L8's Dmitriy Giventar

INTERVIEW

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L8

L8’s Founding Director Dmitriy Giventar

L8’S DMITRIY GIVENTAR

TPi’s Stew Hume speaks to L8 Founding Director Dmitriy Giventar about the history of visualisation software.

When it comes to visualisation software, Dmitriy Giventar has been in the game longer than most. The Founding Director of L8 helped write his first piece of software back in the late ‘90s immediately after graduating from the University of Kharkov, Ukraine. “It was called RoboShop Digital,” reminisced Giventar. “It was originally developed for our student community but two years later I sold it and joined a new company, Light Converse (LC).” In this new venture Giventar worked on product development in the fast-paced environment where lighting control software was constantly being transformed.

However, having worked under the LC banner for several years, Giventar thought it was time for a change. “As the user base and market grew we felt increasingly limited by the business structure. Last year, I made the hard decision to sell all my shares in Light Converse and formed a new company - L8.” This new company is fully owned by the development team with Giventar acting as Founding Director. Existing Light Converse clients continue to receive direct support from L8, which will exclusively develop and sell LC products.

Following the announcement of L8’s construction, the company made a statement which stated: “We have made this significant step in LC’s development to improve our support and supply the most technologically advanced product in visualisation world. We will continue to provide our customers and dealers with support and sales worldwide from our new offices.”

Giventar explained the benefits L8’s integrated technology offers show designers. “First of all, it’s a tool to help lighting design ideas be born. There is a huge library of lights with about 5,000 profiles from different manufacturers. Onboard control allows you to explore new fixtures quickly. L8 is also fully integrated with CAD, Vectorworks, AutoCad, 3DSMax and Maya. Users can create accurate construction design in CAD and lighting designs in L8. After all that, you can put everything back to CAD for all your paperwork.”

Giventar listed some of the major developments he has witnessed in this burgeoning side of live events. “I believe one of the most advanced steps made is the ability to generate an image using Ray Tracing technology in real time,” he stated. “The classic rendering pipeline is based on primitives and simply rasterizes them. But Ray Tracing uses a completely different way.” Essentially, Ray Tracing takes a pixel from the screen and pushes it to the depth. It then calculates a collision with the surface and reflection of this ray. “Now we know whether the ray hits the light source or not,” explained Giventar. “It’s certainly a big step towards fully realistic visualisation. Currently L8 are the only visualisation product on the market using Ray Tracing technology for more than a year having

first introduced it in Version 59 in January last year. When you see the visualisation of the beams in L8, you’ll find no compromises. They are true to real life and because of this technology, no matter the direction or zoom, even focus and frost are visualised correctly.”

The founder was quick to commented on the importance of VR in this sector. “We first started supporting VR in 2013 with Oculus and HTC,” he remembered to TPi. “You can also setup your visualisation studio with a 3D Stereo projection polarised screen or a 65-inch glass free 3D-TV. All these technologies are in the box. It feels completely different to create and you can do 3D/VR presentation of the project for your customers!”

As L8 continues to advance its technology, Giventar asserted the importance of customer feedback in the creations of better products. “I would say our product development is based on more than user feedback,” he mused. “Supporting our users is of great importance to us. In our opinion, the path from the user to developer should be short. It’s hard to do, but we must. You can have direct contact via email.” With the help of this user feedback, collected over the past three months, L8 has released 537 new files and 54 fixes in the update. “It’s a huge amount of work,” reflected Giventar, who explained how this level of dedication is necessary to give customers the service L8 believes they require.

Light Converse’s product have historically been free from yearly fees, and the same is true for L8. “We did that because we are passionate believers in helping the industry grow,” commented Giventar. “At this moment, we can say the L8 product will be supported without fees, but some changes must be made. We will separate current product technology and the new technologies which we will unveil in the future. These new technologies are automatically added to new licenses.” For other users, it will be possible to purchase them as separate Feature Packs. For example, license upgrade to FP19 means some new technologies added in year 2019 are available under that license.

But there will never be an “annual version” which leaves loyal customers in the dust, asserted Giventar. “Our customers will always have a fully updated version to use. We are very excited about the next few years. It will be an interesting journey into the technology-advanced future.”

Currently, the company offers a new opportunity for designers to showcase their work and skills. For the month of March, users can try out the L8 product at no charge. “This year’s challenge is for everyone,” said Giventar. “On the 1 March, we published a special version on the website which is equal to the NET license of the L8 software, but works for a month free of charge so anyone can create a project up to 512.” The winner will be announced on 4 April 4 at Prolight+Sound in Frankfurt, Germany. www.l8.ltd

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