Technological Oscar for Vladimir Koylazov, Chaos Group

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences   2017 Scientific and Technical Awards  were  given for 18 achievements (out of 34 individual and 5 collective nominations). One of individual recipients is Vladimir Koylazov. According to the citation, Vladimir Koylazov  was awarded  “for the original concept, design and implementation of V-Ray from Chaos Group. V-Ray’s efficient production-ready approach to ray-tracing and global illumination, its support for a wide variety of workflows, and its broad industry acceptance were instrumental in the widespread adoption of fully ray-traced rendering for motion pictures”.

The award recognizes V-Ray’s role in bringing realistic CGI to the big screen.  Scientific and Technical Awards take into account the overall contribution of particular technology to the process of making movies. However, 2016 has been a monumental year for Chaos Group in film, with V-Ray rendering incredible imagery for movies such as “Doctor Strange,” “Captain America: Civil War,” and “Deadpool.”

Vladimir Koylazov  collected his award at the Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation on February 11, 2017 at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills.

The founders of Chaos Group are Peter Mitev and Vladimir Koylazov.

As students in Informatics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia University, they met  in a computer laboratory and discovered common interests. With starting $3000 initial capital (for a two-processors computer) in 1997, the current gross income of the company is $15 million with more that  $3.5 million profit.  In their best knowledge the product V-Ray is used in 160 productions, but really they are much more. Currently the company employs more than 200 people and has 5 offices  in 4 countries – Bulgaria, USA (Los Angeles and Baltimore), Japan, Korea.  Many of the employees  are alumni of FMI.

One of them is Asen Atanasov, who  graduated from the ECMI Master program in Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Modeling in FMI. He fulfilled all of the requirements for receiving ECMI certificate: he studied  one semester at Kaiserslautern University, participated successfully at the ECMI  Summer school and Modeling week,  August 2012 in Dresden, defended master thesis on industrial topic under the supervision of prof. Oleg Iliev from Fraunhofer ITWM. Asen  maintains regular contacts with FMI.  He  presented several times  his  achievements  at the Mathematical modeling seminar.  He played pivotal role in establishing connection between FMI and Chaos Group.  As a result the company formulated   the problem “Spline intersection improvement” for  the European Study Group with Industry , September  2015, Sofia (ESGI’113)

The solution proposed by the working team can be found in the booklet of Final reports.

We are confident the relation between FMI and Chaos Group will continue through their current and future employees graduated from FMI.