Just 90 days to go until FMX 2025 opens its floodgates. This year’s motto? “Rhythm of Change” — and judging by the avalanche of panels, workshops and login buttons now activated on the FMX website, change is not coming quietly.

Attendees can now throw turquoise flags all over the Program Schedule to mark favorites and lock in chaos ahead of time. On-Site logins are also live, meaning no more excuses for missing the most obscure side-panels.

Lights, Panels, Disruption!

FMX 2025 brings panels hotter than a DIT’s hard drive after a 12-hour shoot. Highlights include:

• “The Artificial Elephant in the Room”: A fearless dive into AI-powered tools, cloud-based pipelines, and clever tricks to survive industry disruption without crying into your Wacom tablet.
• “Global Perspectives on the Visual Effects Industry”: A no-passport-required tour through VFX studios worldwide, swapping stories about local challenges, opportunities, and probably internet outages.
• “State of the Industry Panel Discussion”: Reality check incoming. Experts dissect the industry’s current mood and future headaches.
• “The Secrets of Award-Winning Teams”: Spoiler alert—turns out Oscars aren’t just handed out randomly after a heavy lunch.
• “Embracing Evolution in VFX – Skill Development and Collaborative Innovation”: Upskill or be upstaged.
• “AI and its Impact on Creatives”: Students, supervisors, artists—no one is safe. AI is reshaping roles, workflows, and coffee habits.

Panelists range from VFX heads at Wētā FX, Framestore, Pixar, TRIXTER, The Third Floor, to tech minds from SideFX, Autodesk, Metaphysic.ai, and more. If you can’t network here, you might be allergic to success.

Arcane Season 2: The Hex Tech Deep Dive

Under the banner The Art of Animation, FMX 2025 spills the beautifully hand-animated beans on Fortiche’s “Arcane” Season 2. CTO Philippe Llerena and Matte Painting Supervisor Martin Bailly discuss scaling up production, amplifying painterly environments, and making 3D complexity look like someone lovingly brushed every pixel by hand. Because more polygons shouldn’t mean fewer goosebumps.

Expanding Realities: Goldberg Goes XR

Goldberg’s Dream reimagines Bach’s Goldberg Variations with AI, robotics, projection mapping, and spatial audio sorcery. XR director Jana Günther, animation director Moritz Mayerhofer, and spatial audio engineer Daniel Deboy walk us through creating 82 minutes of computer-generated animation — and remind us that no dream is too weird if it sounds good enough in spatial audio.

Meanwhile, Ilija Brunck (Woodblock) shows how animation is reshaping immersive live entertainment. Think animated stage performances, but without a single corny mascot suit in sight.

SideFX’s Houdini: Procedural Power Unleashed

Houdini storms FMX 2025 as Platinum Partner with the Houdini HIVE. In sessions in Raum Mannheim and Bertha-Benz-Saal, artists from RISE, BlueBolt, Framestore, Bottleship, Untold and more share Houdini workflows. Expect deep dives into Solaris for Lookdev, Layout, Lighting, VFX workflows, Creature FX, and pipeline automation.

Houdini’s procedural magic means every change cascades through your network — perfect for last-minute creative tantrums. This is not a traditional CG pipeline. It’s chaos, organized beautifully.

More info: Houdini at FMX.

Lenovo: Smarter, Bigger, Everywhere

Lenovo joins as Silver Partner. The tech giant, with $62 billion in revenue and 77,000 employees, flexes its “New IT” muscles: client, edge, cloud, network, and intelligence. If they can build a smarter future for everyone, they can probably also fix your render node at 3AM. Maybe.

More info: Lenovo at FMX.

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The post FMX 2025: AI, Arcane, and a Light Stage Walk into a Conference first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.