The Open Doors event will take place on Friday, November 22nd, 2024  starting at 5:00 PM.

This year, we’re thrilled to host a series of presentations by our Crater team and instructors at the Crater Studio theater from 5:00 to 8:00 PM. Throughout the event, you can join us in the school space to talk with instructors, meet course assistants, and chat with our team, who can answer any questions about our programs, enrollment, and what to expect from our courses.

Join us to discover what you can learn in our courses and explore the career paths you can pursue after completing them

Admission is free for all visitors with mandatory registration.

At the Belgrade Houdini User Group #2 we will hang out with Bogdan Amidžić, Pero Lakić, Dimitrije Babović, Nikola Damjanov, and Doca Mladenović, which is organized by CGA Belgrade and our friends from Side FX.

This is a user group for the procedural 3D modeling / animation / VFX / gamedev software …Houdini! The very first Belgrade HUG was held last September as a kick-off event for the CGA annual conference – and we had a blast!

At HUG, everyone is welcome, from Houdini experts to complete beginners who want to get started with Houdini. This group is a mix of visual effects artists, animators, game developers, modelers, VR creators, motion graphics artists, and other CG creators.

See you on March 10 at the Crater Training Center (Knićaninova 3, Belgrade) at 6 p.m.

The masterclass is intended for digital artists with at least a basic understanding of Nuke or Blender. Join in by applying below and know there is no participation fee required.

APPLY HERE

KeenTools: Object and Face Tracking in Nuke with Ease will last up to two hours with Q&A. It starts as soon as November 7th (6 PM CEST), so be quick to apply here to save a seat in Crater.

For those unfamiliar with the tool, KeenTools is a set of tools for Nuke, Blender, and AfterEffects. At the masterclass, you’ll get to know it inside and out, starting from the simple static scene layout to complex facial tracking with capturing expressions and skin surface.

This is a unique opportunity to learn how to use a globally popular node that allows the creation of 3D models of human faces and whole heads based on photos from a guy who actually created it.

Roman Belov started KeenTools to bring the power of state-of-the-art approaches and algorithms to CG artists. He holds a degree in Software Development and Math and has vast experience in Compositing and VFX.

The program was focused on the Unreal Engine 5 workflow and presented a two-month prep process for the sixth edition of the CGA conference – particularly for its online edition. All of the four environments created at the Lab were used in the conference livestream production. It is interesting to note that one of them was simulating a level in a video game, the other a movie set, another one a broadcast studio, and there was an atmospheric “general environment” as we like to call it, too.

Here’s how they all turned out… 

This was the CGA’s very first summer program aimed at students and enter-level artists, yet most importantly, it was an exciting opportunity to create such unique projects with the local CG community.

We filmed the entire ordeal in front of the green screen in the studio of our dear collaborators from Atomic Visual Support, while the magnificent Dane Blačić, CGA’s Technical Director, ensured the smooth experience.

The Lab’s art direction was guided by Dimitrije Miljuš andr Stefan Knežević designed the key visuals. To read more about the program, its mentors and guest lecturers, please visit the Lab’s dedicated page.

Or simply take a final look at our little adventure in its official aftermovie. Enjoy!

The environments premiered on September 23rd, 2022, during the streaming of the conference online program. Almost all the sessions will be available for replay at the CGA’s YouTube channel.

Virtual Environments Lab was organized by Crater Training Center and supported by our friends and sponsors from 3Lateral (Epic Games), Mad Head Games, Case3D Proptech Solutions, Crater Studio, Ubisoft Belgrade, UNA TV.

The theme of this special challenge is – no surprise here – Remodeling the Future. Included in this post is the CGA logo ready to be remodeled in 3D and rendered in an environment of your choice, designed to tell us a story on how you see our future of creative tech..

Imagine yourself as the architect of the future and give us a glimpse into your vision – and where you see the spirit of CGA in it.

The competition is organized as part of CGAcademy track by our team at Crater Training Center.

The applications start on September 23 and will last till December 1st, 2022. The CGA’s jury panel of senior veterans from our partnering companies will select the winner and the competition results will be announced by the end of 2022.

We welcome submissions by all students from Serbia who are enrolled in a computer graphics/ 3D program or course in a government-accredited educational institution. The challenge is open to students with interest in architectural visualization, interior design, VFX, animation, character design, product design, environment, game design, etc. Be sure to read the official competition rules and privacy notice to check that you qualify.

Not exactly. We urge you to combine materials, textures, colors and forms to express your unique vision. We welcome renderings of architecture, designs, inventions, prototypes, media, entertainment, and anything you think can help make your image stand out.

You can use any software to model your vision, but be sure to render in V-Ray or Corona, on any platform with a legitimately acquired license.

If you don’t already have access to V-Ray or Corona as part of your program or course, you can take advantage of free fully featured trials to participate in this student rendering contest (links below).

The works are submitted by the form below. If you have any further questions regarding the competition, please reach out to our team at Crater Training Center via school@craterstudio.com.

Our dear friends from the award-winning studio Mad Head Games have decided to share a scholarship to ONE young artist from the CGA community interested in honing his or her skills in the procedural software Houdini FX. The competition was premiered during the first day of the CGA Belgrade 2022 conference.

The VFX in Houdini course is organized and held at Crater Training Center, starting November 22, but can also be attended online. The lecturer is Bogdan Amidžić, visual effects supervisor and technical director at Crater Studio with over 30 film titles under his belt.

The VFX in Houdini course offers a basic overview of the methodology and tools used to create top dynamic effects as it is done in a genuine professional production environment. Designed to prepare students to create a full-CG VFX shot for both film and gaming, it covers all typical CG tasks necessary to complete a standard VFX render, as well as a level in Unreal Engine. Through the development of the scene, the students learn how to navigate through the complexity of Houdini’s node-based workflow.

The course lasts 13 weeks, and the regular price of the course is 930 euros – meaning this is quite an opportunity for knowledge-hungry 3D artists.

The competition is organized by our school  the training itself will take place, while the Mad Head Games team will decide on the winner of this valuable scholarship based on the answers provided in the application form,

The application deadline is November 1, 2022, at midnight!

The scholarship applies to Serbia-based and Serbian-speaking artists only.

APPLY HERE

We wish you the best of luck.

CGA’s first side-event with Tomskiy behind the wheel starts on September 23, 3 PM CEST at Crater Training Center (Knićaninova 3, Belgrade).

A master class on Camera Composition is designed as a practical lecture so that all the participants will be able to improve their cinematic skills. Tomskiy will dive deep into some of the golden rules of composition, such as, for instance, a “conflict rule” that helps artists create a perfect composition of the frame for any task.

Tomskiy will also talk about the editing process in films and games and share a few tips and tricks on camera animation in UE5. Save a seat in Crater’s classroom for the Camera Composition masterclass by applying via the form below.

Egor Tomskiy is the CEO of the Russia-based Watt Studio. As a former 3D animator, he makes sure that every project reaches high visual and technical levels. Besides nurturing his creative and managerial skills, he is also working as a professional lecturer on CG and 3D Animation at HSE Art and design school in Moscow. He prides himself on being ready to listen and learn from a passionate new generation of artists. Together with his team from Watt Studio he developed the highly praised game called One Day More.

All the reasons why we think he is the best man for the job of teaching you new skills at CGA!

A day after, live at mts Dvorana, Tomskiy will hold a talk on Switching a business to the game development studio in front of the crowd at CGA Belgrade 2022 conference.

Links:

Watt Studio.ru

One Day More (Game)

Life & Workflow of an Indie Studio @ 80LV

Dear VFX artists,

Welcome to the first-ever Belgrade Houdini User Group with Bogdan Amidžić, Nikola Damjanov, Igor Žanić, and Doca Mladenović organized by our friends from Side FX.

This is a user group for the procedural 3D modeling / animation / VFX / gamedev software …Houdini! We welcome everyone, from Houdini experts to complete beginners who want to get started with Houdini. This group is a mix of visual effects artists, animators, game developers, modelers, VR creators, motion graphics artists, etc. While Houdini is the main focus of this group, we will also be discussing other related 3D software and game engine tools.

Join us for this magnificent evening on September 23 in Crater Training Center (Knićaninova 3, Belgrade) starting 6 PM.

Serbia Film Commission and Crater Training Center are proud to announce that the acclaimed compositing guru and director Victor Perez is coming back to Belgrade for the most exciting CG weekend of the year..

On September 25, Perez will hold a 6-hour master class on the use of light in compositing. The event will be held in Crater Training Center starting  from 12:00 to 20:00. The maximum number of participants is 10, therefore, we encourage artists to apply for a chance to attend the master class. 

The selection will be based on the candidate’s professional experience and motivation to jump on board for this exclusive occasion. If chosen to attend the master class, you are obliged  to the participation fee of 70 EUR.

Attending the master class will give you an exclusive opportunity to win a year-long FREE NUKE™ LICENSE, officiated by our friends at Foundry. 

The day before, live at mts Dvorana, Perez will hold an inspiring session on Mind-Mapping Conceptualisation of Light in front of the crowd at CGA Belgrade 2022 conference.

Proceed below to read more about the class’ syllabus and concept.

The goal for the visual effects compositor: Photorealism, or the art of composite layers of images to look coherent using the physics of light at the service of an idea: storytelling. The art of compositing consists in merging two or more images making them look like they have been shot at the same time with the same camera and lenses, under the same lighting conditions. 

Applying the physics of light in a photorealistic environment could not always be artistically synthesized in simple formulas or fixed structures due to the complexity of the light phenomena but understanding the journey a ray of light has taken from its source to get to the screen could lead to a more scientific analysis of the image composition process to replicate and emulate the qualities and artifacts of light as the eye perceive it interpreted by the lens of the camera.

To log the events in the lifetime of a specific ray of light, Victor Perez proposes a Mind Mapping Analysis Structure to translate the physics of light into mathematical operations within Foundry® NUKE™ nodal-based compositor. An articulated system of observation to guide compositing artists in the fantastic odyssey into the invisible.

This course is divided into 2 blocks (3 hours each):

• Primary color transformation operators & decoding of the Characteristic Curve for a target image match
• Secondary overall color operators: understanding brightness, contrast, and saturation & CG
• compositing script structure for replicating lensing artifacts
• Multipass setups and narrative manipulation of light
• Elements of Light & Lighting Qualities Applied in NUKE™
• Integrating NUKE™ CG Relighting Workflow
• The Shadows Workflow

Victor Perez is a film director, creative and visual effects artist with more than 25 years of combined experience, and has worked on many Hollywood films, including The Dark Knight Rises, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, plus many more.

Considered a visual effects compositing guru, his breakthrough work in virtual cinematography on ‘Echo’ earned him a nomination at the Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards in 2019 (the first time in history a short film was considered in this category), in the same year that wins the Italian Academy Award for his work as VFX Supervisor on The Invisible Boy: Second Generation, Victor started his career in the film industry as a photographer and digital compositing artist. He then worked on collaborations as a 2D technical director and consultant where he developed a combination of both artistic and technical understanding of film post production and visual effects from a photorealistic point of view. Today, he designs and oversees the process creation of feature film visual effects as VFX Supervisor.

Milan Ličina is a new media designer and creative technologist from Belgrade. Apart from being hired as a docent on the Faculty of Digital Arts at the Metropolitan University, he is also a part of the innovative collective of Galerija 12. He started his career as a CGI generalist and today celebrates his anniversary of work in the industry. It is for these reasons that it is a huge honor that Milan joined Crater’s assembly hall this spring in a role of a lecturer on a course that explores the possibilities of a powerful tool that is Unreal Engine..

You are most likely to find Milan on long walks with his dog around Belgrade, at an interesting exposition, or in a tight crowd of a concert, especially if you love post-black metal (with a slice of the Doom gaze). And it is without a doubt that you will, in any aforementioned situations, find a common topic to talk about for ages. This is exactly what we have done, marking the end of the summer semester at Crater.

– I graduated in the design of industrial products and graphic design from Belgrade Polytechnic. I chose interactive media as my major above all else because I wanted to specialize in design and technology, which was becoming more and more interesting to me when I was a student. At that time a few relevant festivals have been popping up, such as Resonate, that were frequently visited by artists that were connecting technology and computer sciences with art. It wasn’t long before I followed in their footsteps because, as an industrial designer, I was taught to design the form and function of a product that is first and foremost useful, as well as highly esthetic. Graphic design has taught me to visually communicate my ideas, and then somehow combine them into product design, resulting in interactivity. I’ve always had a nick for mashing things together to see what happens, just like Rocket Raccoon said: “We could just get it first and improvise”.

– Creative technologist is a designer that has mastered the technical-technological aspects of the industry in which he can create and participate in both processes – art and technical. Or, it is a programmer with high visual sensibility. In the world of new media, this is a title that combines Technical Design and Technical Art positions, which is especially common in the industry of video games and visual effects, but it also brings with itself certain creative and art decisions.

– For years I have been a part of the content creation team at Galerija 12, where I was working as a generalist. But as my interests were leaning towards experimentation in technology development, testing the boundaries of what technology has to offer, and using that to create those unique scene-visual experiences of ours. With this, my role was changing accordingly. Today I am a part of the research and development process, as well as integration, where the usage of a gaming engine is more than useful. Transitioning to real-time graphics was the next logical step.

– Unity was my native engine, but at that moment when Unreal Engine 4 became available to everybody, getting familiar with that kind of technology was a no-brainer for me. Contrary to popular opinion, for me, the same set of rules applies for both of them, because for me as an artist it is key to work modularly and to have an insight into the scalability of the project, which is something both engines provide. Unreal Engine, even though free, comes with a certain set of rules that not every client is ready to comply with. Unity is however directed at a completely different angle and that engine is much easier to optimize. I would say that the creators of these two tools realized that they can’t go against each other, and instead opted for aiming for filling in two different needs in the market.

– Blueprints, without a doubt! The specificity of this course is that the students got a chance to talk to somebody who does visual and interactive programming firsthand. With that said, I use engines for the necessity of creating an interactive design, in other words, I am not developing video games, but rather activations. When I manage to show that you don’t necessarily have to build a shooter game in the engine, but rather activate anything and everything in your virtual set, people are quite pleased. Even though my making is not focused on gaming, the logic and mechanic used in games is absolutely the same as the activation logic that I use in my professional work, having just a different output. Whether you are working on an exhibition or a video game, the mechanics that are utilized on the project are identical. 

– The students had very positive feedback on the procedural design as well. I’ve shown them how to generate terrain and texture it automatically by parameterization of certain values because the outcome of the course has been set in a way that by completing the course, students can become generalists, which I regard as a big advantage considering that I have worked as a CGI generalist for plenty of years.

– The energy of the group was really good. We had students with almost no prior experience, as well as trained professionals who have been working in the industry for 15 to 20 years, and they all had a common goal of expanding their knowledge and wanting to hear what a fellow colleague in the industry has to say on their native tongue. They all knew how to create something, and how to model, but they were interested in how an experienced professional approaches obstacles because we are not all starting from the same position when beginning a new project. I was blown away by the fact that there were no feelings of being lesser than others in the group when it was to happen that a student isn’t familiar with something. They were all supporting one another, and have insisted that every term gets a further explanation even if it is not directly tied to Unreal Engine, but plays an important role in the process.

– People with the least experience that arrived like tabula rasa have shown to be the most diligent by the middle of the course. They improved significantly faster because they have invested time between classes to further educate themselves. The width of the knowledge they have received has further surpassed the reason they enrolled in the first place because they got my 10 years of experience condensed, which is something I can say with zero prepotencys.

– I think that the biggest challenge was to get them adjusted to my tempo. This is not regarding speed, but the fact that Unreal Engine Essentials is not a project-orientated course. It was created with the goal of helping students understand how the tool operates, and all that it offers so they can ask further questions, give it purpose and create their own challenges. There were a few people that came to the course to create their own pipelines for their studios, one student that works in the army had amazing questions regarding optimization, and we had one teenager that was connecting the dots rather impressively. One student, an archaeologist, enrolled intending to create a visualization of a monastery that he had 3D scanned because he sees amazing potential in applying real-time graphics for materializing the worlds that once existed – which is somewhat in line with what I do. They all actually came here so their careers would benefit from Unreal, but somewhere along the way, they realized that they can advance on a personal level too, make some of their ideas come true, and it was beautiful to witness that.

– Whatever job they are doing today, we have come to a point where there is no stagnation. If you want to be up-to-date, and fair to yourself, you will always follow trends. Never should you stop studying, only switch the aspect of what you are studying, but you cannot allow yourself to not be up to date in your field, whether that would be CGI or something else. In this day and age with the internet, it’s possible to connect with people that are doing similar things or ones you see as high-quality coworkers or influencers. 

– In our industry, you ought to keep up to date with metahumans technology because that’s a very interesting way of speeding up and automatizing certain things. I am under the impression that locally we are the least “suppled” when it comes to animation and rigging – purely because we don’t have enough specialists in these fields. On the other hand, we have a local product that supplies them. MetaHuman, a tool developed by 3Lateral, a team that recently joined the Epic family, is not just a success story, but a story about the fact that we have a local team that developed globally successful software for motion capture/ facial animation capture that needs to be studied from. One should keep an eye for their next product because they obviously are masters at their craft.

– If we are talking about formal education, I am still at the precipice of a doctorate degree, only having left the doctorate exhibition and dissertation 🙂

– The first big project that I participated in was the world tournament in drone racing, World Drone Prix 2016 when this whole industry was expanding. All of our exhibitions that are currently active, and by that I mostly refer to our section at the Museum of the Future in Dubai, represent the crown of our collective creative and productional strain.

– We are always trying to achieve the next level of visual quality on these projects, and the fundamental goal is what we actually want to achieve with a creative concept. Probably the biggest satisfaction of this job is to see the attendees truly believe they are there at those places due to the credibility of production and the quality of the narrative. When that resonates with them, they display emotions just like when they attend a theater play or a concert, which means that, above all else, they learned something new about themselves.

– I was blown away by a recently held exhibition of needlepoint at the Ethnographic museum. When you take a look at how someone used media like sewing and puncturing as a means of creating highly complex compositions, it’s fascinating. When it comes to interactive exhibitions, I really liked the Saudi Arabia Pavilion and Switzerland at the Dubai Expo. Both states have demonstrated their heirloom intellectually, with a lesser usage of technology. The swiss received an award as a state with the most innovations, and they presented this highly simplistic through the motive of drops – because for them ideas are dropping everywhere. The Saudi Arabia Pavillion is, on the other hand, completely high-tech, but was based on an intelligent concept. They used ornaments that are present in their folklore, but the final impression was that we are entering the vision of Saudi Arabia itself like it’s some sort of introspective exhibition, which was a breath of fresh air.