Q: Where can be Arion used at most? What kind of industry can take the full advantage of Arion?
A : That's a question only the users have an answer to! Of course there are some areas that are not at their best in Arion yet, such as film production and VFX, but ultimately we intend to make Arion be able to adapt to any type of job.
Q: By developing Arion or fryrender are you proud on some specific moment which achieved one or both of them?
A : We are proud of every bit of our 'babies'. Some moments were particularly rewarding, like when we added micro-polygon displacement to an unbiased engine for the first time in the world for a commercial product through fryrender.
The development of Arion which was, and still is, the first true hybrid CPU-GPU engine was quite an excitement as well. And of course our BRDF model, the foundation of everything.
But summing it all up I think that what makes us the proudest is the whole. The ability to keep working on the stuff that we love, occupying a place in the market, and to never run of ideas for further development.
Q: For development and testing you use Azken Muga workstations, why you decided specific for this brand? Why not Dell or similar company? Can you describe us the specification of your Workstation?
A : Over time the people at Azken Muga have become friends of ours, so their attitude and their proximity has always proven to be very convenient for us in case we've encountered hardware problems or needed upgrades.
At some point they also became resellers of our technology, which strengthened our bounds. They are also highly speciallized in integration of graphics workstations, so they've been a win-win venture for us to rely on them.
Q: If someone would like to know more about your products, can he take somewhere any kind of training about it?
A : This is an area of our work we would like to develop at some point, but as you know our primary job is to be developers and so far we haven't found the time to address that kind of 'problem' properly. We have a couple of schools which provide training on our products listed on our website, though.
Q: What are your plans for the future? Do you plan a new product?
A : Our plans are rich and plentiful! With the recent work we've accomplished to integrate our core technology in 3dsmax and Softimage we're taking a serious leap of faith in trying to make Arion and fryrender to be much more accessible/easy to use. From a technological point of view, we're focused on turning Arion (through the new LIVE plugins) into a production engine, where everything you can think of is animatable through the host modeler.
We have a bag full of features and ideas to implement. All being well, 2012 and the upcoming years are going to be really exciting so, stay tuned!
Cortesey of RandomControl, Arion –first row, fryrender –second row
