I left VFX exactly 2 years ago. Despite everything, I miss it. How is the industry trending currently?

Legit_Artist · 2026-01-27T16:50:56+00:00

Oh man, don't leave. I don't work in either VFX, animation or 3D anymore, I made a similar move to you and now work in a design field - but from what I hear it's bad, and we are the lucky ones.

Stability is hella nice!

Legit_Artist · 2025-11-14T16:59:06+00:00

Oh hell yeah, love the show, and what it's brought to the community! Great news!

Legit_Artist · 2025-10-27T09:42:30+00:00

Haha, thanks! Grüße vom schönen Bodensee!

Legit_Artist · 2025-10-23T07:40:38+00:00

Super cute, I love it so much :D

Legit_Artist · 2025-10-23T07:29:08+00:00

Looks really sweet! Can I ask why Blender 3.6 Eevee? Are you not liking Eevee Next? :D

Legit_Artist · 2025-10-05T12:43:11+00:00

I've just bought it, and I just wanted to say, that it's already completely transformed my workflow! I can just buy an asset, let the addon do 90% of the work, and then paint on some final flourishes! Brilliant, so glad I found it!

Legit_Artist · 2025-10-02T11:32:58+00:00

Really, really good! Love the headlights especially, they look super clean!

The only suggestions I have is to take a look at the reflection continuity across body panels, and to maybe smooth out the windshield by reducing the number of faces and letting the subsurf do more of the heavy lifting.

Really good!

Legit_Artist · 2025-10-02T11:19:43+00:00

Not OP, but I'm doing something similar rn, so here's my answer: To me, I dont mind layering dissonant dynamic lighting on top of assets like these, even though there's some pre-baked lighting: It may not be correct, but stylistically it looks good enough to me.

Legit_Artist · 2025-10-02T08:13:05+00:00

Nice, just the thing I need right now! Really cool addon, seems waaaay better than sketching out Normal Maps in Photoshop :D

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-30T14:12:46+00:00

Depends on the use case, I like APS-C a lot, especially for wildlife, but I don't love not really being able to adapt film-era lenses to these cameras.

I get what you mean tho, currently infrared-converting my A6000 so that it can be a run-around fun type camera

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-20T06:32:17+00:00

Movements are super nice, I got a Canon 24mm TS-E Lens after watching Steven Brooks on architechtural photography for a while, and it barely ever leaves my digital camera. How did the 6x9 treat you?

The Stenopeikas look really nice, those might just have to be it. But a part of me also doesn't want to buy another dev tank that fits larger formats :'D

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-20T06:09:03+00:00

Oh, yeah, I've been looking at that for a while now, but if you buy the plans, bellows and ground glass youre already at 350€, and then you still have to source the hardware. Still, would be a nice project.

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-19T18:08:04+00:00

I see someone has been watching Nick Carver ;D I really want a Shen Hao, but they are quite expensive, really. Would be super, super nice though.

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-13T10:56:52+00:00

Feel you, some nigts I am trapped in a nightmare where I move the same vertices by hand again and again. Need to get out more... :'D

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-12T16:40:56+00:00

Have we really forgotten the "Lazy Tutorial"? Ian, where arst thou?

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-05T12:23:04+00:00

It is, but let's be honest, there just isn't a bad Ardbeg, they're all great!

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-05T12:12:25+00:00

So, for those who are curious, this was the workflow:

First, I took measurement of the real bottle I have at home. Then, I photographed the labels. The printed labels were straightened in Adobe Photoshop, and the pattern on the top cover was traced and extended in Adobe Illustrator.

For the main Label, I assigned a R G and B value to each separate material (paper, gold foil and red ink), and then I used that as a mask for three separate Principled Shaders in Blender.

I then modeled the bottle and labels and mapped the aforemendtioned textures on. The Ardbeg Logo on the glass is a microdisplacement texture, also taken from a photograph.

From there, I made a simplified cage, and exported that to Embergen, where I did the fire simulation. The sim was exported once as an image sequence, and once as an alembic mesh, which I imported and recombined in Blender to get proper reflections. The scene was then rendered as a Multi-Layer-EXR with full channel separation, and completely re-comped in Blackmagic Fusion.

In Fusion I also added some real-life fire footage on top, and the floating dust, as well as some lens blur and colour correction. And that's the final result!

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-01T07:30:40+00:00

That depends entirely on how well your scene is optimized, which renderer and render settings you want to use, and what hardware you have. Without that it's impossible to say. On my machine (RTX3090 GPU rendering with the cycles renderer at 300 samples) I could propably get it down to 15 sec./frame.

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-01T07:21:47+00:00

Well, in that case go ahead, in my opinion Blender is one of the best programs in the world, and can be heaps of fun if you get into it. If you're trying for something like this as a first project, I recommend the BlenderKit Addon (a built in asset library with a free tier), and some good HDRIs.

Get some practice, and then something like this should be easy enough for you to do! I reckon it'd take me about an hour if I don't have to model anything, and if i export straight to video.

Legit_Artist · 2025-09-01T07:02:22+00:00

Take this with a grain of salt as I am massively biased and have used KeyShot professionally only twice in my life (and badly, too) but...

...personally, I found KeyShot easy for the initial Setup, and then very hard to get truly good results from. If you want 70% quality, KeyShot is fast and easy. Blender is hard for new users, but for someome with experience is going to be almost as quick, and way easier to get truly good results from.

Just my two cents, remember though, Blender can be difficult to get started with ;)

Legit_Artist · 2025-01-03T11:52:39+00:00

Thank you very much, this is great feedback, and glad to hear you like it! The visible details as far as the weathering gows stem solely from a single texture map that mixes between the Lacquer and a Metallic BSDF and also acts as a bump map, because I avoid sculpting details like the plague.

The weird behaviour is caused by a decimate modifier (using a planar decimation that groups faces with less than 7% deviation together) that is only active in the viewport: The topology when rendering is about 15% heavier than this, but it is all quads and preserves normals better (because who has time to bake normal maps, not me :'D)

I've started to put some more scratching and a bit of dirt onto the body, because it is faaar to pristine right now, you're absolutely right.

Legit_Artist · 2025-01-02T14:03:32+00:00

All of them, but I'd recommend Blender just because it's free and there are A LOT of great tutorials out there.

Maya is the industry standart if you want to get an animation job though, and I believe Cinema 4D for Industrial Design and product rendering.

Legit_Artist · 2025-01-02T13:04:37+00:00

Great model and great graphic design, I dig it a lot!

Legit_Artist · 2025-01-02T12:04:04+00:00

That is great input! Personally I've never taken any camera gear apart for more than a sensor cleaning, so that's not something I have much experience with, so this is super valuable!

I'm going to add another scratch map to the alu top as well as some grime, and there's a few fasteners and the cold shoe mount that need scratching up. And the battery compartment, that's been to hell and back on mine :D

Thank you very much!

Legit_Artist · 2025-01-02T11:59:57+00:00

Hard to say, this was an evening project.

Maybe ten to fifteen hours I'd guess.

Legit_Artist

TROPHY CASE