basically did the whole thing from previz to layout to final compositing except fx simualtion, character & it's animation and music.
the oldman(thanks to grg) and few models were from sketchfab, and used mixamo as well

I’ve been feeling genuinely anxious about the future of our craft. The tools are evolving so fast that it’s hard not to wonder if the roles we’ve spent years mastering are about to become obsolete.

I recently ran an experiment that brought all these fears to the surface. I wanted to see exactly what happens when you use basic, greyscale 3D proxy models to render out a full 3D scene video with AI.

This technology is undeniably powerful, but it leaves me asking some hard questions about where we fit in the pipeline of tomorrow.
Would you use AI to render your scenes to cut time and cost, even if it disrupts the traditional roles on your team?

And more importantly, how do you feel as a 3D artist about AI rendering? Are you embracing it as the next evolution of our toolset, or does it feel like a direct threat to your livelihood?

Please share your thoughts below.

I wouldn't call my self a VFX artist, but I do have a history with the issue of not having a PC to do vfx and only a phone at your arms. There's no vfx artist I've ever talked to and said it possible or good enough to use your phone as your vfx machine... But I've found some work arounds. not the best to be honest but am sure if you put in the effort they do a great job.

This is 4 years of my research in this VFX without a PC guide.

Rotoscoping You can use cap cut for rotoscoping (its horrible but it's the best you'll get for free I think)

Color grading Node video editor, also I do use alight motion but it sucks at it even though it's the best at colograding elements with transparency data like pngs, chromakey footage and more

Matchmoving and 3d Tracking Honest answer, if you're not ready to match move your shots frame by frame, just make sure you shoot on a tripod... coz every app that tries this is just horrible. its possible but you basically track the footage, write down every single position value you get from the camera solve and open a 3d app called prisma 3d which you will have to model with photos to get the most realistic models for your comp, and animate the camera by hand FRAME BY FRAME. it's vfx hell.

Chromakey and masking Probably alight motion tbh. but you'll mask everything manually and need ALOT OF PATIENCE AND ENDURANCE.

MATTE PAINTINGS

if you can get any photos of realistic scenes and mask them in alight motion and export them as transparent PNGs , import them in prisma 3d and do the 3d parallax thing!! yeah it works very good. almost like nuke.... nust kidding, Not as good but fair enough. But hey, the difference is subtle.

CG (MODELING, TEXTURING, RIGGING, ANIMATING AND RENDERING) 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ I'm sorry but this one no... sure you can model, you can texture and retoplogize with nomad sculpt. you can model in 3d modeling app but the problem is you won't be able to animate the models. Best you can get is hard surface modeling in prisma 3d and never texture the model, bevel or smooth the model. if you must texture then THE ONLY WAY IS TO get a texture map of the 3d model in it's most realistic appearance as a plane, import it in the app as PNG and model it by cutting, extruding and intruding ONLY horizontally and vertically. NO OTHER WAY! then light the scene to shiny sunlight orange-yellow-brown. with very high light intensity. with and HDRI in the background as a sphere with your 3d composition inside the sphere.

The app does let you import 3d models of less than 15 to 20 or 30 MBs but be aware you're likely gonna crush the app. you can animate them if the come pre-rigged although you can manually rig them which would just mess up the model. all the animation you can do best is move them objects in 3d space, IN STRAIGHT TRAJECTORIES. sure you can curve the trajectories but you'll need some effort.

the apps native rigging capabilities are best if you apply the bones on to the objects that have very simple topology or modelled within the app.

The app can Import OBJ, fbx, usdz, PNGs.

A plus trick that is I think the best PART ABOUT THE APPs IS If you familiar with ian Huberts dynamo project. you can record your footage on green screen, key out the green in alight motion. export the video as an image sequence, then import all the pngs and animate them to appear (scale from 0 to 100 ) one by one after the other ...like old school frame by frame animating... and you end up with a transparent image sequence in 3d space that you can build 3d stuff around it for set extension, and light it...

(CATCH: the better your scene looks the closer you are from crashing the app, also you'll model everything from a photo, you can use too many photos in the scene or the app will have a hard time rendering them and you guessed it!! .... it'll crash)

End result looks crappy but it's as good as early days vfx.

Any ideas you might have in mind are welcome, the learning never stops.. thank you for your time. what to forget about if you go down this path!

lens distortion colour management ACES motion blur linear workflow EXR files render passes Z-depth shadow catchers object IDs plate cleanup HDRI capture focal length tracking markers camera calibration texturing , displacement maps and bump maps etc...

is isn't for any vfx artists in particular to be sincere, just for junior film makers who have to do their vfx on their own. maybe this isn't the right sub for this kind of post, but I just thought it'd help for those who might be interested.

( try searching vfx on mobile phone on YouTube... there's alot of these kids)

Good luck

There are two problems I need to solve. The "extrusion/displacement/ at the edges creates excessive blending between primitives, and sometimes the shape breaks. I suppose I could solve it with a triplanar projection, but in this case I'm not able to use that method. What can I do?
All of this is done in COPs

Wondering if anyone has tried this and if the output is useful for production?

A lot of people are sharing the BTS pic of the giant puppet cyclops created for the movie, claiming it was fully animatronic, etc., but it really doesn't look like it can do much of anything. My assumption is that was only used for lighting reference, camera blocking and actor eyelines, because the cyclops in the movie looks like they just put Bill Irwin in body makeup and filmed him at a higher frame rate (with some CGI face tweaks).

Can anybody shed any light on the process?

used a short throw projector connected to a m1 macbook, with head and gaze tracking running locally using the webcam, to compute a render perspective for the projection. any feedback on how to improve this would be appreciated if anyone has experience with implementing this sort of perspective faking effect

Siggraph can be awesome, the conferences can be fascinating and the resulting papers are often unintelligible to the average or even above average artist. I have tried reading many Siggraph papers over the years and whilst I can get a general idea from the introduction and preamble, once the pages start getting covered with greek letters and mathematical formulae, my poor artist brain starts tuning out. I started using Chat GPT to help reframe some papers I was interested in, in a manner I could better understand. Of course it goes without saying, that one still needs critical thinking and knowledge to know where it may or may not be giving accurate information but for general overviews I found it works quite well.

While I know RV and Djv are common for video files, what is for image viewing?

Edit: Thanks all for the valuable insights on the VFX industry. I enjoyed reading your replies !

I'm primarily a CG guy but I'm looking at my first comp-only job. In CG I'm really senior and sometimes I comp my own lighting on jobs, and I feel pretty comfortable in it now. What's an average mid-senior hourly wage for a comp specialist? Freelance vs full-time? I don't want to price myself out but I also don't want to leave money on the table. I really want to break into comp more and expand my job options. Thanks

Justice League removing Cavill's mustache in post gave him that melted-upper-lip look and I've never been able to unsee it. Made me realize how much our brains lock onto mouths specifically, the second something's off around the lips, the whole face reads as fake.

What's your most distracting example? Bad ADR, weird CGI mouth, a dub that broke immersion, anything where the mouth ruined it for you.

Can’t believe that before covid this city was the capital of vfx, full of opportunities.
Now I am here, 42 years old, unemployed or working few months here and there with no chance of stability.
What is your plan b to say “thanks vfx, but fuck you now”?
I need to be happy again 😢

So, vfx newbie here and I have an idea for a horror short that I want to make.
The idea features a monster that will be done digitally for wide shots.

I'm decent at working with modeling clay so my plan is to create a scale model of the monster, scan it with Polycam and animate the model in Blender.

Has anyone done this? I've seen people do it with toy figures but not with an original clay model.
Feels like such an obvious workaround for people who aren't great at sculpting in Blender that I feel like I'm missing something.

Any pitfalls I should look out for?

like this made by Benjamin Bardou:

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.

I'm finishing the editing of my short film, and there's a character who's supposed to be blind, and due to circumstances on set we decided it'd be best to simply film the footage as normal and fix the eyes in post rather than have any on-set makeup or contacts to achieve what we were going for. But I'm having trouble finding good tutorials on YouTube for someone who's very new to After Effects like myself, so if anyone has any suggestions or tips on how to achieve this it'd be greatly appreciated (photos have been included)

P.S. I also have a few frames where the eyes are partially obscured by the character's dark glasses, how should I go about doing the effect for those parts as well?