Newbi but not newbi

BlenderBob · May 23 2025

Hey Gaming World! I'm a senior VFX artist with 30 years of Hollywood experience. The VFX industry is not going well at all so I'm jumping into the gaming industry, hoping to make a demo for a game I have in mind. I will have to adapt my modeling and look dev to Unreal's restrictions (We don't really care about polycount in VFX) and it will be a hard journey for me to make the switch but I'm super motivated and I hope that this community will be there to help me, the same way the Blender community does. Just wanted to say Hi and introduce myself. This is my demo reel

https://youtu.be/nJkLw5TH140 and these are my film credits: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0727947/?ref_=fn_all_nme_1

zetheros · May 23 2025

jesus it must be bad in VFX if someone of your caliber is coming over here

welcome though, @BlenderBob. Fantasia is a fav of mine. Hope you find what you're looking for

iam717 · May 23 2025

read this as shots towards site.

"must be bad in VFX if someone of your caliber is coming over here" , probably just a me thing again.

Though yes welcome, enjoy the stay using the search option will probably help you greatly, with many of your needs.

zetheros · May 23 2025

well, no, not taking shots at Polycount. The games industry is basically reverting to pre fortnite levels of employment. He's coming here to learn how to get into games, so it must be really bad in VFX

There's a wiki Blenderbob, http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Polycount but you probably know most of what's in it. Games and VFX have gotten fairly similar over the years, there are just slight differences like using smaller texture maps (2-4k, usually no 8k maps), efficient UV layout (can't just auto unwrap a million poly model). Using less bones in rigs. Smaller particle limit, as particle emitters will be running in real time. Mostly optimization strategies to get the most performance you can out of assets

BlenderBob · May 23 2025

VFX is hell. Technicolor, who own MPC, Mikros, Mr. X and other VFX companies went bankrupted. So did Method Studios. Both major VFX companies. Rodeo FX went from 3000 to 700 employees. And in Quebec the government cut the tax credits by 30%, killing the entire industry. more than 80% of the 8000 people are now jobless, including me. DNEG closed its office in Montreal. Maybe like 1000 people. Yeah, it's bad. Thanks for the welcome :-)

okidoki · May 23 2025

Uhhh...

so bad to hear this.. since i enjoyed your videos ( only no likes on YT bcause i'm not on YT

and learnt a lot) and in fact (you might not remember) we "met" on BlenderArtists..

It seems the world is going crazy.. Is this because of all "those AI" ?? Not only in arts but also:

( ..we force our staff to use AI so we can fire them..)
https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/21/2021255/the-information-microsoft-engineers-forced-to-dig-their-own-ai-graves

(..we "hired" a malfunctioned AI to hire you.. not..)
https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/05/18/1842225/when-a-company-does-job-interviews-with-a-malfunctioning-ai---and-then-rejects-you

..or about some politicians going mad ?? (Better not talk about this topic )

I hope this is ai (ad interim).

thomasp · May 23 2025

I'm probably one of the five or so people in the world who liked Ad Astra. Congrats are in order I suppose. That moon chase was pretty intense on the big screen! Also FF: Spirits Within: major inspiration of mine back in the day when I was starting out. Still have the art book on my shelf. No endless superhero franchise galore either so that's a plus in my book!

I hope you find what you are looking for on the games side. Also I don't think the switch will be quite that hard - in my niche nobody seems to care about the polycount anymore especially when dealing with Unreal. I keep reminding them - they keep dismissing my old-school concerns.

It's an established pattern as of now.

kanga · May 23 2025

Hi Bob. Great reel.

Welcome to polycount and hope you find what you are looking for.

Grindy · May 24 2025

Welcome to games, though I'm not sure we're doing a lot better, sadly. I hope you find something! I've watched some of your tutorials in the past and they were pretty good by the way!

BlenderBob · May 24 2025

thomasp said:

That moon chase was pretty intense on the big screen!

I was in charge of the layout for that scene. One huge enormous scene.

https://youtu.be/3QfXya3y4Tw

sacboi · May 25 2025

Welcome Bob, scrolling your credits reads like a who's who tent-pole 'dream team' selection for the best part of 30yrs, especially for nerdy folk (...which certainly includes me

) that are enamored with scifi/disaster/apoc/fantasy content and may I add particularly mechanical hard surface stuff so hope your time here is not only educational but a whole heap of fun besides.

Cheers

Newbi but not newbi

Replies