texturing with OpenPBR compliance in Maya and Houdini’s new Volumetric Shader.
Zibra AI’s collaboration with SideFX Labs brings real-time volumetric compression to Houdini, optimising storage and bandwidth and enabling high quality VFX workflows.
Foundry has developed more USD-native workflows for Katana's look development and lighting environment, a new 2D Painting Mode in Mari and the Nuke 16.0 open beta with multishot workflows
The Winter Release of the Maxon One software suite includes new features in Cinema 4D, Redshift, ZBrush and ZBrush for iPad, and Red Giant for VFX and motion artists, animators and studios.
Digital Domain appointed Gabrielle Gourrier as Executive Vice President of VFX Business. In this role, Gabby will focus on expanding client partnerships and establishing strategic initiatives.
Video production, post and applications are evolving and expanding rapidly around the world. Three committed companies talk about their ambitions and expectations for 2022.
Foundry has made significant changes to Nuke in this release, updating its Node Graph UX, improving the timeline, extending Machine Learning and introducing an Unreal Reader in beta.
Foundry Mari 5.0 improves the brush engine to include colour jitter, has a new export workflow for USD material networks and helps users to take better advantage of proceduralism in Mari.
3D software developer Unity will soon acquire Weta Digital’s tools, pipeline and engineering talent, in effect making Weta’s VFX tools available for integration onto the Unity platform.
Chaos Group’s V-Ray renderer has won an Engineering EmmyAward for making new levels of photorealistic visual effects possible in episodic productions. The award honours technical developments that are “so innovative in nature that they materially affect the production, recording, transmission, or reception of television”. The award will be presented by the Television Academy Engineering Committee live at their annual event on 21 October 2021.
Used on hundreds of television programming since 2003, including Game of Thrones, Stranger Things and Star Trek: Discovery, V-Ray creates a blend of real and virtual elements on screen through the use of physically based rendering and adaptive ray tracing. Optimised to handle large production scenes, V-Ray is used to render digital environments, digidoubles, creatures and vehicles in a highly efficient way, leading to its use at studios like Digital Domain, Zoic Studios, Scanline VFX, FuseFX, Mackevision and others.
Game of Thrones, Scanline VFX
“We are very honored by this award, and are happy to have played even a small part in helping artists achieve their visions. It feels like every year we see something new and exciting happening in episodics, which gives our team the inspiration we need to push the software even more,” said Vlado Koylazov, CTO and co-founder of Chaos. “I am thankful for all the studios that have made V-Ray a part of their pipeline, and all the developers who work hard behind the scenes to make it even better. There’s more to come.”
“We use V-Ray every day to achieve the highest quality render output and iterate quickly on a very compressed delivery schedule,” said Matt Smith, digital effects supervisor at Digital Domain. “As we continue to bring film-quality VFX to episodics, V-Ray has become especially important to shows like WandaVision, where it helped us create over 300 shots for the season finale’s Witch and Vision battle scenes. Congratulations to Chaos.”
WandaVision, Digital Domain
“V-Ray has been at the core of Zoic's CG render pipeline for the past 14 years, producing close to 75 million rendered frames for 1,893 episodes, for the major studios including Disney, Netflix and Amazon,” said Saker Klippsten, CTO at Zoic Studios. “The support from Chaos is also first class. They’re always there to help implement new features and fixes, allowing us to focus on the creative and solve other pipeline issues.” www.chaosgroup.com