Depending on what aspect of VFX you go into will determine what programs you work with.

The general
areas for modern vfx include: 3D modeling (and associated tasks like texturing and possibly rigging),
animation, lighting and particle effects, and compositing. You can find any number of videos on youtube
which will give you an in depth education on the subjects without the cost of going to a so-so school.

We didn’t mess around with sound effects, or practical effects like monster costumes. I wish we had, but
those things are their own industry of sorts and have their own pathways in the industry. I would
recommend an apprenticeship at a studio if you want to learn practical effects like monster building.

That being said, these are the computer programs I recommend for the following areas:

3D Modeling – Maya & Z-Brush

Maya is the industry standard for 3D modeling. If you do any kind of character design or asset creation,
chances are it will be in Maya.

Very easy program to learn. You only need to know a few functions to get started. Don’t worry about all
the buttons and menus you aren’t using. You’ll learn over time what they do and it will become more
familiar. Don’t worry about its old looking interface. They don’t mess with the program too much
because the code works.

Z-Brush is like a finishing program for 3D models. This program lets you add finer details and sculpt to a
better degree than you could in Maya or something like MODO. Z-Brush does not like triangles and
certainly not n-gons in the mesh of 3D models. Z-brush will convert your model into tris anyway to get
finer details anyway.

I would recommend modeling a red beer cup as your first model. We did that and once you know a little
about Maya it will go very fast. You’ll feel silly once you realize how simple it is. Don’t feel bad about
starting over your 3D model. My class all did that during our time at that one school.

Once you know the basics of hold edges, switching from Catmull-Clark to polygons, and a few other
things, you can model anything really. It just will take longer to make a Gundam or a Star Destroyer, but
you’ll know how to make all the parts to join them together to make the bigger model.

Z-Brush is mainly for character creation. It is used a lot for video games. All the character busts you see
on Artstation or similar sites which appear to be made of clay are made in Z-Brush or similar programs.
Those models are exported back into a program like Maya for retopology and then rigging/animation.
Animation – Maya

Maya 3D not only lets you make models and texture them, but it also lets you rig and animate said 3D
models. You have a graph editor so you can adjust animation splines and check them in your viewport.
You can also import 3D models from other programs and use those in your scene provided they are
compatible OBJ files, etc.

We only used this program at the school I went to, but companies like Pixar or Dreamworks have their
own proprietary programs that they use for certain things. If you get to work there they will teach you
how to use these programs, so don’t worry. It isn’t unusual for studios to develop things in house
because they don’t have to pay license fees to other companies like Autodesk.

Textures and Lighting – Maya/Photoshop/ Substance Painter/ and possibly Mari

Texturing was undergoing a major shift when I was in school. Substance painter had not come out yet
and people were still fighting UVs and all that wonderful stuff. You’ll have to double check with on-line
sources to make sure what you’ll be using, but this is what we were taught.

In Maya 3D you can unfold your 3D model in one menu in order to create something called a UV layout.
This is like unfolding a cube and adding a photo to each side so you’ll see a picture on any of its 6 faces
when it is reassembled.

It can be very complicated, so when you hit this phase I would start with simple objects so you feel
comfortable before trying to texture a Gundam or X-Wing like a lot of people want to do from the start.

UVs aren’t the only way to texture though. You can also do something called a “procedural texture”
using the node editor in Maya. This lets you add a texture you design in Maya to any 3D model you have
selected in your scene. This does not require the mess of UVs and the associated hassles, but procedural
texturing can be frustrating in itself (especially if the teachers don’t tell you what menus do what). I’ll try
pointing you to a good Youtube series on it so you can go at the speed you find comfortable.

Lighting engines are very important for textures and these also were going through a revolution in 2016-
2017. V-Ray was really big back then and we used it almost exclusively in our program. Katana was just
getting started. Arnold was new too.

I really liked V-Ray and Arnold, but in just a short 8 years there have been a lot of newer engines come
out. Whatever you use will likely have the same layout. There are wide general lights for outdoors, and a
lot of smaller detailed lights for things like close-ups or making spooky scenes where you only see a
select few things.

Maya and Photoshop were the programs we used the most. We would make UVs in Maya and then use
Photoshop to create textures to put on the models. You can even make bump maps in Photoshop (but
you can also do this in Maya with a procedural too).
Maya also has Arnold as its lighting engine so you can play with lights without having to move to another
program. I’d recommend doing this if you can get access to Maya 3D as every VFX company will have
someone in some department working with this beast of a program.

Substance painter to me seems like just an easier version of procedurals. I never messed with it much,
but I’ll link you a good intro youtube video. Not sure where you can find a trial of it to mess about in.

Particle Effects – We used Maya for this as well, and you still can. But there are 2 big changes since I was
in school.

Houdini is the industry standard for making particle effects in movies now. We never used it, but you
can find a number of good tutorials on youtube. I think Houdini also has a free version so you can learn
how it works (it did at one time since I remember downloading it; I just never had the free time to play
with it).

Unreal Engine has gone wild since 2016. It once was just for video games, but it increasingly is being
used to generate cities for CGI shots, and its own lighting engine is very impressive. This trend shows no
sign of slowing and I believe videogame and movie making are going to merge in many areas other than
motion capture which both industries have used for decades now. Definitely look into Unreal and what
it can do.

Compositing -- NUKE Studio (or any version of NUKE really)

Nuke is the industry standard for compositing. You can do everything from greenscreen keying to
rotoscoping to color corrections and so forth in this monster. It is my favorite program asides from
Photoshop. In fact, NUKE is almost like a super Photoshop, except it is node based and non-destructive.

Everything you do to an image in NUKE can be undone and you won’t destroy the original image you are
working with. That isn’t the case in Photoshop if for instance you blur a layer and then want to remove
the blur. In Nuke you use a node for every effect and you can remove it from the chain of nodes if
needed.

Compositing is what many junior VFX people start out with. Nuke has a version for students with some
limitations. You can’t render out more than at 1080 resolution (not a big deal) and some of the nodes
are locked (like primatte nodes which are good for sky replacement).

I would recommend this 100% first as it is so much fun to learn and mess around in. You can do the
same kind of nonsense people do in photoshop where you replace someone’s head with a giraffe’s or
other such goofiness. What makes Nuke really cool though is it’s much easier to change footage this way
than just a single image at a time (which is what Photoshop was made mostly for).
Some other notes I would add are to keep your eye on VFX themed apps. AI is really going fast, and
some of the apps I have seen (for keying out greenscreens for example) are just amazing. They might not
get you 100% of the way there, but if they save you time then they are well worth using to do
preliminary clean up work.

The VFX industry is all about removing people and jobs, and if they can get an AI to track an object for a
camera solve or to do keying then they will do it. The company MPC moved most of their compositing
academy out of Canada right about the time my class was finishing up. That meant that all the roto jobs
and other compositing positions were **POOF** gone overnight. They went to India because of the
cheap labor and because Canada was ending some of the subsidies for the movie industry there. They’ll
do the same to the Indians once another place pops up where they can do things cheaper.

This brings me to one last and BIG point about the industry. If you want to work in VFX then be prepared
to be very disappointed almost all of the time. You will constantly be working under enormous pressures
and be pressed on hard deadlines if you are at a shit company. If you are lucky and find a really cool
indie studio then that might not be the case, but there is one catch – indie studios go out of business all
the time. It’s hard for them to compete with a bigger studio like Legacy or ILM and there are only so
many projects per year with the funds to keep a VFX studio going.

The company behind Life of Pi’s VFX, Rhythm and Hues, went bust just as they were finishing up work on
that film. It won a ton of Oscars including one for VFX, and NO ONE came to the aid of Rhythm and Hues
to save them. One of my instructors at DAVE was there because he got laid off with the rest of the staff
from R&H.

Don’t let that deter you though if you are sure you want to do this for a living. Just be aware that it isn’t
going to be easy at all. You will have to move away from your hometown in all likelihood, and if you go
to NYC or LA (where the main work is) then you will be in a place where few people are looking out for
you. Be prepared for that.

Junior artists often get very poor pay and sometimes get mistreated. Be prepared for that as well. You
might have to share an apartment with 4 or 5 other people if you really want to make it in a town with
rents as high as NYC has.

Most of my class that stayed with vfx are in Georgia. It has a very good film subsidy (20% and another
10% if you use a “Made in Georgia” tag in the credits). A lot of them work at Crafty Apes or Bento Box in
Atlanta where most of the action is.

You do not need to go to a VFX school to do VFX just like you don’t need film school to learn filmmaking
anymore. Youtube is the key. It’s just a matter of finding the right videos to provide you with adequate
training. Your demo reel, professional attitude, and a willingness to relocate and overcome obstacles
will be what gets you hired. That being said, you should not be a doormat. If a company is crap and
treating you like it, there’s no shame in moving on to a better one. Everyone deserves better than what
they start out with in this industry.

If that doesn’t scare you off from your dream of working in the industry, then good. You might find your
dream in such a job. Here are the youtube vids I found which will help you get started on the way. Feel
free to reach out to me at [email protected] if you have other questions or want a more in-
depth description of 3D modeling and what is likely expected of them in a VFX workflow.

3D Modeling --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZieJcA5vf0

This guy will give you a good overview of Maya and get you going fast. Render settings are another thing
I forgot to mention, but he will cover it once you have something to render for a demo reel or to show
to your buddies.

Another 3D modeling video worth checking out is here:

And another here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYQ98Q5UmNo

Character creation can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbAVBh4Tc78&list=PLQWBsXPnuVCSW5w5SD3p0b6IyI6cxQ7mJ

And this is a good video on tips and tricks. You don’t need 20 subdivisions to make an eyeball for
instance 😊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8JkR6tI_q4

Animation Tutorials --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbeiG1YmmDc&list=PLD8E5717592CF5C26&index=7

Maya has its own channel with useful videos. Some of them go a little slow, but that is a good thing
when you are just starting out. If you want some more advanced animation stuff it can easily be found
on the tubes. Just be aware that other programs will be slightly different when it comes to animation. I
strongly recommend avoiding Blender as it operates very differently than Maya in my estimation. Things
like hold edges work the same way, but Blender just feels gross once you are used to Maya.

Texturing --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PlP0phqTqY

Texturing hard surface models (buildings, robots, etc) is much easier than organic models like humans
and other creatures. The amount of work that goes into one of the girls from the DOA series is
phenomenal compared to some of the work done for stages or a droid that you can do with just
procedurals. Human have a lot of variation in skin tone, and when they are all one shade it can look odd
unless everything else in the work is similarly textured (like in a cartoon such as Jimmy Neutron).

Lighting --

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwxbX-6KIK8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtTrCT8WPDs

Particle Effects --

Maya N-Particles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2xZ0k3U8EA&list=PL6jLkFksyoUUkLdT1fTp38L2UenEDrzC7

Intro to Houdini:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbxNElzALrM

Compositing --

Intro to Nuke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6UkJRuN6j0

More intro to Nukes (no, not that kind of nuke!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDuQDwWjMLY&list=PL70z9un4UL0Z4QfOQ7p1ixOCck5_JuQ4W
Here is the documentary about Rhythm and Hues (and the general state of the VFX industry at present):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lcB9u-9mVE

And here is just a good short documentary about VFX and how well it was used in District 9 and why it is
that way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YJwPXipJbo

Remember to drop an e-mail if you have any other questions or just need some input on the industry. I
don’t work for a studio because I went through the VFX program to learn the stuff so I could do it alone
for my indie films I am working on now. I have used the 3D modeling training and NUKE to make images
for my hobby store business. Several of the programs can have applications outside the film world too.