What are /r/vfx's favorite Products & Services?

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The VES (Visual Effects Society) sell a book that is exactly what you are after..

“The VES Handbook of Visual Effects: Industry Standard VFX Practices and Procedures”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0240825187/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_WPOjCbW5Y9X08

Capped at 4K yes. But If you are cutting your Vfx reel in anything bigger, well, you probably have the $295 to burn for the studio version.

The free version disables fusion, the AI stuff and limits the number of GPUs. Unless you’re a power user, you’d never even notice the difference. resolve

Depends on who you listen to and if you can see through all the spin. Rhythm and Hues didn't die because of subsidies. That's the way it's been spun since Pi day, but the thing that killed them was paying artists for MONTHS while they waited for Ang Lee and Fox to get their act together. Add to that, RIPD was a mess as well. Labor is the most expensive cost in VFX - And R&H foot the bill.

As far as "internationals getting the best gigs", it's not that black and white either. Tax credits(subsidies) in areas like BC, Toronto, Australia, New Zealand, London have attracted a lot of work from Hollywood. Truth be told: this has been the case since the 80's, but in recent years it has gotten quite competitive and out of control. As of this week, LA is pushing to massively expand their subsidy program. And the race continues.

So that's one angle of the concern about 'Internationals". The next one is cheap labor in areas like India and China. It turns out these locations can't attract enough established talent to produce the blockbusters. They don't seem to be doing as well lately.

You mentioned Russia, so I will touch on something else. Outside of English-speaking movies, the world of film making is doing just fine. Check out the top shelf work from some guys in Russia or artists in Denmark. I would hold them on par with the top guys working on Hollywood films. And the best part? They are doing fine. The Danes aren't being moved around or outsourced and they don't need to aggressively undercut to bring in work.

Rough seas right now for people that work on Hollywood projects.

Below I've linked two reviews of blackmagic cameras that actually turned me away from both of them. Not that these reviews bash the cameras, but they tell you exactly what they are, and what I was looking for in a camera did not align with what they were. Definitely worth a watch if you're considering purchasing something.
Blackmagic Cinema Camera Review
Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera Review (part 1)

This update looks great! The changes to the looping functions look nice: https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3148&Itemid=412

There are just a ton of changes! http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3138&Itemid=422#vfx

The Blackmagic cameras have their downsides and aren't for everyone but since this is in vfx I have to say the 2.5K raw of the Cinema Camera is pretty awesome. Green screen is no problem and compared to a dslr 3D tracking is like night and day.

I have a vfx making of video of a film I shot on the BMCC here.

Yes Blender is probably the most powerful open source compositor you'll find. The learning curve is kind of steep and sometimes for small, simple stuff you might miss the layer based compositing of for example After Effects.

I learned Blender not long ago and made a video praising it and showing how I did some visual effects here: The VFX of Wallace

Also, Blender

Also x2 don’t discount stock footage or elements. If you find the right element, you then shoot your principles to match it. This can be a huge cost savings. Ie we want someone riding an elephant on the moon, you find the stock clip of the elephant on GS animals, then reverse engineer the angles and walk cycle and shoot that to match.

> Is there anything on Linux that is remotely as good as After Effects?

After Effects isn't even the most powerful compositor on Windows. You should look into Nuke or Fusion - they're both on Linux. Nuke especially is something you should look into - it's generally the most widely adopted anyway, but upcoming releases would make it of particular interest to VFX editors, or you can get a similar sort of set up now with Nuke + Hiero

On the 3D side, I'm not sure if you're looking to learn this stuff or something - learning both compositing and 3D at once is a lot to take on, but Maya is by far the most widely used 3D tool in the film world.

Edit: Actually, I probably misread your post. If you're looking for open source VFX software rather than just software that runs on Linux, you won't have much luck.

If you can get your hands on it, there's a beautiful book called The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting which features a lot of the images from the blog. I think it has only been printed once, but I found a copy < €40 a couple of years ago.

Back in the old days of scanning film, the scanner would typically tack on a tiny amount of sharpening.

Most visual effects pipelines will include some component of sharpening to compensate for things like the flattening of plates (compensating for lens distortion), and stabilization, which add small amounts of blurring as a necessary byproduct of the operation (unless you're working in some wacko pipeline that turns 2k input images into 4k's for production work - but nobody does that.

Lest it's not obvious, many TV's actually have sharpening in their core function, which you have to drill down to and turn off. A TV sharpening every signal it receives is, needless to say, fucking stupid - - but someone at Sharp (or fill in the blank) wants their expensive engineers to have a visible effect on the display, I guess? So if you've got a new TV, you might want to look for and turn off that default sharpening.

As for "correct" sharpening, there's no such thing as empirically correct sharpening. You're distorting the contrast ratios of adjacent pixels in an arbitrary way, according to what looks good. There ARE good arguments for certain kinds of sharpening in certain cases - lanczos filter & energy preservation, for instance; or the algorithms used to pull accurate color and intensity when an image is being de-bayered.

a couple fun discussions: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter

Each camera/sensor maker will have their own special sauce for pulling the best image out of their constellation of pixel sensors (RGGB in whatever configuration.) - - so in that sense, sure, just about any digital camera is likely to yield some component of sharpening, but the semantics of whether this is "post" or not are debatable.

Whoops - started to write a book. Signing off now ;)

There's a good thread here that goes over it, you can find a breakdown on Foundry's website.

Wouldn't hurt. The main 3D software used in the industry: Maya, Cinema4D, Houdini, Nuke, and After Effects can all be enhanced and tweaked with programming.

After Effects uses Adobe's ExtendScript for expressions and scripting, which I think is a derivative of javascript. C4D and Maya can both use python, and Maya has it's own language, MEL. I've also seen some cool stuff done with C++, such as flocking birds and schools of fish, using a library called Cinder. Specifically: this guy.

Go for it.

This is the reason why it's not integrated in any studio pipeline by the way.

GPL based software packages are more harmful to studios than they are valuable.

You run into the risk of having large parts of your pipeline published whenever you hire a freelancer if you get Blender into your pipeline.

After researching a bit on his site, I found a free (2017) gumroad post of scene files relating to the same aesthetic that says: "For each shot, there [is] a Maya scene file (.ma) and a pointcloud file and sometimes a mesh file... I post-processed this project on After Effects with a basic pixel sorter." Link

For composting you would use an application called “Nuke”. It is costly around $10,000 USD, but if you’re going to use it as a non commercial it’s free. https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke-family/non-commercial I’ve been running this software on a $200 USD laptop and it runs fine. But it may crash if you do heavy work in Nuke.

My point here is if you are thinking about just learning the basics of composting your budget is fine. However if you move to other aspects of the VFX pipeline like modeling and animation, your pc or laptop with that low budget wouldn’t be able to handle it.

Try Handbrake. I've gotten way better results than adobe media encoder. Much smaller and better quality than even the high settings through adobe. For the web normally what i've done is render out uncompressed from after effects or premier then run it through this,

https://handbrake.fr/

use h265 as people have mentioned.

Have you tried Handbrake? You should be able to convert or compress the video with that. It's fairly robust, but I must admit I've never given it anything bigger than 30GB. Worth a try.

PTgui.

If you're using a tripod, you're gonna have to mess with it a bit no matter what software you use. However if you have a nodal tripod head, you can calibrate it to your setup specifically, shoot your brackets, and just pipe your raw images into PTgui and get a pretty reasonable result. Plus if you are happy with what you get, you can save out a template, and just shoot your images in the same order and automate things in the future.

I see your geometry cache is for a fire sim.

For any sim you can only continue from where you left off if you also have the "simulation cache" for the previous frame.

You are only caching the geometry here, just the resulting density voxels. You don't have the simulation data that got you there. So Houdini needs to start again from 0 to get itself back up to frame 79.

You can save the Simulation cache (warning it's large). Check the documentation here...

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/obj/dopnet.html

Under 'Cache -> Cache Simulation'

You'll also get better answers from /r/Houdini

please no ironman / dragonball z shot.

usually something with a little story / twist / humor will get more noticed.. maybe check out the houdini challenges for reference how they sometimes think a bit outside the box

SideFX has an Apprentice version of Houdini 17. It has most of the features of the full version... Big drawback is that you can't render past 1280x720. BUT, it has all of the features that you requested above. So, for free you could see how well it works for you and then upgrade to the full or Indie version. Lots of tutorials out there as well...

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https://www.sidefx.com/products/compare/

Game companies are using Houdini for Modeling as well as what Allegro said. You can look at https://www.sidefx.com/community/section/stories/ to get a good idea of real world uses Houdini is in. The articles also tend to have the artist's title within the first few paragraphs.

It tends to be a program specialists use for particles, smoke, fire, liquid simulations. It's something the bigger studios use for film and bigger productions. It allows you to tweak and not be locked into baking stuff, or being able to use one thing to drive another much easier. I would check out their site: Houdini

When I had my interview for NFTS I was encouraged to look in to node-based compositing, and was recommended Fusion as an introduction into the concept.

It's free, and despite some hitches, easy to use, and should build up some fundamental skills that will then transfer into Nuke.

I dont use it much myself, however Blackmagic Fusion is apparrently really good for getting started in the industry. There is FREE version which involves pretty much 90% of the paid version ($300 for life). Here is a link if you're interested :D -> https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion/

https://www.amazon.es/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving/dp/0062457713/ref=asc\_df\_0062457713/?tag=googshopes-21&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=82853730130&amp;hvpos=&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=9867604382045330522&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvqmt=&amp;hvdev=c&amp;...

Patu 2 Packs (1 Pair) Rotating Desk Extension Elbow Pad Armrest - Aluminum Alloy Arm Stand Wrist Rest, Ergonomically Designed for Professional Computer Monitor Working, Lift Adjustable, Sliver https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00QMMMFU8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_J07R9FMJA9NNZT2QRF9F

These help with neck and shoulder pain!

The key to drawing is observation.

You may not need to be able to draw to work in an artistic role, but you'd damned well better be able to understand what you're seeing.

I usually recommend "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" as a good introductory text, but it looks like the latest edition (the 4th edition) sucks, so see if you can find an earlier copy.

Here's the whole thing: https://pixabay.com/videos/mexico-pyramids-people-traditions-22196/

I've tried twice to track the cut shot, both were tedious and manually adjusting markers frame by frame and didn't work at all .... I just got burnt out. Looking for some advise or tips, thank you.

>which 3D app do you think I should learn as a solo artist?

have you tried blender? it is open source/free, and it has a rather big community, which means there are tons of tutorials on youtube.

ps: afaik houdini is relatively complex and mostly used for advanced dynamic simulation. and unless you already have basic python programming skills, this is probably not the ideal weapon of choice for a project like yours.

I agree with most option giving here and I actually don't recommend that I am going to recommend compared to pftrack or 3dequalizer.

But for the sake of listing options for people who may not have a budget or seek something that isn't limited by just the free trials of these software:

Voodoo

Blender3D

https://www.openstreetmap.org

There's a C4D plugin called Dem Earth that pulls data from OSM and generates accurate geo and textures for the requested coordinates.

I just tried out the Githup Repo. It's quite interesting, but will be difficult to use for video perhaps, since it doesn't seem to be able to save the "blur trace" thingy. But maybe that's just the "home" version... or whatever.

It also gives a link to a much newer version: http://smartdeblur.net

Check it out. It's quite good in my opinion. Of course it's no magic, but it gives about as much information back as I would think it should ...

Python is a very useful tool, and usually a desired skill in Houdini artists. I personally work within Maya, but I have countless stories of python saving the day. It's incredibly powerful at automating predictable, repeatable actions.

I use it in my professional environment far more often than my personal projects at home, but I have still coded myself a few small tools.

I believe the below link will show you a bunch of python commands you can use in Houdini, along with an explanation of the command and their corresponding flags.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/hom/hou/index.html

I'm unsure about Houdini, but in Maya, you can tell the script editor to echo any commands when you perform an action. So if you're wondering how to create a locator for example, you can manually create the locator, then see the script editor echoes a command called 'spaceLocator' - which I find helpful if I don't know what the command I want to automate is called.

I hope this helps, good luck!

That's normal, to an extent, it happens to all solvers

If you want to only upres the sim, you can use the upres sand shelftool. But it's limited

In that case, I think you should try to see what you can pull of with Blender. It's free and there are youtube tutorials on how to use it for creating motion graphics. Since you're probably going to be needing graphics regularly for your channel, you might as well go ahead and learn it. There's a large Blender community. https://www.blender.org/

For absolute beginners I always recommend starting with blender. https://www.blender.org/ Its completely free, and for your first year making fx it will handle just about anything you want to throw at it. The reason I say that is because the industry standard programs that you would eventually want to work towards (maya, 3DSMax, cinema 4D) are prohibitively expensive. If you can pair that with Adobe After Effects which isn't crazy expensive, then you'll be all set up to make crazy fx. Personally I wouldn't recommend something like video copilot, since programs like that tend to just hand you your lens flares or explosions pre-made, whereas it would be more beneficial to design these things from scratch as a beginner. Best of luck to you, it's a long road but the more skills you can hammer down from the start the easier it will be in the long run!

Foundry "Nuke". It's industry standard Compositing software. It's what a lot of high-end 2d or 2.5d work is done on. Think of it as Photoshop on steroids.

They have a non-commercial license if you want to have a go: here

I don't think you need additional schooling at this stage, but I'm coming from the viewpoint of a self-taught houdini td who started when cmi vfx only sold dvds, so ymmv.

I think your reel will be your first step into the door, and today there's far more resources out there for you to get that reel done (cmi vfx has affordable nuke tutorials). There's a non commercial version of nuke you can use (https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke/non-commercial) - and lots of resources out there to learn about compositing. I think if you search around you'll also find some elements and plates for you to learn comping on.

There's also the mpc academy but I've no experience with that. Good luck!

Teradici will only sell you PCoIP in 5+ licenses at a time. So we went with Parsec Warp which is only $8/mo per computer with no minimums.
https://parsec.app/pricing

Quality isn't quite up to PCoIP Ultra but it's very good and runs ok even on android + a TV in a pinch.

But yes Wifi should be avoided at all costs. Although I've run it over 4G\LTE on a Surface ok while working outside.

So they're a little zoomed out due to the confidentiality issue aneks was talking about, but here's two of mine from recently just to show about the level of complexity you'd hit in an 'average' shot: http://imgur.com/a/6NBO2

If you want to learn to comp at a high level, read this: the Art and Science of Digital Compositing by Ron Brinkmann: http://www.amazon.com/Art-Science-Digital-Compositing-Second/dp/0123706386/ref=la_B001IO9KYE_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1423931635&amp;sr=1-1

Be sure to try the demo before buying to check if everything works well on your side. There is now a 20% discount at the marketplace - https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/virtual-plugin

>Info on the subject is rather limited at the moment

Honestly there's a wealth of papers, articles, demos and interviews available out there, particularly on the Unreal Engine website and on their YouTube channels. Here's a good starting point for those resources. They're really pushing awareness and adoption of the process hard right now.

fxguide.com has in-depth articles and interviews too.

And for those with Disney+ there's a whole episode of 'Disney Gallery' that focuses solely on virtual production.

For VFX at the moment I'd say Houdini then Unreal makes sense.

You could happily start with either of them but Niagara as new and so there're not that many learning resources out there for it, spending a bit of time with Houdini first means that when you come over to UE4 there will hopefully be more.

It also means you can use Houdini Apprentice to learn with until you need to use the UE4 plugins, and so if you do decide that Houdini is not for you (and it's not for everyone, I do love it but happily admit that at times it's as friendly as a double-ended chainsaw) then you've not spent money- something I know is in short supply as as a student.

(Oh, and one more reason for Unreal. Unreal Engine 5 is on the way and looks to massively enhance the graphics capabilities of it while being backwards compatible with UE4 projects, and given how new Niagara is I assume that'll be mostly unchanged. I have no doubt Unity will be improving as well but with Epic seeming to be happy splashing some of their Fortnite money on this they're in for a challenge)

This may be a bit old, but never outdated -- the SIGGRAPH course notes, &quot;PIXEL Cinematography: A Lighting Approach for Computer Graphics&quot; from Sharon Calahan, the Pixar Cinematographer and earlier PDI Lighting Supervisor. Another great book is Matters of Light and Depth.

You could look into AI-based tools, there has been some research:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Perspective-distortion-modeling%2C-learning-and-Valente-Soatto/b8cfcba4609fae835d9b24902191230f267144c9

And maybe Adobe is working on it? https://youtu.be/DQ8va2ipK8I (at 0:20s)

Can't tell if there is a software tool for this available, and really unclear if there's support for video. It seems that you could try to fake it by distorting the image, but this is a perspective change rather than just distortion. So it'll be hard to go from one extreme to the other.

Thanks for the information.

I wont have any time in USA to go into a home depot, I'll go straight to set. In my country there isn't anything similar to homedepot, I cant even get gazing balls in here.

So I'll have to get everything online the be shipped. I got an "access denied" on Home depot site, but I've found this on amazon, do you think it might work? https://www.amazon.com/Tamiya-86507-Spray-Neutral-USAAF/dp/B001Q158MW

A proper "real" one isn't gonna be cheap, we're talking over $800USD. But you could have it shipped to where you'll be shooting. Compared to $50USD for the DIY method.

https://www.amazon.com/Maoping-Chrome-Stainless-Hollow-Photographic/dp/B0B1PXJDSL/

bro, i doubt your laptop supports both.

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is it this laptop?

https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-AORUS-15-IPS-Level-XE4-73USB14SH/dp/B09RQ75FBH

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then it is ddr4 only. there are also ddr5 versions so make sure before you buy!!

Getting Things Done - David Allen

Will decimate work anxiety. Let's you work in peace while work anxiety is put in it's place. Imagine working at the speed you can with no thought of deadline, other problems. You put those in a box that will be taken care of, and because you know it will be taken care of, you can let it go. Allows you to focus, perform work in it's proper order.

This was the book that NYU film school assigned for the fundamentals. It's very dry, but also incredibly thorough. Not sure if there's a newer edition that would cover digital a bit more, but if you want all the timeless stuff on aperture, shutter, ISO, lenses, critical focus, etc... it's in here.

Depends on how much financial comfort you need. I know guys who need to work all the time to support their family and/or lifestyle.

I’ve been fortunate enough over the years to make enough to take a few months out of the year to travel and/or work on personal projects. During the summer of 2012, I directed my first feature film.

As for stunt work, you can definitely get involved without making it a full time career. In fact, I wrote a book all about getting into the stunt biz:

https://www.amazon.com/So-You-Want-Stuntman-Second/dp/1794582258

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-link-face/id1495370836

That aside, that's not a picture of a mask. That's a 2D rendering on a flat piece of plastic with the pattern etched in so it appears as a bright line. This kind of thing; https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Narwhal-Ammonite-Illusion-Changing-Control/dp/B09CKRLYW9/

This is what I'm going with next I think:

https://www.amazon.com/Nuke-101-Professional-Compositing-Effects/dp/0321984129

Shooting on film and shooting some practical effects & miniatures on film is fairly straightforward because a lot of that technology is still heavily in use.
The tricky part comes with post-production. The digital intermediate process eliminated all the old optomechanical processes without compromising on the look of the footage shot on film itself, so there is no creative reason to keep using those technologies.
If you really want to go back to the optical printing days etc. I'd advise reading Dominic Case's "Film Technology in post production" first. Read that cover to cover and understand what you are thinking of doing.
https://www.amazon.com/Film-Technology-Post-Production-Dominic/dp/1138148458

yeah, definitely. When I built my PC, the monitor wasn't as high on the list as it would be now that I mostly work remote, and my PC specs don't matter so much.

I had one of these previously because it was 4k and cheap prior to going ultrawide. It did fine for random moonlight gigs.

Here’s a decent primer Production Pipeline Fundamentals for Films and Games

You also can’t beat the VES Handbook which goes in depth through all the departments above the line and parallel. VES Handbook

The Visual Effects Society (VES) publish an exhaustive handbook (more of a tome) about current processes in VFX. If you look up any part of visual effects, there is in-depth coverage. On set capture, matchmove, rigging, you name it.

The VES Handbook of Visual Effects: Industry Standard VFX Practices and Procedures https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1138542202/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_navT_a_TB6M4KCQ3SVVAVZ9M2B9

https://www.amazon.com/Nuke-101-Professional-Compositing-Effects/dp/0321984129/ref=sr_1_1?crid=AGQO183LQDN0&amp;keywords=nuke+101&amp;qid=1644708415&amp;sprefix=nuke+101%2Caps%2C93&amp;sr=8-1

If you don't mind a textbook this helped me learn a lot about nuke.

Kvm wise, I own one of these. Hopefully it helps! Had it for around 5 years. https://www.amazon.com/IOGEAR-2-Port-Switch-Cables-GCS62HU/dp/B004YCUDMU/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?crid=BYFD7S5KEUC6&amp;keywords=iogear+kvm&amp;qid=1644452478&amp;sprefix=iogear+kvm%2Caps%2C459&amp;sr=8-3

Thanks for the link. I actually have super specific use cases in mind already and some friends who use Blender and C4D but kind of would rather teach myself than hire someone really good. Not sure if that's a mistake or not.

Maybe a bit of both would be good.

If I want to render CG planets like space shots from Star Wars with atmosphere and stuff I assume either program is fine?

If I want them to blow up like with FumeFX is either program okay?

Also both support lighting from HDRI probes I assume?

Looking into buying this and making a short with it just to learn the UI:

https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Blender-Oliver-Villar/dp/0136411754/ref=pd_lpo_3?pd_rd_i=0136411754&amp;psc=1

Thanks, I hadn't heard of Ian Hubert but that's the kind of stuff I want to get better at. I think I'll buy this book and make a little CGI short to get started:

https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Blender-Oliver-Villar/dp/0136411754/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Would it be worth taking drawing/painting classes at community college do you think? If I got a job as a compositor at a big studio, would that help me get a window into how CGI is done too or would I be better off just teaching myself?

I probably have more talent as a photographer/DP than I do anywhere else. But CGI is what I most want to improve at.

I lowered the price from $75 to $25 for the next week because I figured why not? The initial price was to recoup the cost of time spent and I already did that so there you go. https://gumroad.com/products/LXkvk/edit

I usually export for color and comp as ProRez 422 or 444 depending on the bit depth of my source.

To do this on windows you need to correct codecs installed. Go to https://ninite.com/ and from the media section choose the K-Lite Codecs. Install that and you will be able to read and write ProRez QuickTime from fusion and all your other video apps that reference shared codecs.

Btw that site is amazing for all sorts of fee tools and open source softwares

>do they actually make those tissues muscles

Yes, it's part of the overall simulation to get a realistic behaviour of movement/skin etc.

> how do they make it

As far as I know MPC uses an inhouse system that you won't get access to from outside. Especially muscle systems are very common do be developed inhouse, because they are specific, complicated and tied to the rigging pipeline, that there is no standardized workflow for it available to the masses.

But if you want to learn the basics you can use other programs, like Houdini, which has a new muscle system in Houdini 19 that is trying to make this kind of stuff more accessible outside of big studios:

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/news/19/muscles.html

>It’s pride, plain and simple.

Not really. Just criticizing Blender for not being the way some may want it to be is really short sighted. You have to look at Blender's lineage. It's more of the focus of any given update. Blender started out as an in house tool. It didn't reference industry standards because it was originally written in 1988 in isolation it didn't have to. Maya wasn't released until 1998 and was based on Wavefront's internal software. There where no real standards then as most, if not all the commercial software were extensions of existing in-house code. So Blender started at the dawn of the CGI era. The people in NeoGeo learned how to use it as it was even when it was updated in 1995. Later when Ton open sourced the code in 2002, the focus was on maintaining it for the community that knew how to use it as it was and not on matching any industry standards. As the community grew, there became a legacy reason NOT to change it. Only in the last few years has it become apparent that Blender needed to update itself and conform to industry standards if it was going to grow past the existing community. This upgrade started with the open movies, the first of which was in 2005, to probe the software's issues and to point to where weaknesses where as well as to complete an open source movie. The 2.5 upgrade in 2008 brought Blender into the modern age but still conformed to many of it's legacy standards. The 2.8 upgrade this week is meant to cross the divide between the legacy blender standards and bring it up to the current industry standards. They are still working on this update which is why this version is 2.8 and not 3.0. It's an ongoing process. Now with the new interface and rework, criticism is more warranted because Blender is NOW focused on moving up to take a place as a real industry software choice.

Blender Foundation - History

Depends on the machine specs required but you could consider using a remote machine on an hourly or monthly basis if you wanted to not worry about buying a new machine or remoting into your own.

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https://www.paperspace.com/pricing

Lighting for animation and vfx, requires some knowledge of renderes (arnold, renderman, etc..) and a lighting software (katana, maya, blender). If you are hired as a lighting aritst, you not required to know the full cg workflow, (modeling, textureing,...), but it could help. you would likley have the visual eye, just would need to adapt to a diffrent work flow.

I would find premade models or scenes and just try lighting them, see if it is intersting to you. you get to bend the rules a bit with CG lights, turning off shadows, or making the source not visible, which can be fun. So just try to make some nice images that show off your lighting ablilities.

i might also check out Unreal 4. it is a game engine started to cross over into film and live events.

https://www.unrealengine.com/

Nope. Free for anyone to use. You can’t make money off the free version, and it has a few limitations, but it’s still super powerful. Just a question of if you’ve got a computer that can run it.

https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke/non-commercial

That you have to grind for code test. Many of the smaller to mid size tech companies out source their hiring process, some only initial screening, many almost completely. And 1 of the most popular method these 3rd party recruiters use is coding test websites (most popular one being https://leetcode.com ), even for positions that do not usually require that deep of a knowledge these tests require. Like, web design.

Many prospect programmers paid for code interview courses to tackle this. And yes the people who would talk to you during the talking part of the interview weren't even coders.

Hello SabreToothBucket,

Alex here. We are 5 in the team. Anna, Greg, Melissa, Seamus and myself. You are welcome to check my profile on LInkedin or Anna's one, you'll find easily the other members of the team if you look in our connections.

About understanding professionals involved in rendering activities, this is the aim of the research part of the project. The needs of the company we picked are clear to us and the survey is only designed to get market information.

Our goals as marketing students is to deliver a marketing plan aligned with the marketing activities that have been suggested for this project and benefit to Rendicity. This involves a research part, preparing various promotional material, run a campaign and measure our performances :)

We can do all this well only if the research part is bullet proof. Having enough answers to our survey from you guys will allow this :D

Just so I know, when you say Tablet, I am assuming you mean something with a screen (Like a Cintiq) so they can draw directly on that?

Or is the Intuos Pro that I have still useful?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08G7L8TVF/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1

All you had to do was google it, the Kindle edition is £8.

There's that too, but if you don't have at least a basic understanding of vector math, you're pretty much boned.

Speaking of which, if you (anyone reading this post) can find it (it's kicking around online), this book is a great introduction to most of the math necessary: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/listing/2671119702956?r=1&amp;kpid=2671119702956&amp;cm_mmc=GooglePLA-_-TextBook_NotInStock_26To75-_-Q000000633-_-2671119702956

Use a mask or a track matte in after effects. This is the most basic technique in visual effects. If you're interested in learning more techniques I'd recommend VideoCopilot's basic tutorials:

http://www.videocopilot.net/basic/

If you're interested in understanding how visual effects work on a more fundamental level, I'd recommend this book:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/listing/2691578697129?r=1&amp;cm_mmc=GooglePLA-_-TextBook_NotInStock_75Up-_-Q000000633-_-2691578697129

I took at look at your site - looks like you have a lot you have created. I think for a job I would make a more focused site which clearly says “ I am an FX Artist” Here are some ideas Jump on Linked in a and search FX TD or FX Technical director and have a look at some of the reels and links Jump on ArtStation and do the same

Start a new focused FX inspired site - get a free template or use ArtStation While you are learning curate stuff you are learning that you find interesting in FX - put this on your site Head over to Rebelway and get involved with their courses and community : https://www.rebelway.net/yan-weitlauff-fx-td-demoreel-2020/ If you can’t afford the course ask them to help you out - maybe they will do some time swap - you help them - they help you Do every FX course on Side effects site : https://www.sidefx.com/learn/. - take notes on every course - where you started - what you learned , key learnings - use these notes to measure your journey later when you get down hearted about your progress.

Build a new show reel from your Tutorials Follow and connect with Artists like Entagma and Ben watts

Do all the Entagma tutorials —- these hurt my brain but they may not hurt yours!

After this journey which will be massively challenging and fun you will know many things

How you learn What your good at What you enjoy What your passion and future might be That you a badass for grinding through that stuff, keeping notes and doing your practice like a Ninja!

Day by day step by is all it takes my friend.

Play on easy mode.

https://www.shutterstock.com/video/search?searchterm=green%20screen&amp;irgwc=1&amp;utm_medium=Affiliate&amp;utm_campaign=Oxford%20Media%20Solutions&amp;utm_source=51471&amp;utm_term=

Yeah. I wasn’t too stoked at the idea of having to rely on low quality pirated stuff for my reel. I hit up Pexels (it’s all free footage) and used some of Cottonbro’s shweet shweet 3k + 4K footage and made some fun stuff did some cleanups and then added in some free 3D elements from Megascans in a shot or two. It actually helped me get a gig last week :D gonna definitley send this bro some beer moneys when my paycheck comes in. Highly recommend! @cottonbro

/u/kadse_rekt described it pretty well, let me add some sources with free to use content:

https://pixabay.com/de/videos/search/abstract/

https://www.pexels.com/search/videos/abstract/

I love these two sites, great stuff on there and it's free.

You say for "a shot" in the video — do you have something in mind? How long is the shot? I'm assuming one shot, short and visually striking.

To keep costs down (per EyeLens' detailed reply), I'd suggest something simple, using on a good still image as backdrop something like this, or go out and get your own. Much larger/higher resolution would be great, to allow lots of "camera" movement (and faux pan/tilt/etc.)...

This way, the CG elements (car, misc) can get all your attention — and $$. Model a spiff car, animate some spiff movement, shadows, lighting, dust, maybe a stray newspaper "blown away" by the fly-by... Point is, eliminating all the expense of a full-blown shoot/match/etc. can still get you some cool results.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uf3ALGKgpGU https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle/ Cycles was used for a full length feature film and shots throughout an entire season of man in the high castle, both to great success. And man in the high tower was nominated for a VFX award for those shots.

Several large shops use it extensively, and every year or so the blender team makes an entire animated short using only blender and cycles in order to clean up the workflow and choose new features. it works fine, the issue might partially be the belief that "you have to pay for value" or that "it's too expensive to retrain people" but in the end, I think it just needs more exposure.

Blender is very easy to install. Just download from https://www.blender.org/. It will take a bit to get used to but there are lots of tutorials and it is a very fast and effective piece of software once you get to grasps with it.

I was giving some comp tips to an AE guy in the office a few months ago. I got flashbacks when to do an effect masked by a layer he had to hide the layer he was masking by, then select the name from a dropdown menu. I’d forgotten how painful some workflows are in AE.

I’m with you on that too! Software is generally written in a way that the idea of modular pieces (nodes) connected by lines (data passing between) is a pretty good representation of what happens under the hood. They’re a pretty great UI paradigm That said I while ago I was looking for a node-based instant messaging service, so take my enthusiasm with a grain of salt.

Also, I wonder if there’s anywhere that works on mgfx using Scratch 😉

i get most of it through my instagram, but then I just signed up for upwork.com for some suplemental work, also I browse job boards daily. so far its been mostly work in houdini, like hair and soft body simulations and some more artsy commissions aswell

A guy on editors community noticed some details that leads us to the conclusion of a heavy keyed out horse with duplicated bridle textures . Watching it frame by frame you can see some missed details like hair and inverted belts . So probably they tried something similar on carriage shot , rotoscoping the belts and just duplicate them to create matte for shadows. All with the use of cleanplates behind . http://www.imagebam.com/image/7637971346352425

>If I where to take multiple exposure of a chrome sphere myself and put them together into a HDRI, would the resulting mapping be spherical or angular ?

Depends on how you output the stitched images them. Multiple images on a tripod produces a superior image, but as /u/ephisus said chrome balls are good on set if you don't have 10 min to setup and shoot a good pano.

http://www.kolor.com/autopano/

You should look into delighting your texture(s).

There are some pretty easy to follow guides, and it would probably improve the look a lot.

I've only done the process with Metashape, but I'm sure it's similar for other software suites. Unity has a free tool for this, and there are probably other free solutions out there.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/de-lighting-tool-99583

https://www.agisoft.com/index.php?id=42

Thanks! To summarize and add to that list:

• Much faster baking mostly on RTX cards
  • Older NVIDIA cards get a bit of speed increase too using Optix denoiser for bakes
  • Non-Nvidia gets a smaller speed increase via CPU ray tracing
  • new baker visualizer
• Updates to Python API
• 40 new smart materials and 20 new smart masks

[Source]

And agreed. It's pretty meh. I'll never turn down a faster bake, but many of the "new" materials are just ported from Substance Share and personally I have most of them already. The new smart masks though are super welcome. Can't wait to experiment with those.

I guess we're still waiting for those earth shattering features Allegorithmic said they could now add thanks to being Adobe-owned. This has been a pretty slow year so far for big updates to SP and SD. Perhaps they're muzzled on bigger features until Adobe MAX this November?

Read about scattering fields and scatter field masking. There are better ways to shade pyro than just plugging temperature into black body or a color ramp. Actual pyro sim looks good though!

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/pyro/shading.html#understanding-the-pyro-shader

makes sense.. we have no ziva experience, just the regular social media news, but maybe we will test it before making this decision.

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Currently we are aiming to sim/assemble all the shots. Main Road Post just released some stuff on the sidefx website that shows their system, but i guess this is all houdini work and no bridging from maya:)

https://www.sidefx.com/community/muscles-and-character-fx-by-main-road-post/

houdini is expecting channels to be named a certain way for a transform, specifically:

tx ty tz - for translate

rx ry rz - for rotate

sx sy sz - and for scale

you can use the rename chop to name your channels appropriately if they come in named something else.

to export a chop, you can use the export flag on any chop or use the export chop

On Houdini, yes. Not sure on Phoenix https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/dyno/distribute.html I have no personal experience with it though.

More valuable from an industry standpoint (where the deadline is always too near) is this would give you a chance to iterate more quickly, because you could kick off two or three sims simultaneously, pick the best and continue, or do two sections of an effect on two machines. With most places you might work in VFX, you'll never have the luxury of endless processing power or comfortable deadlines, or even a really nice workstation. It's often more like "Alright I have a week, what can I get done that looks awesome on the hardware I have access to?"

If you're learning this stuff to get a job in VFX (I'm presuming) you could look at your current hardware as a really valuable challenge.

You can't work effectively with 4k textures, then how close can you get to the look with 2k? How about 1k?

Can't create a god-level sim or render? Keep paring it back until it works and still looks good.

When you're getting paid for it, you won't get a choice, because the deadline matters more than squeezing another 1% of quality out. It doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be done. Racing the clock and learning how to create awesome stuff on a shitty PC is literally half the battle in most studio roles.

No, it's not worth it. You'll probably be disappointed in the quality of the instruction and regret taking on the debt.

Look for ways online to learn what you want to learn - it'll be cheaper and faster. Better yet, try to get an internship or some freelance work somewhere. SideFX has a pretty well run internship program even https://www.sidefx.com/ja/company/internships/ it would be a much better way to learn more Houdini than going to grad school would be.

SideFX has a masterclass.

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/houdini-16-masterclass-muscles-overview/

Once you watch this and have more specific questions/problems, I would start searching the ODForce forums or making your own threads over there.

> Who actually LOVES working in Houdini every day, like waking up and DYING to drop 1000x nodes to do some thing.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/assets/create.html

This is like saying Nuke is too much work because you have to drop loads of nodes to do something you can do easily in After Effects. A lighter nowadays needs to run dozens of shots while keeping things consistent across a sequence. Lighters aren't animators or concept artists, the place they occupy in the pipeline means they'll always be doing a lot of 'not lighting' regardless of software.

I would avoid tutorials for versions prior to Houdini 16. The UI and some of the core functionality has changed from 15->16 and its worth learning for 16 or newer.

This is a good one

Tokeru is there for you when you've gotten a bit more advanced.

Entagma is again a bit more intermediate.

Also cool thing about Houdini, they have a great community and there is ample free training for it. Here's a tutorial for sound based deformations on their website, I just googled it.

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/houdini-tutorial-03-sound-driven-deformations/

You can definitely work in Houdini and not touch programming. This seems like a good tutorial, although I haven't followed it myself. The ones you've linked to aren't what I'd recommend to an absolute beginner. I, too, would have been overwhelmed if I started with those tutorials.

Best place to start would be here > https://www.sidefx.com/learn/getting_started/

Work your way through the reading material, then you can move on to Rohan Dalvi's tutorials.

As for where to apply your coding knowledge, I think the materials above should give you a good idea on how to apply them.

You definitely should not include any tutorial stuff when it comes to making a showreel, but I wouldn't worry about that at your current skill level.

Get comfortable with the software first, then you can move onto your own projects, if you find yourself getting stuck you can make a post over at /r/Houdini or use the SideFX official forums.

Best of luck!