Speakers & Talks - 2024
Talks are split between pub-floor sessions which are for the entire event audience to see, and individual room sessions which will go in parallel, so participants can choose their preferred content. Talk topics vary, but the underlying idea is to have world-class experts share insight into their processes, latest technology achievements, unique and important projects and similar.
These were the speakers at EUE ReConnect 2024:
Boyo Frederix
Animals, Zombies… and Spiders
Back by popular demand is Boyo Frederix, from Postoffice Amsterdam!
He specializes in VFX for the international ad market, and works on many types of visual effects, with the emphasis on creatures and animals.
Given all that, we think the title says enough about the talk, and based on previous experience, we’re sure it will once again be a talk full of real-life lessons and valuable info.
XAPKOHHEH
A Random Topic
There’s two things we never manage to get from him, and that’s a bio that isn’t completely crazy, and the other is a ‘normal’ photo. But we don’t discriminate here at EUE ReConnect, so we’ll work with what we have.
Now, as for the talk …
Us: We need a talk title and description.
XAPKOHHEH: It’s A Random Topic.
Us: Is that like the title?
XAPKOHHEH: It can be.
Us: Okay, we can work with that.
So there you go. We’re guessing it has to do with randomization of something.
But you know as much as we do.
Stanley Brusse
Bigger is Better
We’re thrilled to introduce Stanley Brusse, a dynamic force in the world of VFX and Archviz. With over 15 years of accumulated expertise, Stanley’s journey began with a fascination for computers that led him to tinker, break, and subsequently fix them. This hands-on experience fueled his passion for understanding the intricacies of technology.
Graduating from a film school in Belgium and later self-taught, Stanley has continuously pushed the boundaries of the technical aspects of VFX and Archviz. His curiosity and skills with cameras have driven him to explore and innovate in the field of 3D tracking through his work with 3dtrack.io and in photogrammetry with raw-textures.com
Stanley’s presentation will review his extensive experience and the latest advancements he’s been pioneering. Expect insights into the cutting-edge techniques and tools he’s developed, offering a glimpse into the future of visual effects and architectural visualization. Prepare to be inspired by Stanley’s passion for technology and his relentless pursuit of innovation.
Vladimir “Vlado” Koylazov
Latest Developments at the Chaos Innovation Lab
I’m sure many of you are wondering what the future of 3D graphics is. Well, considering the last few decades, it turns out the future gets to be pretty much whatever this guy decides to code.
In case there is some person somewhere who doesn’t know who this is – officially, Vladimir “Vlado” Koylazov is a co-founder of Chaos and is the co-author of V-Ray. V-Ray has been honored with Emmy® and Academy Awards® for its role in the widespread adoption of ray-traced rendering for motion pictures and television.
Unofficially, Vlado is well… Vlado. We wanted to write a classic introduction, but whatever we came up felt kinda awkward, so we’ll just say it – he’s back at ReConnect yet again, and we are, of course, beyond happy to have him.
He will tell us about some of the latest projects underway at the Chaos Innovation Lab, including real-time rendering for virtual production, and applications of machine learning to various artist workflows.
Ilja Wijnker
Virtual Production When You’re Not ILM
Ilja is a 3D generalist from The Netherlands. She has been refining her master’s thesis in Breda for so long that she’s practically the campus mascot. So beware if you engage her in conversation – she might just pick your brain empty!
When the weekend rolls around, Ilja loves to unwind with a jigsaw puzzle and a cup of tea from her collection of mugs that could probably cause a cabinet collapse. But on those weekends when she’s not channeling her inner grandma, you’ll find her zipping around on a motorcycle, seeking out hidden nature spots across the Netherlands.
In her talk, “Virtual Production When You’re Not ILM” Ilja will delve into the hazards, hassles, hurdles – basically all the troublesome H-words you can think of – involved in tackling a Virtual Production/Stagecraft project with a small team of 13 people. As a 3D generalist, she’s all too familiar with the curse of juggling multiple roles.
During this project, she handled creature creation, environment design, lighting, stage setting, and real-time creature motion-capture on the LED screen… just to name a few. Join Ilja to discover how her team managed to pull it all off – or didn’t. After all, success is a matter of perspective!
Roy Nieterau
A Bright Future Ahead With USD
As the caffeinated Technical Director, Roy Nieterau wrangles code and coaxes the team at Colorbleed to have their digital characters tango to their hearts’ content. Imagine Shakespeare scripting pixels, sleep-deprived yet splendidly insane, orchestrating the polygonal ballet.
Even outside of work, Roy lives half-in half-out the world of code editors mangling open-source ASCII code into binary executables.
There’s an ongoing prophecy saying that USD is the best thing yet since the invention of sliced bread. As Technical Director (or really the one nerd) at Colorbleed, Roy will be taking you along on their journey of adopting USD into the open-source pipeline AYON. He will discuss the highs and lows showing what you may encounter wen transitioning to USD, discuss what it brings (is it worth it?) but best of all you can join some shared frustrations of working with USD. He will bring a keyboard that we can all smash together just after.
Roy will share some of their USD workflow development before taking it in production and lead you through how to adapt production for a small team using USD. But really, we’re all just there for the keyboard smashing.
Nikola Jankovicova
& Tomas Misura
EPIC GAMES
Creating a Digital Twin for Virtual Production with RealityCapture
Nikola has a robust background in aviation, and her mission at Epic Games has been leading the expansion of aerial photogrammetry and pushing Unreal Engine into new verticals such as simulation, healthcare, energy, AECO, and virtual prototyping. She is a seasoned speaker at major simulation events including ITSEC, P3DL, and IT2EC, and various Epic Games-hosted events.
Since 2016, Tomas has been at the forefront of a VR multi-user software solutions start-up, developing VR games, and advancing robotic machine vision projects tailored for Industry 4.0 environments and leading teams and projects that have digitized a vast array of cultural heritage assets – from tiny historic coins to castles.
Currently serving as the Technical Project Manager at Epic Games’ Capturing Reality team, Tomas oversees the development of RealityCapture technology and its related products. With a deep understanding of transforming 2D images into detailed 3D models, Tomas continues to push the boundaries of digital reality.
Their talk is titled “Creating a Digital Twin for Virtual Production with RealityCapture” and here’s what they say about it: “What happens with movie sets after the shooting is done? Even though the cost of these assets might skyrocket to several millions of dollars, when the show is over, they are usually destroyed. There is another way: Using RealityCapture, you can create and preserve unique digital twins for eternity.”
Personally, we’re excited to bring in photogrammetry to the ReConnect loop since historically we didn’t have a lot of those kinds of talks.
Zap Andersson
AUTODESK
OpenPBR
The one and only Zap Andersson is back with a vengean… wait… no… He’s back with a talk, yes.
What is there to say about this guy that isn’t already part of CG legends? From mental images to Nvidia to Autodesk, he’s done everything rendering and shader related and then some. Statistically, if you’re into any kind of 3D graphics, we think there might be a greater chance than not, that you’re using something he worked on at some point.
Or as they say in one episode of Corridor Crew: “You don’t know who Zap Andersson is? Man, he’s like… The Brad Pitt of CG!”
We think that says it all.
He’ll be talking about OpenPBR, the standard that came to be when Autodesk and Adobe suddenly realized both are developing the exact same thing. No joke. Knowing Zap, we have no doubt it’s gonna be awesome, fun, educational and who knows what else.
Ovidiu Stanciu
Crafting Culture: A Decade at The Image Factory
We’re excited to have Ovidiu Stanciu among this year’s speakers.
Graduating architecture at the peak of an economic recession was a bummer for Ovidiu. But, unwilling to give up his dreams, he packed his bags and a scholarship and headed for a two-year master’s programme at TUDelft. He would return to Romania stronger and wiser, ready to shape its towns and cities.
As it often happens, in a combination of choice and no choice, life took a different path. Shortly after graduating from TUDelft, he turned towards 3D visualization when he joined the Rotterdam studio Beeldenfabriek. Over a 10-year transformational adventure for the company and himself, the 3d artist became the art director.
In his talk, “Crafting Culture: A Decade at The Image Factory”, he’ll be talking about how transitioning from a 3D artist role into an art director role came with entirely new challenges and a deeper understanding of own strengths and limitations. Working with images became working with people, focusing on shaping roles, creating processes and eventually crafting a new organizational culture.
This is a story about learning, fostering strong relations and ultimately about belonging.
Jonathan de Blok
Training Ad-Hoc AI Networks to Get S#it Done
We’re proud to have Jonathan de Blok on board. Jonathan is a very Technical Artist that will definitely write some code if a button needs pressing more than once. Has been known to tinker with hardware, electronics and has been working on CGI since the mid nighties, trailblazing automated cloud rendering on AWS before it was a common thing. He does pipeline development for various studios and writes a lot of opensource tools. He has grown up in 3dsMax town and about eight years ago moved to the suburbs of Houdini and Unreal. Takes the occasional break away from the keyboard by getting his hands dirty while swapping engines in offroad vehicles and searching for broken driveshaft parts while knee deep in mud.
This will be a talk based on findings from the AI R&D rabbit hole, distilled from coffee stained notes full of incoherent sentences about designing, training and using custom small scale AI for solving fluffy production problems and other random surprises that usually pop up at the worst of times. Aiming for a point where creating some ad-hoc AI will be as commonplace, and similar in effort, as writing a few lines of code. Brush up on your python and math skills before entering, Houdini knowledge will make this talk easier to understand but it’s not required.
Tim van Helsdingen
Houdini Setups for Concert Visuals
We’re proud to have Tim van Helsdingen back with yet another interesting and inspiring talk!
[Fun fact: EUE 2015 was the edition where he met people that inspired him to start learning Houdini. He’s been going ever since. His words, not ours. We don’t like to blow our own horn, except sometimes we do.]
Tim hails from the home of EUE: Utrecht (just outside of it anyways). To keep things interesting, Tim loves to do many different things, advertising, concert visuals, the occasional movie, teaching, as long as it seems like a fun project, he’s down with it. As an independent Houdini artist he helps create epic FX or other types of CG for various studios around the world. As a teacher he loves teaching this craft to the next generation through his YouTube channel, workshops, or presentations at events such as EUE.
In his talk “Houdini Setups for Concert Visuals”, he’ll be talking about creating a whole bunch of visuals for a concert tour of an undisclosed artist. And he’ll tell you all about it. Fields of hundreds of thousands of flowers? No problem! Awesome rigid body sims? Ain’t nothin’ but a peanut. He’ll be going over a bunch of the Houdini setups he had to build and the technical difficulties he had to overcome.
Jakub Čech
Photorealistic Surface Digital Twins
Jakub is many things, a passionate researcher of photorealism, a builder, thinker and doer who has his eye keenly pointed towards the future of digital materials and digital twins… But if asked to put it all in one sentence, he’d say: “Forever chasing fidelity” which, knowing him, sounds just about right.
Currently he’s the CTO at Mode Maison and leading the development of Total Material Appearance Capture ecosystem (or TMAC for short). Previously he was an Art Director in CGI / 3D for premiere developments and a passionate Archviz Artist.
In his presentation “Photorealistic Surface Digital Twins” he’ll be talking about TMAC (https://tmac.dev/), the ecosystem of hardware and software for Total Material Appearance Capture they created at Mode Maison, made for rapid suface appearance acquisition and seamless tile creation, specially tailored for home industries (furniture, wall coverings and the like).
Karim Mousa El Ramly
MOZSES
Between Architecture and Filmmaking
Karim is an Architect/Film maker/ex Taekwondo international champ. (yep, you read that right. so you better laugh at his jokes, and clap when necessary, or else…)
He’s got over two decades of experience art directing internationally recognized projects, where he worked with a multitude of high-profile names: KPF, Zaha Hadid, BIG, SOM, Woods Bagot… You name it.
Concept communication and exploration of ideas define the core of his work, which is all about custom creation of visual directions, 3D animation and experiences. While striving to unfold different design identities and connect narratives, he emphasizes the fabric of every unique project, so as to have a fingerprint of its own. His expertise of art directing multicultural and diverse scale projects has been forged over many years of work and dedication to each and every project.
Karim’s passion towards filmmaking and his expertise in 3D animation has led him to invest a lot of effort and time in translating his vision and experience into combining the art of storytelling, emotive visual experiences and building virtual worlds, providing an immersive storytelling experience throughout short movies and animations. And that’s what he’ll be talking about.
[okay, we added the mandatory laugh joke, couldn’t resist, but ReConnect management guarantees his talk will be perfectly safe to attend. ]
