I am thrilled that I recently had the opportunity to meet with Ms. Albena Ivanova, Director of Media, Entertainment and Strategic Projects at Chaos, a company whose main aim is to ‘democratize the 3D industry.’ With my (now ancient) background in workstation graphics and visualization, I was really amazed at how technology has progressed on so many fronts.
When we met, Ivanova and I covered a lot of territory including new demands for high performance hardware, real-time rendering and raytracing solutions in many industries, new uses for AI, and the speed records AMD and Chaos have broken together.
I admit that I was a little starstruck meeting Ivanova, because Chaos’s landmark rendering technology, V-Ray, has earned many accolades including an Academy Award and an engineering Emmy. V-Ray rendering software has been used to create visual effects for several movies and TV shows such as Iron Man 3 and Game of Thrones.
While Chaos may be more visible for its achievements in entertainment, Ivanova explains that the company works with customers in many industries including architecture, interior design, automotive, aerospace, advertising and product design. As each of these industries evolves, customers face new challenges.
“People [customers] want results faster, [and the ability to do] more iterations” says Ivanova. “We have to respond to those needs,” while also delivering visual effects that are as realistic and accurate as possible.
For example, entertainment has rapidly evolved, in part because of Covid, as consumers have invested in large high-definition flat screens that can rival movie theaters. As a result, TV shows have dramatically increased the quality of their visual effects, explains Ivanova. TV producers use Chaos software to render visual effects and simulate large scenes or whole city blocks quickly. You’re likely unsurprised to learn that realistic simulations of the physical world are a heavy lift!
“This [requires] a lot of geometry, very detailed volumes, a lot of textures, light [sources],” says Ivanova. Rendering these special effects and simulations with speed, accuracy and precision requires high performance hardware, with Chaos solutions optimized for each customer.
Using AI to help customers tackle new challenges is a ‘big focus’ for the company, Ivanova says. “I am happy to say we have already [made] some very good advancements and identified and created optimizations that can help our customers,” she adds.
Chaos has created a team dedicated to AI that collaborates with the company’s Innovation Labs to address customers’ needs and challenges. “We are digging deep to find ways to help artists, designers, architects and engineers [our end user customers] save time.” Saving time means increases in productivity and efficiency while also giving customers more opportunities to innovate.
Chaos offers its customers [and prospective customers] access to a free benchmarking tool to help them assess the CPU and GPU performance of their hardware. Chaos V-Ray Benchmark 6 measures how fast a hardware system--such as AMD EPYC processor-based systems--can render V-Ray workloads.
“We work with many different industries and customers from large enterprises to smaller companies [and individual artists],” Ivanova says. With such a broad spectrum of users, there are many different hardware configurations running Chaos solutions. Customers can work with Chaos to track and optimize the performance of V-Ray and other solutions.
Collaborating with customers is ”the loveliest part of all,” says Ivanova. “It’s always a pleasure to collaborate with them… We might think we’ve delivered something great, but they [customers] come, and they break it.” These experiences ensure that Chaos persistently innovates and learns from their customers to evolve better solutions. Ivanova also insists on being accessible through in person meetings, product testing and online forums. “You have to be sure that you can support every one of those customers in the best possible way.”
Ivanova also told me that she has enjoyed partnering with AMD. “We’ve been collaborating for a long time. I am super happy with the partnership we have.” AMD gives Chaos early access to new generations of its hardware, before their commercial release, “so we can make sure it provides the best possible experience for our customers,” Ivanova adds.
