Interview with Vyonyx studio

Hello!

Let me please introduce Adam Hotovy and Vladin Petrov – guys from London based visualization studio Vyonyx.
Vyonyx is well-known all around the world for their highly emotive visualizations and for their unique style which motivates thousands of artists and studios. I would say you have already seen at least one of their images, because architectural studios always try to present their proposals to the world in the best possible way. Vyonyx is the right way, when 100% success is needed.

Vladin is with Vyonyx from “Day One” when they started the company together with Christian, Deyan and Nikolay. They are all creative people and they’re all involved in production because they love what they do and they want to change things- how people produce images and how people regard images.
Adam is a senior artist at Vyonyx since 2009 and has a keen interest in SW, renderers and networking.

Hello guys! My name is Matus and I would like to thank you for this great opportunity to do the interview with you. Thanks for finding some time in your schedule, which must be quite packed, being full of interesting projects.

We would like to thank you for the opportunity to answer your questions and represent whole Vyonyx team.

First of all – I was wondering, what does “Vyonyx” mean? Whose idea was it originally?

Do things always have to be called by a name? As children, we first learn how to put sounds together and only later we become aware that sounds can have a very specific meaning. It was Nikolay Salutski, one of our directors, who came up with the name after days of heavy brainstorming. The beauty of it is that is does not have any specific, attached meaning and is open to interpretations- you can say sound is autonomous from language – it is not a word with a-priory meaning attached to it, it is a kind of a “before language”. Who knows, maybe one day in the future it will receive a meaning, just like “to google” became a synonymous with search.
We were mesmerised not only by the sound of the name but its visual impact as well- there’s certain symmetry in it and also a sense of a visual harmony in the arrangement of the letters.

When I took a look at some websites of other visualisation studios, I noticed that their websites are full of their projects, packed with interactive galleries. What kind of advertising do you prefer? How do clients find you?

Adam: Well, I suppose that this would be a good question for Vladin, but I will try to answer it. Clients usually come directly to us thanks to recommendations and well-established relations within industry. Vyonyx partners have more than 50 years of combined experience in leading design practices and that already tells a lot. The only thing that I can say towards our website is that almost every person in the studio has got slightly different opinion about how our website should look. But we all agree that our website should look more like a communication hub for connecting people interested in Vyonyx, and in architecture and visualization in general. It is definitely not a sales channel.

Do your clients want you to follow their style of presentations, or is it just your decision and can you create freely?

Vladin: We are lucky to have clients that come to us because they already know our work and they like our approach. But then, time and again, we have difficult situations when a client comes and expects us to copy our own work. As Robert Bresson once nicely put it,-”is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?”
Usually we start with a loose Photoshop sketch, in a way testing ideas, compositions, colour schemes. In a way, we put the clients to the test as well – how deep are they prepared to go into the realm of the unexpected and the unconventional? As the project evolves, we always keep previous versions of the image and sometimes it is one of these early WIP (work in progress) images that goes into our portfolio and not the final result that the client signed off.

Do you categorize your clients into any groups? Are there visible differences in their approach, so you can clearly say you are not going to cooperate with some of them anymore after first images produced, or do you always say YES?

Vladin: We are getting calls from all types of different people with all their different ideas and desires. Some of them are open-minded people, well educated in architecture and visual arts; others are great “Avatar” fans. There’s nothing bad about liking James Cameron’s movies, however the point I want to make here is that too many people these days have developed passive viewing habits; they are after instant euphoric satisfaction- cheap looking sparkles, explosions and “bling”.
Some clients see us as collaborators, as a part of their team and they trust our judgement; others think we are a discount supermarket or a fast-food chain.
There’s seldom an absolute freedom of expression, especially when money is in play, but we do have the freedom to choose people and companies we decide to work with. There are different factors to consider in business like, for instance, supply and demand, mutual respect, sharing of ideas, creative freedom and of course, profitability. Sometimes we advise our clients to go with any China-based visualisation company of their choice – Chinese do better fireworks than us, you know.

Any “clients from hell?”

Adam: I think that every company has got them, so do we. But it would be unprofessional to mention their names here. So those hair-raising stories will be kept safe in our minds. We love to collect quotes from clients and for now I will give you one which made us laugh out loud and I quote “ I’m not sure what you’ve done but I can’t say that I like it” we have a collection of these types of quotes that prove very entertaining reading!
Vladin: You see, we are like the doctors- we won’t reveal your deceases to the outside world.

Simple question: PC or MAC?

Adam: And not that simple short answer. It is PC in my case!
I have to admit that I do like the design of many apple products, but I do not like their value-price ratio and their dictatorship rules in basically everything they do… Apple creates platforms, which are not free or open, nor they are supportive enough for independent developers and it doesn’t matter how much they are trying to mask it. Their obsession with control, starting with only one distribution channel for music / movies /applications, having to pay to become a developer or the need to get access if you want to distribute free applications drives me a little bit mad. Their acclaimed fight to a better and a more open world is just a nice bit of marketing on surface which goes to a deeper, proper money-making core. But I could imagine buying a Mac as a home computer for my mum – as an email and web-browsing machine. Macs unification makes it easy to maintain and solve problems, but surely unification also kills creativity and curiosity. So what do you prefer?
It’s so funny watching their first iconic TV advert “1984″ directed by Ridley Scott, where a heroine throws the hammer towards a massive screen the same moment as “Big Brother” says “we shall prevail!”. To see today all those people waiting in a queues for days just to get hands on almost exactly the same-looking gadgets overpriced phones, mp3 players… just to get that invisible sticker saying “ I am a cool person”.
These queues really remind me of those masses of people of ambiguous gender marching in unison through tunnels and listening to the voice of Big Brother- the one you can hear at the beginning of the advert…. Times have changed- today Big Brother on (the) screen is Steve Jobs giving another speech during another keynote about starting just another revolution in everything…

In short, I prefer PC and I can happily live with the feeling that I am not a cool kid.

Do “Secret / Non-Public” projects take a big part of your portfolio? Is it possible to say an approximate
percentage?

Vladin: Indeed, at least 70% of all images we produce are stamped as “top secret” by the client mainly for different political reasons, like competition not being won, fear of attacks and protests from the public and NGAs (Non disclosure agreements) over a controversial scheme, poor design not worth showing etc. Sad as it is, but unfortunately, a great deal of our most exciting work never gets published or credited!

How powerful is your in-house render farm? Do you render your projects in-house or do you think that online render farms are the better solution? Which approach is in your opinion more important – trying to get full control over render process or to minimize the time? (What are the advantages and disadvantages of online render farm and in-house rendering in your studio?)

Adam: I am not sure about the exact specs of our render farm, but I think most of the machines must be 12-18 months old. Actually, the specs of the render farm blades aren’t that an important factor for us, because we mainly work on visuals based on simple renders. So what we really do care about is high specs workstations. That’s because before sending any kind of job to the render farm, you would do a lot of little tests locally… Most of the machines are completely tailored by our IT manager – admin and “HARDWARE GOD” José Olivares-Hatch. Btw, I would like to give him a little applause here!
We use our render farm mainly for rendering animations and Vue renderings, and advantages are obvious. There is no need to pack whole projects, collect all resources and data and send those gigabytes over internet to online render farm and then getting another bunch of gigabytes of data back from render farm… And disadvantages? In short – high electricity usage, cooling issues and constant maintenance needed.

Vladin, you are one of the founding partners of Vyonyx. Could you please tell us, what was the most difficult step for starting to create the company? Was it hard for you to persuade your clients that you are the best choice for their projects? What was the hardest part of it all?

Vladin: I would say, the hardest bit was, and still is, to acquire all those vital business and managerial skills you need to possess in order to run a successful company and at the same time not lose you artistic skills.

Vladin, what do you think is nowadays better for young starting visualization studios (regarding software or hardware)? There are tons of programs/accessories – which of them are the most useful? Do you think that the best-known programs are a good solution, or are there any “rising stars” worth to be mentioned?

Vladin: We are trying to be as much as possible a software-independent studio and not to rely too much on technology to do the creative job for us. There is some truth in the words of Aldous Huxley, the author of “Brave New World”, who believed that people “adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”. My advice to young starters would be – don’t follow trends and leaders, be the one who creates trends. Maybe, at least for us at Vyonyx, that’s our way of being successful, rejecting this technological determinism. In our work we rely a lot on Photoshop and we use it as a modern painting tool, not just for colour grading. With Photoshop we feel in control of the software and not the other way around. Usually we use 3D just as a “backbone”, usually to get out a very basic rendering, which we then manipulate and enhance in Photoshop.

Adam: I would like to answer this question into a bit more depth and describe it from a day-to-day production viewpoint. I really do like to test and play with interesting new software. That is the fun bit, and right after that comes the reality part, which means that I will try to put this new software package into my creative process, get some info about application background and possible future usefulness in my work. Basically, I would consider, if new features in that application are worth the results and time spent on learning it, switching from one app to another and learning new shortcuts, sorting out bugs and hardware issues. I have to say that a year ago I was really enthusiastic about all GPU rendering and all. However I am reaching more and more to the conclusion that it is just marketing hype and these kinds of solutions are useful to a very small group of people, like product designers and maybe some interior architects. But I don’t think it is really ready for any mid or big scale projects. Maybe in a few years’ time, when hardware will be more powerful and GPU rendering will get out of its infancy and into its teenage years, it will proof itself as a useful and possibly a “must-have” tool for most of the people in the industry.
My day-to-day tools are definitely Photoshop and 3ds max with lots of scripts from scriptspot.com and I shouldn’t forget to mention Neil Blevins Soulburn Scripts which I am using extensively on a daily basis.
From rendering point of view we fluently swap between Vray or Mental Ray, we also extensively use VuexStream and from time to time we do play with Maxwell or Fryrender. All I can say in the end is that you are able to achieve same results in almost every rendering package, it only depends on how many buttons and switches you like to press and which render engine you find more intuitive. For me it is Vray for the other half of the studio is Mental Ray, for Vladin it can be Photoshop or Scanline. It depends on your taste and on your ability to drive your software and not be driven by the software. For massive-scale projects our choice of use is Vue and for realistic light simulators I would personally prefer Fryrender to Maxwell – simply because it is not three separate apps and it has got UI, which seems more user-friendly to me. Speed is irrelevant for both of them. One last application which is my personal favourite, and I would like to find the way how to implement it into my image creating process, is Corel Painter – really stunning piece of software worth checking out.

About Your visualizations:

According to many people you are the best, you are the inspiration for thousands of visualisers all around the world. But I have a question – Who or what is the inspiration for you? Where is your source for getting it? Do you also get inspired by any other studios or freelancers, whose work you admire?

Vladin: You see, in art when comparing artists, the word “the best” is not applicable. Who was “the best” – Matisse or Chagall? How do you compare an apple to a pear? Art is a very subjective thing, you know. Only some technical aspects of artists’ work can be compared – the innovativeness of Leonardo da Vinci’s compositions compared to his peer artists who were still living the International gothic style, for example. In terms of the technical aspect of our work we are far away from being the best, because we are not interested to compete for “the best rendered glass” award. We strive to be less technical and more artistic.

Adam: Of course we are inspired by other artist, photographers, film makers, music and nature… My all time favourite’s archviz are the guys at Luxigon, MIR and Labtop. This artistry-superior triangle has been sitting in my head for a couple of years now. Their work is truly inspiring. I also like arch photography from Kim Høltermand and works of my friend Nick Rochowski. I really admire Kim’s compositions and his sense for color. Another great source of inspiration for me is movies. Good ones. The kinds of movies, which will not let you sleep for days, because you keep on thinking about them. It’s a real pity that to find such a movie nowadays, as we are constantly being bombarded by high-octane Hollywood nonsense, is much harder than in the sixties or the seventies… maybe it is harder because it’s more difficult to get your hands on proper LSD these days… who knows.

Vladin, It took a long time to make your pipeline accurate and perfect as it is nowadays. Which aspect of your workflow do you think is the most important? Is it colour/overall feeling/relish/composition/perfect 3D modelling, or anything else?

Vladin: Yes, all these things are equally important to make an image “work” – composition, colours, a good 3D model. Passion and emotions is what art is all about. We rely a lot on intuition and spur-of-the moment improvisations in our workflow- they bring an element of the unexpected – you don’t know how the image is going to come out in the end. Every image requires a singular approach; it is a unique case with no ready-made formulas. “Omit unnecessary and superfluous details and look at the bigger picture” is another principle we always try to sell to our clients.

In this pipeline, are there specialists for 3D modelling, texturing, or postproduction? Or does each member of your team work on the whole pipeline process if needed?

Adam: There is nothing like station-to-station pipeline and I am very happy that at Vyonyx people can do every part of the production they feel they can handle. It is actually encouraged that you try to get involved in as many individual tasks as you can and that you work on your image from start to finish. Vyonyx nurtures an environment that creates artists and not technicians, vertex pushers or pixel monkeys. All your artistic abilities are put to the test on real projects under supervision of the partners or senior colleagues. You never feel alone during the creation process, there is always someone ready to help you, even if you are a junior “freshman”, helping you to push your artistic skills to a higher level.
It might sound like cheap propaganda on some corporate archviz website, but this is the reality at Vyonyx.

Do you also work on small architecture visualizations like residences, family houses, or even product design, or does your work consist only of huge projects like masterplans, stadiums, harbors and stuff like this?

Vladin: Believe it or not, we don’t shy away from smaller projects at all and from time to time we do work on very small residential bijoux. However, developments of that scale rarely require our expertise as they are usually on a very tight budget and perfectly manageable by one-man companies. Big master plan projects is one of our biggest strengths.

What about having fun in Vyonyx? Do you have any internal Vyonyx competitions, or visualization battles? What can someone get if they win? Or are these competitions only for fun with no purpose of winning any prize?

Adam: Every month we have an anonymous “image of the month” vote, the whole studio votes on their favourite image and the winner gets all the kudos from the team and gets the privilege to have his picture framed on our “Wall of Fame” :) We also did a Quicksilver competition last year which was pretty successful; maybe we should do it again. Quick silver is a service we offer our clients with tight budgets and time constraints, so it’s an image produced in a day with minimum data. Also let’s not forget our in house table tennis tournaments and beer Wednesdays! We also take the whole studio to see the latest CGI spectacular and recently we were at the IMAX in London to see TRON 3D. As well as visiting interesting galleries and exhibitions suggested by the team when deadlines allow!

Do you cooperate with other studios, or are your relations based on competitive character? If you have any cooperations, which studios are worth it?

Vladin: If you would visit our website, you will notice that we like sharing ideas and creative content with the community and we are not scared of the competition. Competition is good. We cooperated with Luxigon on a project some time ago and there is a lot you can learn from Eric&Cie! Yes, we are great fans of Luxigon. We also have a good connection with many of the London based Archviz studios. We often attend the 3D MAX London forum evenings hosted by Simon Moir of Eric Khune Associates – CivicArts, where you will find many of London’s studio artists presenting and talking about their work.

Vladin, you are one of the Vyonyx founding partners. What are your big future plans for the studio? Do you want to tell our readers about any new unreached borders you want to achieve?

Vladin: We are not much into planning, especially in terms of a brighter future. We like to improvise. To be given the chance and the inspiration to try more new stuff and techniques would be great. An image should give space for interpretations by the viewer and not be realistically authoritarian. You should let the viewer’s imagination fill in the missing bits in the picture- this will provoke him and will challenge him. So, the image should always look unfinished.

Can you define the lowest skills and abilities people should have before applying for a job at Vyonyx? What is the most important factor in your decisions?

Vladin: Lowest skills in terms of computer skills – they should know how to use Windows. Knowledge of Photoshop is a bonus. In terms of artistic skills, well, we’d like to see good understanding of composition and perspective, colour and light harmony, show at least an interest in architecture. Good taste is important. We would not hire people who do not share our views and ideas on art and architecture; people who do not like to learn and try new stuff, do not like change.

Adam, can you tell us, how did you get into Vyonyx? What skills/experiences were you supposed to have that time? What do you think was the main reason why they gave you this job, which of your abilities persuaded them to choose you?

Adam: Well Vyonyx was on my radar since the very beginning of the company. But at that time I was thinking that my portfolio didn’t reflect my skills. So, besides my regular archviz images I did a few badly paid jobs as a freelancer, where I was able to try different techniques and have more fun. Then I simply waited for a position to become available in the jobs section at Vyonyx. I went to the interview and after a short presentation and longer discussions I found that Vyonyx was the right place for me. A few days later I got a life-changing email from Vladin.

What could you recommend to potential applicants for Vyonyx? What do you think helped you the most? Please give our readers any advice that might be useful to them :)

Adam: My advice to all potential applicants is not to be afraid to go their own direction and style. It is possible, that your style will not be the “right one” for many average clients, but who wants to be getting average clients and to be working on average projects anyway? Remember, that you usually get the type of clients you deserve. If you create your own style, based on observation and it influences other people’s work, you are on the right track. If you take direction of the masses and turn 180 degrees, only time will prove that your decision was correct. There is only one warning I would like to give to all young artists. Read and study good tutorials – that is a good thing to do, BUT please, do not take every word in tutorials as the right and ONLY way to do things. Learn new techniques or just absorb all the best bits that suit you do not try to remember and replicate every step in these tutorials. Because in the end you will become just another PC/Mac operator who argues on the forums if the vignette fringe was set -4 / -3 or -5/+6 and what is right or wrong on IOR settings of plexi-glass. You will become another faceless guy placing same grass proxies, applying same filters, using same models and arguing about same topics again and again. Some more advices: use tablet, take camera on all your trips and take lots and lots of reference pictures of everything, and we do mean everything!!

Is there a big competition and rivalry between applicants? How many candidates do you have daily/monthly/yearly approximately? And can you say how big is the chance for our readers?

Vladin: Oh, I don’t think that we are that popular, unless we advertise for a job there, we receive only a handful of applications – probably not more than 3 or 4 per week. When we advertise though, we are undulated with ridiculous applications, which is a kind of normal. People are trying their chances without having done their homework. If you are motivated by a desire to learn and become a master in this industry and not motivated solely by money, you are committed and focused, talented and responsible, and you can show this in your portfolio, then you stand a very good chance. We had this candidate a while ago, who we invited to an interview – he was showing very promising skills. But he was strangely persistent – he wanted to know straight away before even coming to see us, how much exactly he was going to be paid. Needless to say, he did not turn up to the appointment, neither did he call back. Obviously, he was not particularly passionate about his work. So, yes, passion is a great motor in our industry.

At Maxcon conference in Prague, few months ago (summer 2010), I saw your big interest in helping people – you give them for example advices on how to make particular things in CG. Why are you so open to the community? Are you planning to take more steps and to continue helping people more? Tell us something about your future projects.

Adam: Future is sharing. Sharing ideas, thoughts and skills is the way forward. If you want to get, you need to be prepared to give first. I remember times when I was a student and when I was very thankful for all free information, which I was able to find on the internet. Sure, there were some CGI books in Czech at that time, but when I was 18, spending 35 GBP on an outdated book wasn’t my priority. And usually those books just raised more questions than answers. So if I found a good source or a person online, who was able to give me answers to my questions or point me in the right direction, I was more than happy.

Now, 8 years later, I think that it is time to pay back to the community. Recently, I have been trying to help some guys who contacted me via twitter/linkedin/facebook and it works perfectly, but with raising amount of people, willing to have some quick chat I realised, that I have less and less time for them. So my conclusion and decision for 2011 is to share more information in forms of video tutorials or PDFs, which will be published on our Vyonyx website. I still would like to have interesting chats over skype, but with less free time it will be rather rare.

I have to also mention that Maxcon 2010 that took place in the Czech Republic was a very successful event, where Christian Flores-Nunez (Vyonyx founding partner) and I presented Vyonyx’ point of view on visualization plus some handy tips & tricks. We connected with many young artists and students and it was very interesting to get direct interaction with our fans. I am personally very determined to give more lectures on archviz in 2011 to architecture or CGI students. I do not only want to talk about theoretical stuff there but also show some practical tips and tricks at our weekend workshops. I will hopefully make two presentations this year, but I would be quite happy to organize this workshop anywhere in Europe, if I get invited, that is! We live in the 21st century and distance isn’t an issue anymore, so if I can meet interesting young people, share ideas and give them something that will help them in their careers as architects, visualisers or designers, I will be more than happy to do so.

Basically I’ll be glad to get in touch with any of your readers and fans on behalf of Vyonyx!

Thank you very much for your time also on behalf of all readers. I wish you all the best and many good ideas to keep being always at the top!

Thank you very much, Matus! It’s been a real pleasure talking to you.
Vladin & Adam

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