Learning VFX - No Money

Y

Yfeatures

New member
Hey guys,
I'm a student, about to head to school for screenwriting. I am pretty much broke from buying all other necessary equipment, which is a problem when I try to learn VFX. I'd like to start working with the Foundry products (Nuke, Maya, Modo), but have no way of purchasing them. :huh: Is there any other way I can go about obtaining and learning these programs? Legally of course. How did some of you learn VFX? I have Blender and the full Creative Cloud, will this teach me the basics of what I need to know when I eventually have enough capitol to buy some Foundry Products? I understand this is a difficult and open-ended question. I would love any ideas and directions! Thanks. :grin:
 
Many high-end programs have demo or training versions, crippled in some way (number of objects, certain features disabled, etc) - usually making them worthless for serious work, but fine for a lot of self-training. Some products also have heavily discounted student licences (although with varying criteria of what a 'student' is, e.g. being a screen-writing student may not qualify you for a Maya discount). Definitely worth checking out each program's website.
 
Last I recall there were learning editions of Nuke and Maya for free.

Linda has a lot of good tutorials.

Good luck. Serious learning curves, but serious rewards. I never got past the learning curves. Many of the best people I know are self-taught so don't think you need to take courses, though intro courses can help. Lots of textbooks out there, too, some good.
 
Yep Blender is very fully featured and open source so it is absolutely free. It is very good considering it is free. As for the Foundry products they are now offering non-commercial versions of at least Nuke. These versions are nearly fully functional so you can comp, 3D track, etc... Then you have Resolve that is free and is a excellent color grader along with them now offering Fusion for free which is quite similar to Nuke. Renderman which is the renderer developed by pixar and is used by just about every major vfx house is now also offering a totally free non-commercial version, not sure how well Blender can be used with it though. I believe Pixologic offers a simpler version of Zbrush, Scultptrix or something, that I believe will allow you to do 3D sculpting. Sidefx Houdini does have non-commercials too and is the standard off the shelf vfx/dynamics software package, not sure about restrictions though. There are probably more but those will get you a long way, good luck.
 
Thank you guys so much for the great responses, I will investigate Blender and all that it entails. All of the recommended programs are fantastic thanks @ dhessel - Do you know where I can get the non-commercial Nuke?
 
Black Magic Design recently bought Fusion and you can download the basic version of Fusion for FREE.

Jeff
 
I'd say - if you want to end up at the professional level - decide if you want to be a 3D guy or a compositor.

You can learn a lot with AE - you and everyone else on the planet. Same with Blender (which would get you conceptually into 3D but I doubt is a tool used much on the pro level).

I'd contact every FX house you can find and ask what they feel the future is, what skills will be needed, etc. You might make some contacts, and you may be surprised.

That's how most every major makeup effects guy working today got started - by calling up Stan Winston and the like, and ending up interning.

My son's interning at a big animation studio that does several adult swim shows - he a great animator and now he's learning how it's done at the high end (surprise, they use SketchUp to design their backgrounds...)
 
Blackmagic Resolve for editing, color and finishing
Blackmagic Fusion for compositing and a lots of effects
Blender for 3d effects and not only
All free with professional workflow. There are many others like nuke, Modo, Maya etc that have student ediction but i don't know exatcly the limits of everywhere, specially about diffusion of your work. When you work with BMD free or blender you not have limits.
 
Also, don't forget houdini which has a free apprentice version.
But I would start with after effects which will give you the most bang for the buck. Blender/houdini/fusion etc will require more time investment.

Lastly, I would not be in a rush to spend money on the foundry products as the above will do everything you need.

Edit: maya has a student version but again don't really need if you have blender, etc.
 
Probably so but if anyone new comes across this updated info isn't a bad thing.

My $0.02 is that I would in his shoes go with the Blackmagic Designs software. The reason is that along with being free, for his use, it works in the same node based system as the high end software he wanted to learn. After Effects has a tone of tutorials and a lot of users but it is a track based system and all the high end VFV apps are node based. I am really familiar with Protools (DAW) so track based came naturally but switching to node based was a very big change in thinking. So If your plan is to end up working with node based I would start that way because very little of what you learn in AE will translate to node based systems.

that works in reverse also. If you are headed to working in AE then it will make life harder if you spend a bunch of time in node based. THey approach the same problems in very different ways.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top