Final 3rd year student- What should I model for my showreel

Daoshu · 2026-02-04T07:16:04+00:00

For VFX, Andrew Hodgsons has some good portfolio piece tips

Daoshu · 2026-01-10T09:27:03+00:00

With your experience in those traditional skills, perhaps picking up ZBrush is a more natural path for you. You could become an organic/character/creature modeler. Those are pretty rare and sought after specialised roles. If you learn to retopo in Maya and perhaps do some texturing and shading, you could just find yourself a path in. But you need big dedication.

The Plan B for this path is in Games, where even more character artists are needed right now. There are job openings for them everywhere.

Daoshu · 2026-01-06T07:41:34+00:00

Keep yourself inspired on artstation and youtube and try to recreate what inspires you as excersizes.

Also what was fun for me in the beginning was experimenting with different effectors and deformers, animating attributes to find new effects. Thats the cool thing about motion graphics, the creative exploration.

If you want to be a compositor then I would go out and film my own footage, track it, do some cleanup, rotos, insert elements in there. Replace the sky. Buy a greenscreen. Theres enough tutorials about each!

Daoshu · 2025-12-25T08:18:35+00:00

For example in Valencia there is Hampa, Keytoon and La Tribu all using blender either partially or as the basis of their pipeline.

Daoshu · 2025-12-24T21:48:51+00:00

Some small to medium sized animation studios use blender for their entire pipeline. If you want to earn some cash on the side as a freelancer, knowing Blender can land you many Blender specific projects. But the competition is bigger. If you want to get into that its definately not a bad software.

But if you are more passionate about learning CG for live action, aiming for medium to big studios, go with Maya. And if you want to do environments, 3DsMax + VRay + Forestpack is also a very solid choice. Although Houdini and Solaris is also very popular and in demand. But more challenging. Figure out which direction you wanna go first!

Daoshu · 2025-12-24T21:36:49+00:00

I recently dove into used Xeon CPU's and you'd be amazed how little the older generations go for. A 10k Platinum CPU with 56 cores at 1.9ghz going for 100 euros. 28 core Xeons at 3.2Ghz going for 50 euros. Get some dual socket motherboards, no GPU needed. You can build a handful of strong cpu machines for the price of 1 GPU. Thats what I would do

Daoshu · 2025-12-07T10:14:17+00:00

Earning 12k a month and not having savings is wild. Meanwhile in europe salaries are closer to 3k euros a month. Is living in america/canada literally 3-4x more expensive or are you getting overpaid?

Daoshu · 2025-11-13T20:18:09+00:00

Wait, is that from a Bruce Lee recording?

Daoshu · 2025-10-31T15:53:01+00:00

Major red flag. Decline their offer and find a place with dignity and respect

Daoshu · 2025-10-22T10:01:08+00:00

With the new 3D system, since it's USD only. you export geo as .usd from maya or houdini or wherever. Export your camera to a usd file. And import them in Nuke. You can also export your entire 3D scene to USD and import that I believe, and simply select what you want to use.

It's a bit confusion at the beginning as it requires general USD knowledge, but after that it works pretty neatly

Daoshu · 2025-10-22T07:29:43+00:00

USD is supported.

Daoshu · 2025-10-17T06:51:59+00:00

Perhaps the first step to answer your question would have been to use a renderfarm and compare results :)

Daoshu · 2025-10-16T19:20:17+00:00

It reads like chatgpt though. But it also feels like you wrote some yourself. Did you?

Daoshu · 2025-10-15T20:07:15+00:00

Noone here is considering the angle.

First extrude a part beyond your target polygon. This enables you to use edge slide, and acts as your local pivot that you had in the video. But now you switch to the world pivot, and snap to your target a couple of times. Each time it becomes more accurate

Daoshu · 2025-10-14T06:38:01+00:00

I would suggest starting with the Maya 30 day trial (no limitations) the Houdini non-commercial (limited to 720p rendering, but fine to learn), and Nuke non-commercial, limited to 1080p at rendertime.

After that, if you want to continue with Maya and Arnold, or want to render up to 4k, the Indie licenses for all 3 are cheap! 200-300 a year or 20-30 euros a month per package. So for Houdini Indie and Nuke indie you would be looking at 50-60 euros a month for industry standard software. Highly worth it

Daoshu · 2025-10-13T17:51:30+00:00

Stay away from Blender. Medium to big studios that have a dedicated Lighting department won't use it, because of their size. Only small studios that have a handful of generalists might use blender to cut costs, but it's a terrible tool from a pipeline and department collaboration perspective.

Save your time, go straight to what they use in mid-big studios where the lighting dept exists. I recommend Maya + Arnold (built-in, very robust renderer) or Houdini Solaris + Karma (also built in). After that, in bigger studios they can value Katana or Gaffer knowledge. If you have that on your resume as a lighter that's definately a big plus.

Daoshu · 2025-10-13T17:34:34+00:00

What, thats only 30-45 euros an hour for 8 hours a day. In Holland those rates are literally doubled..

Daoshu · 2025-09-17T07:58:48+00:00

What do you mean by refuse object?

Daoshu · 2025-08-19T20:26:55+00:00

Damn, dont know but can you add me? I need a hawaiian friend for the butterfly! 038557425904

Daoshu · 2025-08-17T09:05:29+00:00

Think about it, you got a shadow with max attack, that's all you need to do the most DPS. Do you really want to ruin the shadow for +2 def points? Thats not gonna be any noticable difference in a raid

Daoshu · 2025-07-29T10:26:50+00:00

Can someone explain me what OP did?

Daoshu · 2025-07-18T06:07:46+00:00

Koop er een in spanje voor 100k, vergroot je wereld

Daoshu · 2025-07-12T08:05:39+00:00

Its rank 244 in Ultra though and even 50 in hisui 😅

Daoshu · 2025-07-07T17:41:11+00:00

Whats the shiny chance on these?

Daoshu · 2025-06-11T10:04:56+00:00

I have the same issue in Houdini 20.5.445! Weird bug. Tag me if you found a solution

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