"Interruptions are the journey"
This is the subjective story of my life as a professional visual effects person, from early days of personal computing through university and to ending up moving around the globe looking for challenging projects. The focus is not really the projects I was involved with, but mostly how these events influenced me on my path to where I am now.
My way to Computer Graphics was not unusual at all (although that time only a few made it in Hungary): it started as computer nerdery back in the Commodore 64 era, roughly around 1990. Those were the days when I had access to my father’s company’s C64 (does this sound familiar to you?) and managed to meet couple of local guys who had access through hazy connections to some of the up to date games. Little did we know with my brother about what to do with this computer, all I had is a piece of paper with the instructions to load a game from tape, a little screwdriver to adjust the head and a lot of excitement when playing the classic (back then awe inspiringly modern and out of this world) games.
I was so keen to get into this whole thing that after spending about 2 days typing in a game from a computer mag (imagine that at the speed of about 2CPS) and not being able to run it, I didn’t give up. Somehow (out of sheer luck) I managed to successfully debug my first program.
Unfortunately this wasn’t for long and we only had access to the machine occasionally (mainly during national holidays), so my skills weren’t really developing anywhere. Fortunately(?) my parents managed to save up for our very own computer, which was a beast called the Videoton TV Computer.
Essentially a Hungarian Enterprise remake, hooked up on an ugly russian 14″ television..again, running games. Somehow this platform was never really too appealing to me, and after a friend of ours successfully fried the power supply (an item worth of its weight in gold, impossible to replace), our short lived companion was dead.
The IBM PC started to emerge and become available around this time (we are at 1992 now and I clearly remember the Intel 486 ads on the football world cup), so after about a year with our own C64, we managed to get our hands on a 486SX25 with a whopping 4MB of RAM. This beast was serving us for a long while, especially after I figured out that the SX25 could have been overclocked to 50MHZ without overheating or in fact any kind of problems at all.
I think these were the times when I initially got infected with the idea of CG. Not really from the artistic point of view, but more for the undeniable nerdy aspect of it.
Pixar released Toy Story in 1995, and newspapers trying to impress were posting articles about it stating things like “this would have taken thousand years on your personal computers at home to render”…and I was impressed. At the age of 16, this wasn’t too hard..some say I’ve changed since.
So I started to look for tools that could get me introduced to this new world, and tried my hands on Pov-Ray, Cosmo Creator, and some more I can’t even remember the name of. These were all limited demos, running on my 486SX50 with no mathematical coprocessor (no FPU) at a miserable speed.
This was the time when PcWorld started a series of articles on Silicon Graphics, featuring their O2 workstation introduced in 1996, articles telling tales about their dominance in the field of Hollywood visual effects, showing off their Onyx range. I was like the kid sticking his nose to the window of a patisserie.
At roughly the same time, some articles about Demoscene appeared in these magazines I was reading, that was another thing moving me in this direction, but 
as I was living in a small city about 200km away from nerd civilization, this had little real effect on me. I visited a couple of these demo parties, but apart from reading all the articles I could get my hands on and attempting to code some of the techniques, I was too far away from this to be part of at that time (and by the time I made it to Budapest, it was essentially dead anyways).
So what finally got me started on this path was an event completely out of the blue. I was studying french during my high school years and managed to get to a quite decent level with it. For this reason I was chosen to accompany two visitors from another high school in Sedan, France visiting Hungary. Once we figured out with one of the fellas we had a common interest in 3D, that was it, spent pretty much the whole day chatting about that (in French :) and couple of weeks later,I ended up with a copy of Imagine.
Imagine was my first real 3D application that I learned to a quite good level, but I was still a lot more interested in the tech than the art, so I was either playing with it to figure stuff out or produced end results that could have been featured on the Gallery Abominate.
I think from this point on, I kind of lost it, everything was happening so fast.
After I matured, went to university because I had another addiction at that point: motocycles, and I wanted to be an engineer of that field. There was no such thing in Hungary, so I picked the next best thing, becoming an Automotive Engineer. I applied to the best university of the field in Hungary, Technical University of Budapest (BME/TUB) and because of the good level of French I had, I chose to have all the classes in that language (and also the opportunity to spend some time in France either interning at some automotive companies or maybe spend a year or two studying at their universities).
Big plans fail. I made it through my first two years without any problems and decent results, so I ended up with a degree called DEUG (something similar to the BA) with a specialization in Transportation Engineering.
During these two years, I’ve spent couple of months in France at two of the main car manufacturers: at Peugeot I was visiting their International Department of Training and at Renault where I was introduced to the niceties of working at various posts of the manufacturing chain, and later stepping up to help designing some delivery routes around the factory.
Here I’ve met engineers working on some DEC Alpha CAD systems, something I obviously heard about as an aspiring engineer, but something that was (artificially?) unreachable for us during the first two years. It was like a dream coming true. This was the first time when I could see both of my hobbies (engineering and computer graphics) coming together with a hint to satisfy my inner nerd (powerful workstations) as well.
In 1997, when I went back to Hungary, I started to look for this kind of stuff. I took classes in 3 different Computer Aided Design systems at the same time: Pro/Engineer, I-DEAS and Solidworks. So I started to literally live in the lab, skipping more and more classes to get into this whole unknown realm. I happened to meet some decent people in the lab and after chatting a lot to them, I figured there was a dead beast hidden in one of the back rooms only scientists and staff had access to.
This was a deskside Onyx with one CPU board featuring 4xR4400s and 2GB of RAM and a RealityEngine2 graphics subsystem. People in the industry would have killed for this machine, these were days in late 1997, most companies were running Pentiums or Pentium Pros with usually 128-256MB of ram (at this point I had a 486DX120 with no hardware acceleration at the dorm).
It was dead, not powering up, and just sitting there collecting dust. So I applied for permission to resurrect it, took me weeks just to talk to all the people who had a say in that department, and managed to convince them that it’s a worthwhile project to attempt (and that they don’t have to move their pinky for it to happen). Once we had permission to enter the lab and touch the beast, we pulled it apart, washed all the pieces, put it back together again somehow..and magic happened, it powered up!
After a couple of days in the lab, fiddling with the OS (and couple of nights doing the same over SSH), we had a fully functional graphical workstation, with some CAD system licenses but most importantly, a copy of Alias Studio (pretty much the same as the Alias PowerAnimator, the day’s best tool used only at 2-3 places in Hungary).
Most of the rest of 1997 and early 1998 was spent on this machine, or back in the dorm using my computer as an X terminal (can you say 100Mb/s internet access?) to this machine (this was one of the main reasons I initially got into Linux) and running Alias most of the time. By this time it was becoming more and more clear that I was drifting to the VFX side of things and far far away from engineering (this process was not helped by the many theory classes we had to suffer through with almost no practical exposure to our subject: automotive engineering).
Some people say for them it was Terminator2, some say it must have been Toy Story or the Abyss. No. It was Godzilla (around August 1998) that made it click. Once I’ve finished watching the movie (and another 4 times in the theatre..I admit shamefully) this whole idea of VFX was sold to me.
Godzilla was also influential in my original interest in Houdini. I clearly remembe reading articles about Centropolis working on some of the FX shots, showing their gear, talking about Houdini.
Somehow I ended up subscribing to the SideFX Houdini mailing list, which was a fairly high traffic medium at that point (I don’t thin there was odForce that time, or in its infancy). I was reading posts from people at places like D2, Disney or The Refinery, but as I was so noob to the whole field, let alone Houdini, I didn’t really dare to post. I had a lot of respect for these guys, and I think they influenced me in my original interest in Houdini: for the next 10 years, I always had the idea to work with that tool, but because realities in Hungary (and in fact Europe) were so different, I didn’t manage to achieve that for a long time.
Time was passing by skipping more and more classes from September 1998, but something else also happened that changed the 10 years to follow: rumors started to spread about a possible release of Maya on the WindowsNT platform. Couple of days later I was so lucky I managed to get my hands on Maya1.0 NT Beta2 that I couldn’t believe it.
This was the day I skipped going to the lab and just staying in the dorm room, learning Maya methodically, going through the tutorials (do you remember Salty?), then reading all the docs and spending endless hours day and night just using it.
I had one problem though. My PC I had was nowhere from being able to run Maya at a decent speed (this was less of an issue) or display it properly (640×480 is BAD for CG..and I was suffering from this on Alias as well, but virtual desktop was great on Linux). This was further emphasized when I had a copy of the newly released NT version of Houdini3.1 as well, that required at least 1280×1024 to run. Impossible.
So I arranged for a demo copy of Houdini3.1 for the Onyx and was running it gladly, creating cubes, having no clue I had probably the most powerful system at my hands: a copy of Houdini running on a visual supercomputer..
At this point I was becoming familiar with Maya, so I kept Houdini on a side track, especially that I started to look for new gigs, and most people I managed to talk to didn’t even hear about Houdini at that point (not until Houdini 9.0 this whole idea of Houdini being a programmer’s tool slowly started to change in Hungary).
Because I was spending so much time on learning Maya and producing visually better and better stuff, I had a bunch of people at the dorm who were interested in getting more into this. So I started to organize some “classes” for them (they were more like usergroup meetings), showing off my recent findings and just general geeky discussion.
Through these guys I landed some of my first gigs in late 1999 as a “freelancer” (a dude working out of the dorm room using his mate’s computer as a “renderfarm”). Nothing fancy, but got me started with dealing with clients, working for deadlines…etc, and also got me a new workstation with a dual Celeron 266 clocked at 533, rewired using soldering iron to be able to run in dual, 128MB of RAM, and a used HP 21″ monitor that was only able to run in 1280×1024). It was a kickass piece of gear.
This was also the time (around 1999) I first got my hands on Renderman: first BMRT, that was freely available at the time and resulted in a ban from one of the biggest SUN servers at the university for resource abuse. Later Photorealistic Renderman (PRMan3.9 if I remember correctly) was licensed by a department of the university I was helping out with rendering some really heavy CAD models of internal combustion engines on “my” SGI Onyx. (I kinda grew to be the operator of that machine after a while, until they figured it was still useable for scientific work and moved it to a different department finally.)
Because I dropped out of dorm (skipping classes didn’t help), I had to find a job that was stable enough to pay for the rent and still keep me in this field to continue learning. I applied to Leonardo SNS, the official reseller of Maya and other Alias products in Hungary, who were about to start up a new training facility and I was in charge of initially just teaching classes based on the Alias training material, but later to come up with our own set of classes that was a natural continuation of more and more people graduating on the basic class. It was exciting and satisfying for me to be able to learn myself through assembling these training materials, making my own knowledge of the subject more solid by endlessly answering random questions and possibly enhancing my presentation skills as well a tiny bit.
I’m still proud of some of my students (about 100 people went through these classes) when I see them creating content to some VFX blockbusters or being featured on the Alias showreel. Also, they helped me to get in contact with some of the established people of the industry, and after a year, made me decide that I need to do this for real again.
This was the reason that made me apply to Focus Fox, leader in the field of TV commercials of the time. They just moved to a new, amazing building, everything felt in place, I was so excited that I spent a lot of time overnight, just trying to get stuff done. It was a bit on the deep end for me (not technically, but more from production point o view), but had some great people with me who helped through the tougher times and I’m still glad I met them there.
We did a lot of TV commercials work, it was a fast paced environment that had its ups and downs as every place, but it was decent quality coming out of it and it was a good place to learn in general.
This was also the place where my technical inclination starting to show up more and more: I introduced Mayaman (beta) and Entropy for couple of commercials, I also did some tests with Houdini and in general I felt quite keen to do stuff properly.
Also, because I had to spend many days on sets, I started to grow an appreciation for the technical side of movie production as well, which later lead to an effort of picking up that kind of knowledge myself on various classes.
We were still too young (I was 22 in 2002, when I finally left Focus Fox) and naive when together with two friends we decided to start up our own company (DroidWorx) as we knew better how to run such a place. NOT.
DroidWorx could have been a great place from a production point of view. I believe we had a great mix of talents, each with his own area but enough overlap to be able to communicate efficiently. Plus we spent the previous year working together, so we knew what to expect from each other when it came to hitting or missing deadlines.
It was an exciting 9 months to establish a company, find an office, land some broadcast design jobs and then close it down when we finally realized we were immature with an idealistic idea and not really into the business side of things. That being said, I never regretted trying to start my own place, I approached it as a game, there is a lot to learn and gain, there is some to loose..but after all, it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t work out. Plus, as a side effect, we learned a lot, so if I ever was about to try again, there is a tiny bit of experience to build on, which alone made it a worthwhile experience for me.
No, I didn’t enter the Russian intelligence service, but I needed money again to function, so I took this gig. KGB was a bit of a weird place, producing some low budget TV commercials, but at the same time running their own animated short film projects as well, that later ended up with the production of multiple award winning animated feature, Nyocker by Aron Gauder, founder of KGB and an Oscar nomination for Geza Toth’s Maestro, also produced by KGB Studio.
This was also the place I was working on my first feature film VFX project: the pilot for Tender Interface (2004).
This wasn’t really a technical environment, I was using XSI and AfterEffects and in general the place would not leave my forming TD side a lot of place to run, so after some time off to take a class as Assistant Camera and Focus Puller at the Hungarian Society of Cameramen, I decided that I should try to broaden my horizon abroad.
After spending couple of months bouncing back of the Canadian immigration office, and after getting hired by Antefilms Studio in Angouleme, France only to be told by the consulate that having a pro level french, having spent several months in the country, have a diploma by a major french institute is not enough to get a work permit to the country, I decided I will try to leverage one of the side effects of Hungary’s entry to the European Union in May 2004: free entry to the UK.
So two days after the discussion over the phone with the French Consulate, I landed in London on a sunny Wednesday (6th October 2004) with no job, a couple of demoreels in my bag and a lot of energy. These were exciting times. After being known in the industry back in Hungary and never really feeling like not being able to land a job, I was in a whole new universe. A country with the size of the industry about 1000 times bigger than the Hungarian one, a city with over 70 post (at least that was the length of the list I had after about a day spent in an internet cafe browsing websites) production/VFX places stuffed into this area called Soho.
Before I booked my flight, I managed to arrange an interview at Red Vision Bristol, so next day I had to take the bus early in the morning, managed to survive the interview somehow then went back to London. Unfortunately, although I was the chosen one, they didn’t get the gig (that later I had a chance to work on with them) at that point, so I was put on hold for a while.
During the first two weeks, I left my reel at the reception of many places in London and expected to have couple of calls at least next weeks. Time was passing by, I had an interview at Passion Pictures for some commercials projects and an other one at Molinaire, but nothing serious showed up. At this point I was still considering myself a generalist (using Maya and XSI) with an inclination to technical stuff and a fair bit of experience in technical rendering (both mental ray and Renderman).
Fate was approaching and I had to stay in the country to have a chance to break into the industry: I started to take jobs. Random ones: picking boxes, removing body building equipment from a sport complex, slicing my hand with razorsharp prints in a print post production factory. Still, it was some of the best times, full of excitement that definitely helped to survive in those rough conditions.
Then, early October I got an email from Axis Animation in Glasgow, asking for my availability for a possible interview with owner/VFX Supervisor Stuart Aitken, who happened to be shooting the mocap data for a super secret game cinamtics project they were working on at that time. So we met in his B&B somewhere on Notting Hill and I landed my first gig in the UK. What a Christmas present.
Early January found me in sunny Glasgow, working long but satisfying hours on the highest profile project of my career at that point: the Killzone2 trailer for Sony, presented during the E3 in May 2005. It was a fun experience. Although I was originally applying as a lighter/compositor, I ended up being thrown at FX from day one and I have to say I quite enjoyed that kind of technical challenges it presented. This was the point I was consciously looking for becoming a Technical Director (instead of a generalist who knew stuff) and managed to get my hands on the pipeline side of things as well. Overall it was a good learning experience and one of the most intensive times spent in production.
Once my contract was over, I had to decide if I wished to stay with the company, but I just happened to get a call from Red Vision, the company that interviewed me couple of months back in Bristol. As I was looking to work on more live action projects, in no time I found myself down in Bristol.
Once I arrived in Bristol, I could really let my TD side run at Red Vision: my first assignment was creating couple of shots for a show produced by the BBC NHU, and Michael Bright: Killer ants. I was pretty much alone on that project and had to do everything from meeting the director, setting up the project, matchmoving/cleaning up the plates, modifying the crowd simulation software, building models, rigging, setting up Renderman
, writing some shaders, motion capturing ants with the help of the local university, doing the crowd shots and integration as well. The whole nine yards. It was fun as it was a real good mix of technical and visual challenges.
After these shots were delivered, I moved on to previsualizing Perfect Shark – an hour long TV show out on the search for the most efficient shark ever, presented in a Virtuarium (an underwater cylindrical room with giant windows) – for couple of weeks. During the previz, I also had to setup the motion capture workflow with the Mo-Sys guys, so did couple of test shoots, software development and some smart optimization on the previz staging. Once out of the previz stage, I was on set for 2 weeks shooting the 200+ motion control shots on a black box environment, partly doing shooting supervision and onset visualization as well. It was real fun to work with these biologists turn filmmakers who really live and breath this kind of movie making. I had tremendous respect for them.
Because of the good memories and for a need to get even more involved in technical stuff (and there was not many people at RVB to learn from), in December 2005 I was heading back to Glasgow to work as their pipeline lead TD. This involved some long term planning, but soon turned out to solidifying the infrastructure (configuration management, renderfarm…etc), and a couple of weeks after I found myself getting more and more involved in projects as well, until I was officially made Cg Supervisor at the company on the project called Sega Rally.
I’ve spent another one and a half year in the CgSup position and I hope I contributed to the prosperity of the company: we went through a change of mindset from a 5-10 people company to a medium size one that could scale a lot easier to about 45-50. This was reflected in the change of the pipeline as well, from the original Maya-Lightwave one used on Killzone, through about a year using Maya and Renderman for Maya to finally come to the conclusion that we needed something else. 
RfM wasn’t so bad and we made with it through couple of larger game cinematics projects, but it was always feeling like missing the open approach we needed.
So for this reason, together with Sergio Caires, senior artist at Axis, we came up with the idea of introducing a Maya-Houdini pipeline. In about 3-4 months, the project went from the initial design to implementation and delivering its first project, ATV Pure. I believe it was a big success, it showed what an open rendering pipeline can deliver even with a fairly rudimentary, untested implementation, but most importantly allowed the company to step to a different level when it comes to complexity. This was the first time (around March-April 2007) I got my hands on Houdini in a professional environment, and stayed so for a year, not really touching Maya.
Axis was great from a lot of point of views: getting more into the deep end of things as a Technical Director, learning a lot about leadership and technical production issues as a CG Supervisor. Also because I was involved with all the company projects on the production management side as well (and a bit with HR), it let me look at things at a different angle as well, especially when it came to bigger projects like Heavenly Sword for example (or the other game intros we produced for various clients).
Even though Axis was challenging and satisfying from a lot of point of views, I still had the dream that the real thing was working on some complex VFX, so after a couple of freelance commercials gigs, I started to look for something else late 2007. This is how I ended up in Toronto at Mr.X in January 2008, working away on movies like Death Race, Max Payne and Whiteout as a Senior (Houdini) TD.
This wasn’t a long mission though. In May 2008, I was approached by Animal Logic with the idea of moving to Australia and working on an upcoming VFX project (Knowing) as an FX guy, that would eventually lead to a similar role on their new animated feature, Guardians of Ga’Hoole. After some time spent sorting out the visa, and a long flight I ended up in sunny Sydney on the 10th July. This position uses different tools than the previous one, but it’s a whole new environment and experience.
In April 2010, after almost two challenging years at Animal, I swapped horses to get my hands wet again in Houdini FX look and pipeline development and ended up at the newly formed (under the umbrella of mammoth post company Omnilab and director George Miller) Dr.D Studios where I’m residing now.
As you see, last 12-13 years wasn’t a straight path, but I’m glad I’ve been through it and I’m excited to discover more of it.
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