The founder of Bottleship VFX will be speaking on his studio, developments in virtual production and AI agent tech.CGA Belgrade 2025 is coming up on 10 and 11 April get your tickets here!. In this special preview interview, befores & afters talks to one of the speakers from the conference, Hristo Velev, about his session at the event.Velev is a founding partner at Bottleship VFX, a boutique studio specializing in effects sims like water, destruction, fire. He previously worked at Pixomondo, Screen Scene, and Scanline VFX on films including Iron Man 3. Here he discusses the history of his own studio, getting into virtual production and AI, and what hell present at CGA Belgrade.b&a: Tell me a little about the history of Bottleship VFX and some of the main recent projects the studio has delivered?Hristo Velev: We started in 2013 as a simulation specialized VFX house. Worked on a globally diverse feature film slate over the years, added creature and environment capacity to our portfolio, and organically grew to about 20 artists. Very technically minded team, squeezing productivity by developing in house tools that automate as much as possible. Lately with the industry slump post COVID, we added software development and virtual production to our offerings.Comandante.b&a: Yes, youve dived into virtual production in recent times what kinds of things have you been doing and looking at in this area?Hristo Velev: We started a few years ago on an Italian feature called Comandante, led by Kevin Haug and Dave Stump. They had the idea of doing virtual production without greenscreens and LED stages, by tracking the camera in real time, rendering the virtual set in Unreal, and using AI to roto out the foreground, and composite for the director to review at the end of the day, then move quickly to post to present a complete version next day.We joined as the post house on set, but our responsibilities grew until we were contributing at most points in the workflow. It was a great start, and we delivered 36 shots while still on set, but that was just the early days. In 2024, with key technologies advancing, we updated our platform to use real-time raytraced rendering of a USD set by Chaos Vantage, real-time AI roto, and real-time compositing.CLAROS.This is a killer app now, that we call CLAROS you can shoot virtual production anywhere, and instantly jump to full featured post production. We showcased it in an experimental short film called Out of a dream that you can check out on the site at clarosvp.com, and well unveil at a showroom in Sofia on Apr 29, and at the FMX May 6-9.b&a: How about AI? Tell me what youve been experimenting with and releasing with cairos.ai?Hristo Velev: While theres some cool AI in Claros, the one in Cairos is maybe even more fun. It lets you speak to a virtual actor and direct it. It works by letting an AI agent access a semantically encoded database of motion descriptions that is fed by our inhouse mocap team, producing about 600 motions a week.Cairos in action.Conversing with you, the agent produces a list of animations that is then passed to an animation sequencer that splices them together and retargets to your character, and renders the animation in your browser. When youre happy, you request a download and get a package that you can use downstream in your pipeline. Were in an early phase, and working with first adopters to build it up to their needs, so we can open up to the public in a few months.b&a: Can you give a very short preview of what youll be talking about at CGA Belgrade?Hristo Velev: Ill give the audience a tour of both Cairos and Claros the tech stack, how they have evolved on top of traditional VFX tools, incorporating the new wave of AI, real-time rendering and other cutting edge tech.Find out more at https://cgabelgrade.comThe post CGA Belgrade speaker preview: Hristo Velev appeared first on befores & afters.