I need an Advice from VFX People

escudero

Hello,
I`ve been studying VFX in my free time, watching a couple of tutorials and so on. I bought 1 year subscription at CMIFX to get more materials and I saw a couple of new tutorials and I can`t see the difference between CINEMA 4D and Houdini (I know they`re different software, but what unique features do they have?). I don`t have a specific industry target (games/film), I just wanna learn as much as possible while I`m studying Computer Animation in my degree.  

Basically I started to study VFX after see this guy works:  http://www.klemenlozar.com/ , I see that he uses a couple of softwares in one simple effect (after effects, Unreal, 3DsMax and so on), so I get a little bit confuse where to start and don`t ``jump steps``, to get a solid foundation.

I`m reading ``The Art and Science of Digital Compositing`` if you have any other extra material leave it bellow please!

Well, thank you so much for your time and sorry for my English errors, I`m not American.
Regards,
Luis Escudero

Aabel

Houdini is vastly different than C4D, and all other CG packages. If you want to learn as much as you possibly can about computer graphics it's definitely the package to choose. I would not however necessarily recommend it as a first package unless you have experience with 3d math concepts and programming.

Ged

I used c4d for 4 years but found maya better for the games industry. Use something thats more of an industry standard, 3dsmax or maya should give you a good foundation and unless you are doing very complex dynamic vfx I doubt you will need houdini any time soon.  Having maya/max skills will also look good on your cv to. Even maya can do some pretty cool simulations if you need to render flipbook animations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRBqJcYxqlA

haiddasalami

I dont do vfx but had to touch some of it recently. You use whatever is at your disposal and gets the job done pretty much. Bill's site just closed down but he put up most of the tutorials on his youtube page. 

escudero

3dsmax is also good then? `ll take a look in this software, thank you! 

@Hauddasalami Yeah I heard that before, if we have the job done it`s ok.

@AABel thank you!

escudero

Someone else? 

Odow

Houdini is pretty much used for game, I guess it depends on where you wanna work but learning how to do Fx in game engine is pretty necessary too. Shuriken, shader forge, w/e it's name in unreal, etc. I'm no VFX artist but i've been doing a lot of Fx lately to help and I never any of the tech guys or my lead talking about doing Fx in maya/max for games.

RyanB

Aside from software, you should study cartoon animation timing and natural phenomena.  Overlapping action, snap, anticipation are all important.
I steal stuff from classic animation all the time.  For example, three layers of rain/snow: foreground has big raindrops, mid has medium raindrops, and far has lots of tiny raindrops.  Three planes of drops instead of filling a massive volume with raindrops of the exact same size.  Try it.

Look at everything and try to break it down.  Look at the way the sparks move at the top of the fire vs below.  How are the burning gases pushing the flames at the top?  If the flames are accelerating and becoming smaller at the top of the fire, then you need to use force/acceleration over time and size over time. 

If you can break down natural phenomena, you will get better at breaking down effects you have been asked to make or effects you design yourself. 

Tools:
Houdini is amazing but games almost never need a simulation with 26 million particles.  A game effect might have 100 particles.  It might not even be particles, it might just be a quad with an animated texture.  The game I'm working on now need lots of smoke and fire in the environment and particles were too expensive so I wrote scripts and shaders to use on static meshes.  Today I wrote a script that moved 200 individual particles from a particle system into the shape of a chaotic beam.  

Modelling, texturing, scripting, shaders, particles, physics sims, animation - whatever it takes to create something visually pleasing in the most optimal way possible.

escudero

RyanB said:

Aside from software, you should study cartoon animation timing and natural phenomena.  Overlapping action, snap, anticipation are all important.
I steal stuff from classic animation all the time.  For example, three layers of rain/snow: foreground has big raindrops, mid has medium raindrops, and far has lots of tiny raindrops.  Three planes of drops instead of filling a massive volume with raindrops of the exact same size.  Try it.

Look at everything and try to break it down.  Look at the way the sparks move at the top of the fire vs below.  How are the burning gases pushing the flames at the top?  If the flames are accelerating and becoming smaller at the top of the fire, then you need to use force/acceleration over time and size over time. 

If you can break down natural phenomena, you will get better at breaking down effects you have been asked to make or effects you design yourself. 

Tools:
Houdini is amazing but games almost never need a simulation with 26 million particles.  A game effect might have 100 particles.  It might not even be particles, it might just be a quad with an animated texture.  The game I'm working on now need lots of smoke and fire in the environment and particles were too expensive so I wrote scripts and shaders to use on static meshes.  Today I wrote a script that moved 200 individual particles from a particle system into the shape of a chaotic beam.  

Modelling, texturing, scripting, shaders, particles, physics sims, animation - whatever it takes to create something visually pleasing in the most optimal way possible.

Thank you so much, that really helped me.Odow said:

Houdini is pretty much used for game, I guess it depends on where you wanna work but learning how to do Fx in game engine is pretty necessary too. Shuriken, shader forge, w/e it's name in unreal, etc. I'm no VFX artist but i've been doing a lot of Fx lately to help and I never any of the tech guys or my lead talking about doing Fx in maya/max for games.

Thank you !!!

Demno

I use Houdini quite often these days. Though, I'd still say photoshop is my main weapon outside of the engine/editor. Let me know if there are more specific things you wonder about game VFX.