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Hi everyone! My name is Jacob, and a little over a year ago, I decided to pivot back into the games industry to become a VFX artist (I used to be a freelance composer ^^)! 
I started with self-study for a few months before doing some online courses, and then got really lucky and met my mentor @Ati who’s been helping to teach me 1:1 for the past several months 
I’ve been learning everything from texture creation, to animation timing, to making materials/shaders. I really love the blend of artistic and technical skill in this field – it satisfies my desire to be an artist and also be a kind of jack-of-all-trades and branch out into many different but related skills. I’ve mostly been focused on learning Unreal, but am now starting to learn Unity just so I can stay flexible for opportunities in the future.
I recently compiled a few projects I worked on over the past year into a short version 1 portfolio (everything but the fire at the end is Unreal, the fire was done in Unity)
I am proud of this milestone of creating my v1 portfolio, and at the same time there’s sooooo much about this reel that I’m not happy with and want to change. I think there’s a lot more I can do for the secondary and tertiary elements to make the layers a little more interesting, my shaders could use quite a bit more polish and nuance, and I think having more character/animation timing-focused effects would be fun to work on. I recognize this will be an endless process of learning and growing though, so I’m excited to improve and level up my skills further from here! And I am very excited to be getting back to making games 
Moving forward, my plan is to jump straight into working on my v2 portfolio, aiming to improve my shader creation knowledge, get better at animation timing and start making some more complicated/layered character ability effects, and also practice Unity more. I’m really inspired by the stylized VFX in games like Lost Ark and Genshin/Honkai, and want to try making effects along those lines.
At this point, my goal is to be a remote freelance/contract VFX artist, so I am now open to opportunities around the world 
我會說一點中文, 日本語を少し話せます, 그리고 중급 한국어 할 수 있어요 ^^
Thanks so much for reading!!