This one’s a bit too nerdy. But on very bright sunny days, the vapor of cooling towers looks like it’s been badly comped.

Anyways.

I asked the mods before posting and they gave me a cautious yes since this is a topic that is often poorly received, so I'll be straight with you.

I'm a film student writing my bachelor thesis on the bidding process behind a VFX project. Specifically: when using cost controlling instruments like previsualization, whether the integration of generative ai can improve cost estimation.

I'm not an ai cheerleader. The point is to test the hype against what people who actually price and plan this work are seeing day to day.

If you're a VFX producer, supervisor, coordinator, anyone who's had to bid or plan work, I'd be grateful for a 30–40 min chat (vide or call, anonymised on request, academic use only). And I'd be glad to share the finished findings back here for anyone curious.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to the mods for the green light.

I'll be the one to say it. We VFX editors work like accountants.
I couldn't help but automate a bunch of our work... mainly:

1. export timeline to Excel sheets

2. bring modified Excel sheets back to timeline

3. re-do 1 and 2 because the edit changed

Next on my wish list is the overcut aka. bring VFX vendor submissions back to timeline.

If you work in Resolve, give Theia a try! If you work in other editing softwares, export an AAF and import that into Resolve and give Theia a try!

Or even better, fork the project and make it your own!

VFX editors in Resolve is probably a rare species... May Theia bring me bug reports and accountants alike.

Theia's GUI is pretty frugal! Read some documentation before you proceed: https://theia-docs.ming-q.com/

Have you ever just cropped the shot a little bit so you didn't have to deal with some bullshit lingering on the edge of the frame? I've done it a handful of times when there's some difficult, half-untrackable mess of replacement/cleanup work that's bopping in and out of the edge of frame... why not just... crop it out a touch. Should I be changing the frame? Probably not... Will they ever notice? well... probably not!

My daughter wants to study compositing and is looking at Campus VFX. I don't work in the industry, so I'm trying to figure out whether this is a reasonable path or an expensive mistake.

The school tells us that their training is the best available and have high placement rate. I have no way to judge that, so I'm hoping some of you can.

Sculpted an Octopus inside zbrush with all the details possible, tentacles with suction cups too

Retopologized and uv unwrapped a low poly version inside Maya So i can animate it with ease 🧐

THE PROBLEM : I Need DISPLACEMENTS "

How can I bake the displacements like protrusions of suction cups ,bumps and other details on the low poly version

I don't want a normal map i need real displacements of mesh from my high detailed sculpt

Substance painter doesn't generates a displacement maps

How do you people achieve this 😭

I've been wanting to study VFX for a few years now. The thing is, the degree is very expensive. I can make the effort and pay for it, but I'd like to know if it's worth it, since I've read in some places that there's a job crisis in the industry. I'd like to know how true that actually is.

I've also read that it's a job where you're constantly living in different countries. I'm from Argentina, and I understand there aren't many job opportunities here. But I'd love to move abroad and live in other countries. What worries me is never being able to settle down in one place and always having to move from country to country.

Another thing I'd like to know is about salaries. How much do people make approximately? What's the workload like? Things like that.

I hope you can help me. I've been learning on my own for a while now, but I want to take it seriously.

The schools I've been looking at are:
IMAGE CAMPUS (ARGENTINA)
TRAZOS (SPAIN)

The Problem

In production, the same asset gets saved over and over — v001, v012, v040… Most of the file hasn't really changed. The geometry, rig, and layout are largely the same.

But storage systems still treat each version as almost entirely new data. That's expensive in disk space, sync time, and backup cost.

What I've Built ?

It prepares scene files in a smarter way before storing them, so unchanged parts can be recognized and reused across versions.

Think of it like this: instead of treating every save as a brand-new file, it finds what's actually the same and stores that once.

We've seen much better reuse on real assets — often going from single-digit savings to 80%+ on typical production files, depending on format and how much actually changed.

Supported formats: Blender (.blend), Maya ASCII (.ma), and OpenUSD (.usd, .usda, .usdc, .usdz).

I'm open-sourcing Chimera and would love:

• Feedback from pipeline TDs, storage engineers, and studio infra teams
• Real-world test cases — especially where dedup has failed you
• Contributors who care about production pipelines and large scene files

If you've ever watched a 200MB save become another 200MB when only one control moved, this is for you.

Repository Link : https://github.com/iamkartiks/chimera-chunker-trainer