For those who don’t know the event (Even if that seems strange, after the many many times we reported on it): FMX is a spring conference in Stuttgart for animation, altime, games and VFX, built around talks, panels, workshops, and an expo, tied to Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

A 30th birthday, and a hand on the baton

Behind the FMX..

This just in: After the 2026 edition of FMX, Mario Müller will hand over leadership to Agon Ushaku. Müller announced a year ago that the current edition would be his last, and the 30th edition now becomes a guided transition, with Ushaku accompanying him during the event.

The move keeps the tradition intact while still giving the community time to say a proper thank you to Müller after 15 years of building, shaping and evolving the event’s exceptional international scope.

A familiar face steps into the spotlight

Agon Ushaku (LinkedIn) has spent more than 25 years working across CGI and VFX in production, management, and education. He currently serves as Global Director of Nomination Events at the Visual Effects Society (and as VES Germany Chair Emeritus) and curates the international Megabrain Masterclass series, has been an animago Juror, and is one of those faces everybody knows.

Ushaku calls FMX his most important place for networking for almost three decades, and says he has attended pretty much every edition as visitor and speaker. If you have been around FMX for any amount of time, chances are you have already bumped into him, talked shop, or traded recommendations on whom to talk to and where to get the best coffee.

Keeping the spirit, and raising the bar

Agons’s career includes almost 16 years leading CAD and 3D visualisation plus product and data management at Unexpected GmbH. He most recently worked as Senior CG and 3D consultant and CAD manager at POLYGRAIL GmbH.

He is taking over the FMX project manager role as a personal mission, and has plans around building on the event’s foundation while maintaining high standards for quality and innovation, in a moment when AI and realtime workflows reshape production in an even more turbulent industry.

On stage at FMX 2026

During FMX 2026, Ushaku will appear on the panel Ethics in AI with Matt Buehler from vrbn, Reka Kaloczy, and Ben Lock from Moonvalley.

The post FMX gehts a new head for the 30th Birthday first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the event: FMX is a production conference for animation and Visual Effects, mixing craft talks with pipeline sessions. It touches audio post, cinematography, and realtime tools such as Unreal.

Sound design: not an afterthought

Sound Design at FMX lands as a full track, built around immersive, interactive, and animated work where audio carries story weight. The track description positions sound as half the experience, then drills into fundamentals, standout projects, and where AI can help in early creative phases and where it fails.

The program brings in Supervising Sound Editor Nina Hartstone of Cinphonic, with a session on storytelling with sound that centers on recording, design, and editorial choices for film. Her listed credits include Bohemian Rhapsody, Moonage Daydream, Saltburn, and Wuthering Heights. She also teaches masterclasses at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg during the On Campus day, with limited participation and registration handled via program@fmx.de.

Supervising Re Recording Mixer David Fluhr brings a workflow talk tied to Walt Disney Animation Studios and the realities of modern delivery. The session covers sound, music, and mixing workflows that support storytelling, plus worldwide deliveries, language versioning, and the path from temp to final mix using sequences from Vaiana 2 and Zoomania 2.

A third session attacks the handoff between picture and audio. Christoph Groß-Fengels demonstrates an AI driven workflow that watches an edit, extracts key frames, sends them to a vision system via the Google Cloud Vision API, then searches a local sound effects library and assembles a first pass sound bed. The pipeline uses a Python workflow designed to slot into existing post pipelines. Try it, break it, then try it again before you trust it with a worklfow that ships.

Cinematography: where VFX changes the job

The Cinematography track adds Paul Cameron for a career conversation about the influence of VFX on visual design, in conversation with Jordan Thistlewood of Cooke Optics. Cameron’s credits include Westworld, Collateral, and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales, and the talk is supposed to circle around collaboration from on set through post.

Spatial Storytelling: XR wants story first

A first time Spatial Storytelling track focuses on XR narrative craft across film, theater, and games, with an explicit mandate to keep story ahead of shiny tech.

Alex Coulombe of Agile Lens and director David Gochfeld present virtual production workflows behind A Christmas Carol VR and R and D with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their talk “Live to Media framework” that captures live performance motion capture and preserves it via the Unreal Engine 5 Replay System, aiming for scalable, repeatable immersive content.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru of NUMENA argues for space as the medium in VR, contrasting references ranging from the Acropolis to Half Life’s City 17, and exploring scale transitions as narrative devices with examples including Mamoru Oshii’s Angel’s Egg and the Venice Biennale project titled Dear Mother.

Balthazar Auxietre of InnerspaceVR focuses on environmental narrative in immersive experiences and outlines practical design techniques and workflows, including use of Gravity Sketch, with an emphasis on balancing cinematic direction and user agency.

Robyn Winfield-Smith discusses narrative work in Apple’s 180 degree immersive format using the Blackmagic Design URSA Cine Immersive camera developed specifically for Apple Vision Pro. The session description covers story development and previsualisation, stereoscopic workflows, scenic elements to guide attention, spatial audio considerations, and the future of spatial entertainment. The supplied details do not provide technical camera specifications.

Dates, formats, and what you can actually watch

FMX runs On Site May 5 to May 7, with Online and On Campus on May 8, and On Demand from May 9 through June 9. The ticket page has all kinds of pass types including Conference Pass, Business Pass, Combi Pass, Day Pass, Experience Pass, Online Pass, and Press Pass.

Two evening get togethers round out the schedule. Tuesday, May 5 runs 19:00 to 21:00 and is powered by Houdini (Meet your favourite Digital Production Editor there). Wednesday May 6 runs 19:00 to 21:00 and is powered by ROE Visual.

The post FMX 2026 bets on sound and spatial craft first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Feature animation gets performance-obsessed

A new set of feature animation sessions puts character performance front and centre. Supervising Animator Adam Sarophim will present how performance-driven animation gets built at Sony Pictures Imageworks using work from KPop Demon Hunters and GOAT. The session description focuses on crafting emotion, personality, and audience connection through movement, timing, and subtle detail.

Animator Jacob Frey will present The Animation of Zoomania 2 and describe collaboration between art and technology as part of the filmmaking process at Walt Disney Animation Studios. The session description frames the work as an example of how tools and artistic intent meet inside a feature pipeline. Details about specific story beats, pipeline tooling, or shot counts are not specified in the Sources.

Two European-leaning projects also land on the slate: The Last Whale Singer (a teenage humpback whale named Vincent), and a procedural real-time pipeline segment called Trash Island. The speakers listed for that session are Jan Hofmann, a CG Supervisor and Unreal Engine expert at Telescope Animation, and Amir Ashkezari, an FX Supervisor and Technical Director at PFX. The pipeline description centers on Houdini generated assets moving via OpenUSD into both real-time Unreal Engine and a traditional Autodesk 3ds Max and V-Ray workflow, connected by custom tools intended to support daily collaboration between studios in different locations.

Zako is a feature project based on a true story about an Armenian painter during World War II and the Soviet Union. Director Tigran Arakelyan of OnOff Studio will present how VR animation can serve as a core creative tool for sketching, staging, and animating directly in 3D space, as well as practical methods for integrating VR animation into a feature film production pipeline.

AI talks that aim past hype

The Artificial Intelligence track is around practical production use and the question of what AI should do in modern pipelines, with an emphasis on keeping a human artist in the loop.

Ben Grossman of Magnopus is listed for an individual session, followed by a panel appearance. Mohsen Mousavi, Senior Director of Visual Pioneering at Eyeline Studios, is also in an individual session and on the same panel. Hao Li, founder of Pinscreen, is about to present on work spanning computer vision and facial performance technology, having completed AI work on Fallout Season 2. The track is curated by Mike Seymour, co-founder of fxguide.

Cinematography goes deep into the lens mess

The Cinematography track highlights craft from stop-frame production through to photoreal VFX . Cinematographer Dave Alex Riddett will present Work Aard Play Aard, a behind-the-scenes look at decades of cinematography at Aardman and the practical skills involved in stop-frame storytelling.

VFX Supervisor Victor Perez will present GLASS: Capturing the Lens Look for Photorealistic VFX. The session description focuses on lenses having distinct optical characteristics including distortion, chromatic aberration, field curvature, vignetting, iris behavior, and micro-contrast, and on methods to analyze, measure, and reconstruct those characteristics inside VFX pipelines so CGI inherits the visual identity of the camera that shot the plate. The track is curated by Sara Coppola-Nicholson, Director of Research and Education at Cooke Optics.

Partners bring cloud and tools to the conversation

Two newly announced partners add their own angle on production infrastructure and creative tooling. AWS Visual Computing is about cloud-based solutions for visual effects, animation, and 3D content production, including scalable rendering, virtual workstations, and high-performance storage optimised for media workflows. It also highlights AWS Deadline Cloud as a fully managed render management service.

Foundry is … well, if you don’t know the company making Nuke, you should reconsider and read the rest of this website. The partner programming showcases compositing, lighting, look development and texturing, with participating studios named as Industrial Light and Magic, RISE FX, Outpost VFX, and Mikros Animation.

The partner section also includes an in-person day at Raum Mannheim featuring project insights on Fallout Season 2, Netflix’s The Dinosaurs, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey, plus a talk by Director and VFX Supervisor Hugo Guerra.

Dates and tickets, plus the reality check

Tickets are on sale, and the “On Site” runs at Haus der Wirtschaft in Stuttgart from May 5 to 7, Online and On Campus run on May 8, and On Demand runs from May 9 to June 9. See all of you there!

https://fmx.de/en

The post FMX 2026 adds animation, lens talks and of course AI first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the event: FMX is where post, VFX, and realtime folks compare notes, spot new workflows, and meet toolmakers from Foundry to AYON .

The 30th edition runs on site May 5 to May 7, with Online and On Campus on May 8, and On Demand from May 9 to June 9. Early Bird ticket options run until March 20. Tickets are sold through the ticket shop, and the full schedule is published as an online program schedule.

This year’s reveal is a broad spread across VFX, animation, and digital media creation, with more updates promised as additional speakers and topics get added. The headline message is simple: the program is live now, and it is designed to be browsed like a buffet. Get your preferred morsels here :)

RENO turns a studio inward

A newly confirmed session in the Shorts track focuses on RENO, an original sci fi short used as a live testbed for virtual production and machine learning workflows. The session names Tav Flett, Rob Hifle, James Pollock, and Paul Silcox, and describes how a traditionally post-driven VFX studio re-engineered its pipeline for a newly opened virtual production stage. It also calls out Gaussian splat scanning, automated rotoscoping, and marker removal as tools for streamlining production.

Generative video, now with shot notes

The hype cycle is almost over. The bubble tends to pop the moment somebody asks where this stuff fits into an actual production pipeline. That is the useful angle of Moonvalleys‘ session in the “The Road ahead” track. . Instead of treating generative video as a party trick, Ben Lock looks at what happens when studios try to use it for real: control, continuity, versioning, integration, governance, and all the other small details that usually kill shiny ideas on contact.

For VFX and animation teams, that is the point. Not more halfbaked sizzle reels, but a sober look at where generative video already helps, where it still breaks, which parts of the panic were never grounded in production reality, and when studios may begin hiring artists again once practical applications, and their many many limits, are easier to assess.

Predator: Badlands, built as a handoff

A joint presentation in the VFX for Features track names Laurens Ehrmann from The Yard VFX and Dominik Zimmerle from TRIXTER discussing work on Predator: Badlands. Shared assets, shared look development, and constant creative exchange across studios to ensure continuity while elevating environments, characters, creatures, and effects, plus a deep dive into selected sequences and the creative and technical challenges behind them.

And there is more to come! Much more!

https://fmx.de/en/program/program-2026/overview

The post FMX 2026 program goes live first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

For those who don’t know the event: FMX is an annual conference in Stuttgart focused on animation, VFX and digital media production. It connects studios, software vendors and production teams across features, commercials and games. Details and tickets are available via FMX.

FMX 2026 has confirmed new sessions covering large-scale feature VFX, stylised feature animation and high-end commercial character work. The programme additions include speakers from Wētā FX, Pixar and Illogic Studios, alongside new Premium Partners AMCRS, Accenture Song VFX and AYON. The event will take place on site from May 5 to 7, followed by online and on-campus sessions on May 8, with on-demand access running from May 9 to June 9. Early Bird ticket options are available until March 20 via the FMX ticket shop.

Pandora, fire and 3,100 shots

Senior VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon and VFX Supervisor Sam Cole from Wētā FX will present work from Avatar: Fire and Ash. According to FMX, the studio delivered more than 3,100 shots for the film.

The presentation will cover the integration of extensive native stereo photography with CG environments, fully digital performance captured characters and physics based coupled effects simulations. Native stereo photography refers to imagery captured simultaneously for left and right eye views, rather than converted in post. Coupled effects simulations describe interdependent simulations, for example fire interacting with wind and character motion, solved together to maintain physical consistency.

Saindon and Cole will also discuss a new tool called Kora, developed to provide more art directable fire. FMX states that Kora was created to allow greater control over flame behaviour while retaining physically based characteristics. No further technical specifications have been released at press time.

Stylisation as pipeline logic

In the Feature Animation track, Visual Effects Supervisor Beth Albright from Pixar will present Hoppers. The session is titled Stylization as a System.

The session will address how the team preserved physical realism to maintain emotional stakes while shaping surfaces for clarity and appeal. This includes coordination across modelling, animation, simulation and lighting.

A wolf, a supermarket and feature grade craft

The Shorts track will include a presentation by animation director Benoit Bargeton from Illogic Studios on the Intermarché commercial Le mal aimé. The campaign features a wolf attempting to gain the trust of other animals in the forrest by becoming vegetarian. The film went viral globally, and you propaly have already seen it.

Bargeton’s talk will focus on how feature film animation was achieved in a commercial context. This includes artistic and acting choices, as well as technical decisions supporting those directions. Cross department collaboration between modelling, rigging and animation will be addressed.

Commercial schedules typically impose tighter timelines and smaller teams than feature productions. FMX states that Illogic Studios adapted its workflow and resources to deliver a project of this scale. Specific software, renderers or proprietary systems used have not been disclosed in the announcement.

Premium Partners on the floor

FMX has also announced three Premium Partners.

AMCRS, the Animation Media Creators Region Stuttgart network, represents more than 30 VFX providers, animation studios, game developers and interactive media companies, along with six colleges. The network was initiated by MFG, the regional media and film society.

Accenture Song VFX is an award winning team guiding projects from script and concept art to final delivery. FMX states that the team has earned nine Emmy nominations over the past six years and secured an Emmy Award last year for work on HBO’s The Penguin. No additional production credits are listed in the announcement.

AYON is presented as a production backbone for animation and VFX, combining pipeline and production tracking with review, planning, scheduling and resource management. Producers, supervisors, pipeline TDs and developers use AYON to unify creative data and automate handoffs. At FMX, AYON will host talks, demos, panels and Q&As in its dedicated room. The focus will include review, scheduling and resource planning updates, roadmap insights and practical studio case studies.

Many additional sessions are still to be announced!

The post FMX 2026 spotlights fire, fur and pipelines first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.