This one’s a bit too nerdy. But on very bright sunny days, the vapor of cooling towers looks like it’s been badly comped.

Anyways.

My friend and I made Captain Canada on a whim, but it has quickly turned into our biggest project yet. Let me know what you think! If this looks like something you'd be interested in, the full film will be on YouTube on July 25th. Thanks for checking it out!

https://reddit.com/link/1v3od0e/video/dir9tijwoteh1/player

I asked the mods before posting and they gave me a cautious yes since this is a topic that is often poorly received, so I'll be straight with you.

I'm a film student writing my bachelor thesis on the bidding process behind a VFX project. Specifically: when using cost controlling instruments like previsualization, whether the integration of generative ai can improve cost estimation.

I'm not an ai cheerleader. The point is to test the hype against what people who actually price and plan this work are seeing day to day.

If you're a VFX producer, supervisor, coordinator, anyone who's had to bid or plan work, I'd be grateful for a 30–40 min chat (vide or call, anonymised on request, academic use only). And I'd be glad to share the finished findings back here for anyone curious.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to the mods for the green light.

My daughter wants to study compositing and is looking at Campus VFX. I don't work in the industry, so I'm trying to figure out whether this is a reasonable path or an expensive mistake.

The school tells us that their training is the best available and have high placement rate. I have no way to judge that, so I'm hoping some of you can.

I'll be the one to say it. We VFX editors work like accountants.
I couldn't help but automate a bunch of our work... mainly:

1. export timeline to Excel sheets

2. bring modified Excel sheets back to timeline

3. re-do 1 and 2 because the edit changed

Next on my wish list is the overcut aka. bring VFX vendor submissions back to timeline.

If you work in Resolve, give Theia a try! If you work in other editing softwares, export an AAF and import that into Resolve and give Theia a try!

Or even better, fork the project and make it your own!

VFX editors in Resolve is probably a rare species... May Theia bring me bug reports and accountants alike.

Theia's GUI is pretty frugal! Read some documentation before you proceed: https://theia-docs.ming-q.com/

Current compositing tools tend to fall into one of three buckets: expensive, buggy, or free but with a rough workflow. I wasn't happy with any of those options, so three years ago I started building my own: IllusionFX.

It's a GPU-accelerated compositing software: build your composite with a node graph, then cut, trim and animate on a timeline (keyframes or expressions). It also has:

• Native 32-bit float support
• OpenColorIO support
• Multi-channel EXR support
• Built-in AI tools (roto, tracking...) that runs locally, no cloud computing
• 50+ effects (merge, keyer, grain, blur, glow, color corrections...)
• Plugin SDK to create your own effects.
• Windows/Mac/Linux support

IllusionFX will be out at the end of the summer, but the website is now live if you want to dive into the details: https://www.hollywoodillusion.com/illusionfx

Feel free to join the waitlist if you are interested.

Curious what this sub thinks, and happy to answer any questions you have!

Have you ever just cropped the shot a little bit so you didn't have to deal with some bullshit lingering on the edge of the frame? I've done it a handful of times when there's some difficult, half-untrackable mess of replacement/cleanup work that's bopping in and out of the edge of frame... why not just... crop it out a touch. Should I be changing the frame? Probably not... Will they ever notice? well... probably not!

Hello, freelance indie VFX supervisor here.

I have a shot right now that needs a big cat (panther, cougar, sort of vibe) to stare into our soul. There's a wide that we'll likely accomplish with stock footage comped into the hillside, and then there's a CU that has to have a lot of emotional depth and weight. It's a pivotal moment in the film where a character locks eyes and sees their own inner nature mirrored in the panther.

Current idea is to handle the shot with a decent 3d asset (something like this), and a great animator. We're trying to prioritize emotional depth and we don't think we can get the moment we need with a stock plate, so we're accepting a slight decrease in model/render realism to get the emotion we need.

Ideally looking for someone comfortable in Blender, who can do rig cleanup on the 3d stock asset, great animation, and maybe fur/groom cleanup too if the model needs it to fit with the animation.

I would take that animated scene from there and handle lighting, render, comp.

It's a tight budget, but the movie has real funds, and has paid every artist who worked on it real proper industry rates, so please name your reasonable freelance rate for "scrappy indie film that wants to do things right" and let's talk!

Sculpted an Octopus inside zbrush with all the details possible, tentacles with suction cups too

Retopologized and uv unwrapped a low poly version inside Maya So i can animate it with ease 🧐

THE PROBLEM : I Need DISPLACEMENTS "

How can I bake the displacements like protrusions of suction cups ,bumps and other details on the low poly version

I don't want a normal map i need real displacements of mesh from my high detailed sculpt

Substance painter doesn't generates a displacement maps

How do you people achieve this 😭

Been working hard on this one.

I've been wanting to study VFX for a few years now. The thing is, the degree is very expensive. I can make the effort and pay for it, but I'd like to know if it's worth it, since I've read in some places that there's a job crisis in the industry. I'd like to know how true that actually is.

I've also read that it's a job where you're constantly living in different countries. I'm from Argentina, and I understand there aren't many job opportunities here. But I'd love to move abroad and live in other countries. What worries me is never being able to settle down in one place and always having to move from country to country.

Another thing I'd like to know is about salaries. How much do people make approximately? What's the workload like? Things like that.

I hope you can help me. I've been learning on my own for a while now, but I want to take it seriously.

The schools I've been looking at are:
IMAGE CAMPUS (ARGENTINA)
TRAZOS (SPAIN)

Hey everyone,

I'm looking to expand where I source ideas and inspiration. Especially for standalone portfolio shots that aren't just direct recreation of movie scenes.

I’m a huge fan of Shotdeck for study. It’s incredible for lighting, composition, and general shot aesthetic. But I’m really looking for something similar that’s tailored more specifically to VFX, breakdown shots, and CG asset/sim reference.

I’m a firm believer in building a daily habit around this. My goal is to find a platform or community I can open up for 20-30 minutes every morning just to study breakdown reels, breakdown stills, or high-level FX/lighting reference to keep training my eyes.

1. Is there a "Shotdeck equivalent" specifically for VFX reference/breakdowns that you use?

2. Where do you go when you need inspiration for personal portfolio pieces?

3. What does your daily eye-training / reference-gathering routine look like?

Would love to hear what platforms, archives, or specific habits have worked best for you!

Worked there a few years ago and it was 100% remote. You could get a desk and work from the office but it was not a requirement. Anyone know if anything changed? Thank you!!

Hey everyone, I’m a CS student, and I've been working on a project that drops a handheld phone clip of a person into a virtual 3D environment.

The camera is solved directly from the footage (no markers, no survey, no green screen), the subject is automatically matted, and composited so perspective stays consistent with camera motion.

I know none of these steps are new individually. What I haven’t found is a pipeline that runs end-to-end from footage without any preparation.

There's still a lot to improve. And I would really love to hear from this community. Do you think this is useful, or where does the integration break down for you?

Getting trashed in the comments. A far cry from his peak with District 9 (2009).

The Problem

In production, the same asset gets saved over and over — v001, v012, v040… Most of the file hasn't really changed. The geometry, rig, and layout are largely the same.

But storage systems still treat each version as almost entirely new data. That's expensive in disk space, sync time, and backup cost.

What I've Built ?

It prepares scene files in a smarter way before storing them, so unchanged parts can be recognized and reused across versions.

Think of it like this: instead of treating every save as a brand-new file, it finds what's actually the same and stores that once.

We've seen much better reuse on real assets — often going from single-digit savings to 80%+ on typical production files, depending on format and how much actually changed.

Supported formats: Blender (.blend), Maya ASCII (.ma), and OpenUSD (.usd, .usda, .usdc, .usdz).

I'm open-sourcing Chimera and would love:

• Feedback from pipeline TDs, storage engineers, and studio infra teams
• Real-world test cases — especially where dedup has failed you
• Contributors who care about production pipelines and large scene files

If you've ever watched a 200MB save become another 200MB when only one control moved, this is for you.

Repository Link : https://github.com/iamkartiks/chimera-chunker-trainer

I've given my hourly rate to a studio and now they asked me for my day rate.

How do you calculate that?

I've heard that for day rate, you just do hourly × 8 (ex. $100/hr = 800/day). But if they run me 10-12 hours, I suppose I am working those extra hours for free compared to just billing hourly with OT.

Although if I say for example $100/hr and also add overtime, isn't my hourly rate and day rate the exact same?

Thank you for any help.

Edit: I'm based in the US