Math is helpful for super complex shader stuff, but you don’t really need to have a brain for that kind of stuff. I barely passed my programming class in high school, failed another one in junior college, and barely passed my intro to visual scripting course in college. I legitimately just poke things when doing simulations, once I understand the basic concepts that drives those things. You can be a more art-focused/art brained vfx artist, so don’t let technical stuff like scripting and the intricacies of 3d simulations deter you.
Every vfx artist is a problem solver though. When your job interacts with everyone from programming and design to animation and environment art, you’re going to have a lot more problems and bugs come up. What you need to do is just take notes on everything that you learn, and try to understand the reason behind how things work. The more you poke and experiment with things, the more you’re learn why they work the way they work, little by little.
I think you’re overthinking things, and doing simulation stuff in 3d programs is way ahead of the basics. If you enjoy it, keep learning it, but you will still need to learn the basics of game fx pipelines, and the principles of animation. It won’t matter how awesome your simulations are if you can’t make your effects look good in the game engine. There are a lot of directions you can go in vfx for games, try not to get overwhelmed by thinking you need to learn everything that is under that umbrella.
