Jim Rygiel breaks down his work on the groundbreaking film.Today on the befores & afters podcast, were going back 40 years in visual effects history with The Last Starfighter, Digital Productions and Jim Rygiel. Jim was credited as senior technical manager at Digital Productions on the film, which is, of course, one of the landmark moments in CG history.Digital Productions famously bought a CRAY super computer for the film, and set out effectively writing individual pieces of software to render ships and environments. Literally developing bespoke solutions for things like reflection mapping, anti-aliasing and ambient occlusion along the way. With Jim, we firstly talk about how he came to be at Digital Productions. Then we go into some of the tech behind the film, and its resulting legacy.This podcast is brought to you by Zibra AIs ZibraVDB. ZibraVDB is a plugin for Unreal Engine for Virtual Production studios using real time workflows. ZibraVDB efficiently replays large VFX volumes stored in OpenVDB format within Unreal, delivering up to 100x compression and rendering times twice as fast as Unreals SVT. If you are a studio that uses a real-time approach in your production, ZibraAI is glad to provide you free access to the alpha version of ZibraVDB.Listen in below, and also see the fantastic documentary about Digital Productions made by Gorkab.