Chaos Group

Interview with: Chris Christodoulou – CEO/ Managing Director James Digby-Jones – Executive Creative Director Kevin Vucic-Shepherd – Creative CGI Director Eliott Johnson – Digital Artist Mike Gilbert – CG Supervisor Yannick Lorvo – CG Lead David Atkinson – Creative Director

Download PDF (English) version of the interview

"One of the improvements to our processes has been the introduction of V-Ray to the pipeline, to give our artists more flexibility and help us meet some of the really demanding deadlines that we have."

Interview with Saddington Baynes

THE STORYTELLERS

Saddington Baynes is a creative production studio based in London, creating imagery for the advertising industry since 1991. Their work includes still images and animations for online, mobile media, and print campaigns, covering a wide range of subjects from automotive, to animals, landscape, architecture, and everything in between.

Last fall the Chaos Group Team had a chance to meet with Saddington Baynes in London at Bluegfx, where they presented some of their stunning artwork created using Autodesk Maya and V-Ray.  Inspired by their work, we thought it would be great to stop by and capture the studio in action.

With lights and cameras in tow, Chaos Group VP, Lon Grohs and CEO, Peter Mitev, spent the day behind the scenes chatting with the talented Saddington Baynes team.



Saddintong Baynes CEO and Managing Director, Chris Christodoulou, shared how the company evolved from photography to CGI, “We entered the realm of CG about eight years ago when we saw an opportunity to get involved in automotive CGI.  It was starting to have a demand due to a lack of physical prototypes for photography and TV.  We’ve been working with photographers and creative agencies around the world in that time, and we’re very excited at the opportunity to bring our creative skills and photographic knowledge to a new area in the world of 3D.”

INSPIRATION AND TEAM WORK

Our visit with Saddington Baynes provided insight into the team’s mantra, inspiration, and the benefits from adding V-Ray to the studio’s pipeline. “We like creating images that move people, that engage people, that make them smile; and very much our creativity is at the forefront, but we look to find the best possible tools to allow us to express that creativity as much as possible,” says Christodoulou.  “One of the improvements to our processes has been the introduction of V-Ray to the pipeline, to give our artists more flexibility and help us meet some of the really demanding deadlines that we have.  We sometimes have weeks if not days to get very complex imagery at high resolution completed.”

THE BACKSTAGE EXPERIENCE

Creative CGI Director Kevin Vucic-Shepherd explains how V-Ray has become an essential tool for the studio, “V-Ray Proxy was essential for our Gillette project; it would have been impossible with any other piece of software.  V-Ray has been a game-changer for us.  It’s stable, it works, and we’re very happy with it. We’re building up an asset library of V-Ray Proxy objects, and it means we can go from scenes of a certain size to scenes that are vast in comparison, and that’s very exciting for us.  The future is definitely with V-Ray and us.”

Next, we stopped off to speak with CG Lead Yannick Lorvo, and he shared a bit about Saddington Baynes’ workflow using V-Ray RT and Distributed Rendering to accomplish extremely high-resolution images, “The interactivity of RT allows us to set up the light the way we want with real-time feedback.  This way, we can set up a scene very quickly.  When we’re done with lighting and shading development in RT, we use Distributed Rendering and the full power of the farm to render the final image, typically 10K to 20K. The switch to V-Ray allowed us to reduce the production time on our projects.”

Artist Spotlight - Yannick Lorvo

CUSTOMER BENEFITS

In closing Chris Christodoulou adds, “We typically work at 10-12K resolutions, which means our modeling has to be at high level for rendering, and that’s where our photographic knowledge really comes into play.  We need a renderer that can really bring our images to life and give our retouchers all the right ingredients to finish the image off in the ways people expect of us in terms of quality.”

“We’ve experimented with several renderers over the years and each one does different things; but we’ve found that V-Ray has really been helping us on the more complex projects we’ve had recently which involve high-resolution, high-volume imagery that needs complete photographic reality, and that’s very important for us.”

“We’re finding that the increase in media channels has created a demand for imagery greater than there has ever been.  Media needs more images for brands to distinguish themselves from the crowd.  That’s come along at an opportune time as technology and software improvements have helped us as artists create better and better imagery more quickly.”