• AnimationXpress.com interviews Daniele Tosti for TheCgCareer.com channel

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    ย https://www.animationxpress.com/vfx/meet-daniele-tosti-a-senior-cg-artist-who-is-on-a-mission-to-inspire-the-next-generation-of-artists/

    Youโ€™ve been in the VFX Industry for over a decade. Tell us about your journey.

    It all started with my older brother giving me a Commodore64 personal computer as a gift back in the late 80โ€ฒ. I realised then I could create something directly from my imagination using this new digital media format. And, eventually, make a living in the process.
    That led me to start my professional career in 1990. From live TV to games to animation. All the way to live action VFX in the recent years.

    I really never stopped to crave to create art since those early days. And I have been incredibly fortunate to work with really great talent along the way, which made my journey so much more effective.

     

    What inspired you to pursue VFX as a career?

    An incredible combination of opportunities, really. The opportunity to express myself as an artist and earn money in the process. The opportunity to learn about how the world around us works and how best solve problems. The opportunity to share my time with other talented people with similar passions. The opportunity to grow and adapt to new challenges. The opportunity to develop something that was never done before. A perfect storm of creativity that fed my continuous curiosity about life and genuinely drove my inspiration.

     

    Tell us about the projects youโ€™ve particularly enjoyed working on in your career

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  • Narcis Calin’s Galaxy Engine – A free, open source simulation software

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    https://www.linkedin.com/posts/narciscalin_this-2025-i-decided-to-start-learning-how-activity-7357485340300832768-1f3i

    This 2025 I decided to start learning how to code, so I installed Visual Studio and I started looking into C++. After days of watching tutorials and guides about the basics of C++ and programming, I decided to make something physics-related. I started with a dot that fell to the ground and then I wanted to simulate gravitational attraction, so I made 2 circles attracting each other. I thought it was really cool to see something I made with code actually work, so I kept building on top of that small, basic program. And here we are after roughly 8 months of learning programming. This is Galaxy Engine, and it is a simulation software I have been making ever since I started my learning journey. It currently can simulate gravity, dark matter, galaxies, the Big Bang, temperature, fluid dynamics, breakable solids, planetary interactions, etc. The program can run many tens of thousands of particles in real time on the CPU thanks to the Barnes-Hut algorithm, mixed with Morton curves. It also includes its own PBR 2D path tracer with BVH optimizations. The path tracer can simulate a bunch of stuff like diffuse lighting, specular reflections, refraction, internal reflection, fresnel, emission, dispersion, roughness, IOR, nested IOR and more! I tried to make the path tracer closer to traditional 3D render engines like V-Ray. I honestly never imagined I would go this far with programming, and it has been an amazing learning experience so far. I think that mixing this knowledge with my 3D knowledge can unlock countless new possibilities. In case you are curious about Galaxy Engine, I made it completely free and Open-Source so that anyone can build and compile it locally! You can find the source code in GitHub

    https://github.com/NarcisCalin/Galaxy-Engine