Hey Alex! Good luck, you got this! As mentioned above, a good idea is to set smaller goals and plan concrete dates, it will help you feel less overwhelmed.
What usually helps me is deciding on a concrete task, similar to what you would have in a real studio. Not just ‘I want to make fire vfx’, but ‘I will make a burning barrel effect in this style using these references and I will give myself X days to do it’. Even for learning and personal projects setting constrains for yourself helps a lot!
Btw your English is fine and I’m Russian too so feel free to DM me if you need help with anything! I live in the UK now though all thanks to realtime vfx
Hey Alex, great first attempt! It’s certainly possible if you put the work in, there’s a lot to learn but if you put in the work and check in here often you’ll have no problem! There are lots of great tutorials around, don’t forget older ones from the likes of imbuefx, the tech might not be the absolute latest stuff but the principles and techniques are a great starting point. If you post here frequently you should get plenty of feedback and advice, good luck!
Hello! Some news!
I finally started writing my study schedule. My small curriculum
Briefly available
here.
Steps:
Replication of all (except sketch #2, and tutorial #9(mb later)) Sirhaians tutorials VFX (with own rework)
P.S. Look at the finished result and do it yourself. If something does not work, go watch the tutorial.
1-4 =3d
5,6,7=1d\1.5d on each (or more if very excited about one of these) ~ 4d
total ~ 7d
It seemed to be interesting to try to start my own effects with the effect of fire from here (as advised by an experienced guy 1 and 2)
1-2d
total ~ 9d
And then I will try to do some cooler and mb bigger fire with smoke (with help of this)
3-4d
total ~12(±1)
After this, I will another type of fire (mb fireball) with help of this 3-4d
total ~15(±2)
I don’t know yet what I will do tomorrow
I ask all of you (who is reading this) to give feedback about this because this is the work of a complete newcomer to VFX (from me)
And @Keyserito@ShannonBerke@whtsrnm
I’m also presenting to you my third VFX, made on the basis of
Hey, I am very glad to meet you, I am also a newcomer, from the Asian continent.
But I am younger than you, only 18 years old. Now I am confused about the Unity shader, I hope you can stick to it.
I learned about particle systems and movements and painting earlier.
I hope that you can go all the way.
Let me give you some advice on VFX now.
First lay the foundation for your color matching and particle system, and determine the basic operation, otherwise you will not be able to achieve the goal.
△ Remember that all tools are your friends.
△ Please learn to use most of the plug-in and with the use of tools, if you do not have money can try to crack.
good luck!
Over these days I rewrote my schedule a little and…
I finished a small campfire task with help of Sirhaian’s Tutorial.
(Not in one try)
First try
Second try
Of course, this is not perfect campfire, but It seems to me that I need to move on to the next effect. (Fireball)
If you think that this campfire is bad in something and it would be nice to modify it…
Or if you know other types of fire that would be cool to try for me (for learning)…
Or if you just want to give feedback for me.
Ok then @SmearKees advised to me try to upload some gifs after Licecap into giphy and then use that link in realtimeVFX.
Also he asked on VFX Discord about cool ways to create gifs. He was offered several other similar programs:
ShareX
Snagit
ScreenToGif
Ezgif
EzGif comment
"So by using ezgif you can turn videos in HQ gifs.
I recently uploaded a 4k video into it and you can choose your options for quality resolution 800p and 25fps
Made a pretty heavy gif of like 100mb xD but the quality was great.
It was just a gif of my cat climbing a tree on ping pong so he went up & down & up & down on repeat lol.
Buuuut in HQ "
This is another checkpoint on my way to junior VFX Artist.
After my last post about the effects made, quite a lot of time (8d) passed in my coordinate system.
All this time I was engaged in crafting a fireball. And now I will tell you why I spent so much time on it, and will show you what I did. (only fireball without caste and reaction VFX)
Let’s not forget that I had no background in these areas, and I had to learn everything from scratch.
For those who want to find out how I did it, below are links to something, with the help of which I did it.
My way
Curve trajectory with variable speed
Animation along the way in Maya
Editing NURBS curves, Snapping curves to animation
(Everything I read was in Russian(Animation along the way), but you can easily find it by yourself.)
Baking animation
Coped without help
Elementary mesh for head effect
Fundamentals of modeling in Maya
In Russian too, but you can easily find it.
Using Custom Vertex Streams and Custom Data in Unity Particles System
Only this
Through custom data in the particle system. In the shader: UV - split - (B channel) to the value that you want to change in the particle system. In the particle system in the render tab - use custom vertex stream, select custom1.xy (zv), turn on the custom data tab in the particle system, set the x value to 1, change it to a curve and control the dissolution from the particle system.
And now the things that I did right or wrong (in my opinion):
Right or wrong
Perhaps I took too big VFX for me and therefore received little feedback from what I was doing, and understood little what I was moving to.
Some days I lost concentration and worked for a maximum of 4-5 hours (instead of 8) May be due to reason above
Not all intermediate goals were so helpful to me at that moment. And they might be put off until next time. (dynamic alpha erosion)
Perhaps it was necessary to share here the intermediate stages of my work.
Despite the minuses, I achieved those intermediate goals that I set and studied a lot of useful information.
Conclusions:
I believe that instead of doing complex VFX, during this period of my training, I need to create as many effects as possible here (inspired by So You Wanna Make Games??) and do not try to learn a lot of new stuff for one effect, and stretch new information for several different effects. (Soon I will add it to my Small curriculum and Knowlege)
During the preparation of large VFX, make more checkpoints and set more intermediate goals.
I would be very grateful to you if you give me feedback about how my effect looks like and about the right or wrong conclusions I made.
I think you are drawing the right conclusions overall.
That’s very likely.
Relatable! To be honest, I rarely work 8h straight on any particular FX. I usually jump between at least 2, because sometimes, I feel I am too close to it and the lines between what it actually is, vs what it is in my mind’s eye are starting to blur. So taking a break and coming back to it later helps a lot. Switching to something different can kickstart back your concentration / creativity by keeping things fresh. Sometimes, you even get the bonus of getting a new idea for fx A while you were working on fx B.
That’s sort of where I was getting at when I was saying “First get used to the box before trying to think outside of it.” I think it that focusing on 1 thing / aspect and spreading it over multiple FX work is a good idea to start feeling like you are mastering / progressing. See my 2nd post below for more on this.
I think there is definitely value in putting thoughts onto text. Using your peers as a sounding board can greatly help you.
For example: Let’s dilute down your projectile FX to base core component. You get a launching FX, a projectile, and an impact. Now lets imagine that we focus on the motion of the FX. The rest of the FX can be placeholder. So let’s imagine the following:
The launching FX is as simple as a gray sphere shrinking, honing on the concentrated place of power from which the projectile will be launched.
The projectile is a simple gray sphere with a simple gray trail.
The impact is an expanding gray sphere originating from the point of impact.
So here’s my challenge to you. Make the above gray sphere version of the FX. Without changing the colors of the gray spheres, or adding textures of any kind. Only by changing the motion of each parts of the FX. Create the following 3 FX:
A powerful 1-hit FX that could kill its target in 1 shot.
A death by a thousand cuts sort of feeling from a barrage.
A 3-Hit combo where the first 2 hits are more like the #2 style, with a nice chunky combo finisher hit similar to #1 style.
If you decide to try this challenge, you’ll find that a) we can give you targeted feedback. And b) motion is a very powerful tool to master in FX making that can easily make or break any FX.
P.s as a bonus, it even fits the #22 VFX challenge for this month
Oh, god, I am so grateful to you for the advice that you share with me.
For real, at this stage of training, feedback about my thoughts and various training challenges are worth their weight in gold. They guide, save from painful mistakes and give a lot of motivation to move on.
Your help is always useful and, moreover, it is often devilishly difficult to move on without it.
Of course, I will accept this challenge, the refusal is out of the question!
Now I have a big problem with planning my training. And this challenge perfectly solves it for a while.
Moreover, it will be useful for me to distract from current tasks and, perhaps, even to revise them (my curriculum).
I’ll start working on it as soon as possible.
I would be very happy if in the future you sometimes will find a little time to give the same advice as now.
. Might worth to check that out.
For me very useful messages 
"
Internet!
