Bobo Bio

Borislav "Bobo" Petrov was born in 1968 in Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria, which makes him a compatriot of V-Ray. He started messing around with computers in 1984. His first encounter was with an Apple II clone Bulgaria was manufacturing in those days, but he smartened up and quickly switched to the pride of Britain, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and later to IBM PC/AT and its various clones. He used all these computers mainly for two purposes - learning programming and experimenting with computer graphics. The results were often in the form of primitive computer games and more than once inspired by Star Wars...

In 1993, while studying architecture at the Vienna University of Technology, Bobo fell in love with a little program called Autodesk 3D Studio and quickly became addicted to its ability to turn AutoCAD drawings into living and breathing imagery and animations. He worked in the area of architectural visualization, multimedia design (with some help from Macromedia Director) and later actual game development around the turn of the millennium.

In 1995, Bobo started the first of its kind 3D Studio plugin reference website, Virtual Republic Boboland. It slowly mutated into a repository of general 3D Studio tutorials and knowledge and with the advent of MAXScript in 1997, it finally took its current shape of being script-centric.

In 1998, Bobo was invited to act as 3ds Max Support Forum Assistant and Beta Tester. He actively supported the 3ds Max and especially the MAXScript online community by writing literally hundreds of free scripts to solve common production problems. Five years later, he was contracted by Autodesk to develop the MAXScript Documentation of 3ds Max 5, a task he has been performing for all following versions. In 2006, the first year the voting was opened to 3ds Max users, Bobo was awarded the 3ds Max Master Award.

In early 2004, Bobo moved to Canada to join the creative team at Frantic Films where he was employed as Technical Director of VFX and worked on such titles as "Scooby Doo 2", "Stay", "Superman Returns" and "Journey To The Center Of The Earth 3D". After the company's acquisition by Prime Focus, he continued to work in the same position and contributed pipeline tools and technology used in films like "G.I.Joe", "Avatar", "SuckerPunch", "TRON:Legacy" and "Final Destination 5". During these over seven years in the visual effects field, he also actively contributed to the design and development of several software products including the Krakatoa volumetric particle renderer.

In July 2011, Bobo joined the Thinkbox Software team, which had taken over the product palette and continued the proud traditions of Frantic Films Software. He is currently employed as Product Specialist, working on and helping popularise through tutorials, demos and webinars such products as Ember, Frost, Genome, Krakatoa and XMesh.