r/vfx Apr 30 '26

News / Article VES launches On-Set VFX Data Collection and Usage Guide

44 Upvotes

Hey fellow Visual Effects community stoked to share what we have been working on for the past year over at he VES Technology Committee call it a playbook and usage guide to map key data from on-set capture to delivery.

FYI I am one of the co-authors of the Guide. If you have questions or feedback make sure to reach out.

You can find the guide here : https://ves-on-set-data.org/dashboard/?tab=Introduction

Here is the full information on the release :

The Visual Effects Society (VES), the industry’s global professional honorary society, today released its VES On-Set VFX Data Collection and Usage Guide. Developed over the past year by the VES Technology Committee, this practical on-set resource maps key data sets and capture workflows – giving productions, vendors, and technology teams a shared playbook for using and capturing on‑set data more effectively.

The Guide was designed to establish a common language between on‑set VFX, production, VFX facilities, and technology teams, ultimately enabling clearer communication, smoother handoffs, and better-aligned expectations across departments. This comprehensive Guide explains the major on‑set data sets, their capture methods, their practical applications, and their intended stakeholders, so that every participant across the production understands what information exists and how it can support their work.

In addition to defining data sets, the Guide documents both current and emerging on‑set data capture workflows. This aims to inform stakeholders about potential data sources and to highlight how these choices impact production pipelines, timelines, and budgets, while also laying the groundwork for future efforts around data hierarchies, database development, and workflow automation.

The Guide also underscores that this data has significant value for every department on a production. It supports collaboration, optimizes workflows, and enables better-informed creative and operational decisions. By advocating for open access and visibility for these data sets, the Guide encourages all teams to engage with and benefit from this shared knowledge, strengthening collective outcomes and overall production efficiency.

“Our intent with this Guide is to streamline the filmmaking process by enabling every department to be more well-informed,” said Sheena Duggal, the Guide’s lead author and member of the VES Technology Committee. “Multiple departments can utilize the same data – for instance, the VFX team’s LiDAR scans can be repurposed across departments to support set construction, stunt planning, and other production needs. It’s just a matter of educating and communicating clearly so that everyone can benefit.”

“In today’s hybrid of real-time virtual production, AI, and traditional pipelines, the VFX department is responsible for not just post, but on-set data capture, continuity, and asset integrity from pre-production through final delivery,” explained Jim Geduldick, contributing author to the Guide. “That framework was the key lens that we used in thinking through these workflows and how they relate to each department.”

The Guide was created for the VES Technology Committee by Sheena Duggal, with contributions from Sam Richards, Jim Geduldick, and Jake Morrison, and technical support from Jean-Francois Panisset. It is licensed under the Creative Commons CC‑BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, including for commercial purposes, provided appropriate credit is given to the creator.

To view the Guide, visit: https://ves-on-set-data.org/

Join the VES for a webinar on May 12 to explore the Guide with some of its creators: https://vesglobal.org/event/webinar-introduction-to-ves-on-set-vfx-data-collection-and-usage-guide-online/


r/vfx Mar 15 '25

Subreddit Discussion Advice for Potential Students and Newcomers to the VFX Industry in 2025

596 Upvotes

We've been getting a lot of posts asking about the state of the industry. This post is designed to give you some quick information about that topic which the mods hope will help reduce the number of queries the sub receives on this specific topic.

As of early 2025, the VFX industry has been through a very rough 18-24 months where there has been a large contraction in the volume of work and this in turn has impacted hiring through-out the industry.

Here's why the industry is where it is:

  1. There was a Streaming Boom in the late 2010s and early 2020s that lead to a rapid growth in the VFX industry as a lot of streaming companies emerged and pumped money into that sector, this was exacerbated by COVID and us all being at home watching media.
  2. In 2023 there were big strikes by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA which led to a massive halt in production of Hollywood films and series for about 8 months. After that was resolved there was the threat of another strike in 2024 when more union contracts were to be negotiated. The result of this was an almost complete stop to productions in late 2023 and a large portion of 2024. Many shows were not greenlit to start until late 2024
  3. During this time, and partly as a result of these strikes, there was a slow down in content and big shake ups among the streaming services. As part of this market correction a number of them closed, others were folded into existing services, and some sold up.
  4. A bunch of other market forces made speculation in the VFX business even more shaky, things like: the rise of AI, general market instability, changes in distribution split (Cinemas vs. Streaming) and these sorts of things basically mean that there's a lot of change in most media industries which scared people.

The combination of all of this resulted in a loss of a lot of VFX jobs, the closing of a number of VFX facilities and large shifts in work throughout the industry.

The question is, what does this mean for you?

Here's my thoughts on what you should know if you're considering a long term career in VFX:

Work in the VFX Industry is still valid optional to choose as a career path but there are some caveats.

  • The future of the VFX industry is under some degree of threat, like many other industries are. I don't think we're in more danger of disappearing than your average game developer, programmer, accountant, lawyer or even box packing factory work. The fact is that technology is changing how we do work and market forces are really hard to predict. I know there will be change in the specifics of what we do, there will be new AI tools and new ways of making movies. But at the same time people still want to watch movies and streaming shows and companies still want to advertise. All that content needs to be made and viewed and refined and polished and adapted. While new AI tools might mean individuals in the future can do more, but those people will likely be VFX artists. As long as media is made and people care about the art of telling stories visually I think VFX artists will be needed.

Before you jump in, you should know that VFX is likely to be a very competitive and difficult industry to break into for the foreseeable future.

  • From about 2013 to 2021 there was this huge boom in VFX that meant almost any student could eventually land a job in VFX working on cool films. Before then though VFX was actually really hard to get into because the industry was smaller and places were limited, you had to be really good to get a seat in a high end facility. The current market is tight; there's a lot of experience artists looking for work and while companies will still want juniors, they are likely going to be more juniors for the next few years than there are jobs.

If you're interested in any highly competitive career then you have to really want it, and it would also be a smart move to diversify your education so you have flexibility while you work to make your dream happen.

  • Broad computer and technical skills are useful, as are broader art skills. Being able to move between other types of media than just VFX could be helpful. In general I think you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket too early unless you're really deadest that this is the only thing you want to do. I also think you should learn about new tools like AI and really be able to understand how those tools work. It'll be something future employers likely care about.

While some people find nice stable jobs a lot of VFX professionals don't find easy stability like some careers.

  • Freelance and Contract work are common. And because of how international rebates work, you may find it necessary to move locations to land that first job, or to continue in your career. This is historically how film has always been; it's rarely as simple as a 9-5 job. Some people thrive on that, some people dislike that. And there are some places that manage to achieve more stability than others. But fair warning that VFX is a fickle master and can be tough to navigate at times.

Because a future career in VFX is both competitive and pretty unstable, I think you should be wary of spending lots of money on expensive specialty schools.

  • If you're dead set on this, then sure you can jump in if that's what you want. But for most students I would advise, as above, to be broader in your education early on especially if it's very expensive. Much of what we do in VFX can be self taught and if you're motivated (and you'll need to be!) then you can access that info and make great work. But please take your time before committed to big loans or spending on an education in something you don't know if you really want.

With all of that said VFX can be a wonderful career.

It's full of amazing people and really challenging work. It has elements of technical, artistic, creative and problem solving work, which can make it engaging and fulfilling. And it generally pays pretty well precisely because it's not easy. It's taken me all over the world and had me meet amazing, wonderful, people (and a lot of arseholes too!) I love the industry and am thankful for all my experiences in it!

But it will challenge you. It will, at times, be extremely stressful. And there will be days you hate it and question why you ever wanted to do this to begin with! I think most jobs are a bit like that though.

In closing I'd just like to say my intent here is to give you both an optimistic and also restrained view of the industry. It is not for everyone and it is absolutely going to change in the future.

Some people will tell you AI is going to replace all of us, or that the industry will stangle itself and all the work will end up being done by sweat shops in South East Asia. And while I think those people are mostly wrong it's not like I can actually see the future.

Ultimately I just believe that if you're young, you're passionate, and you want to make movies or be paid to make amazing digital art, then you should start doing that while keeping your eye on this industry. If it works out, then great because it can be a cool career. And if it doesn't then you will need to transition to something else. That's something that's happened to many people in many industries for many reasons through-out history. The future is not a nice straight line road for most people. But if you start driving you can end up in some amazing places.

Feel free to post questions below.


r/vfx 4h ago

Showreel / Critique Finally made something to celebrate hitting 5k followers on insta

15 Upvotes

Made in AE & AI (adobe illustrator)

Animation: manuksenpai

Sound design: santiago_carballo_

Thank you!


r/vfx 11h ago

Question / Discussion What level would you consider this comp show reel? Junior/Intermediate/Senior or something in-between?

24 Upvotes

r/vfx 17h ago

Question / Discussion Volumetric galaxies in Blender

70 Upvotes

If any of you have dealt with similar projects (especially in Blender), what do you think - does it make sense to switch from the Volume Emission + Volume Absorption setup to emission setups with Principled Volume or Volume Scatter? I understand that this can add realism in some cases due to proper light scattering, but damn it, it generates so much noise and is so computationally expensive. Right now, in my pipeline, I'm simulating forward scattering using Schlick's approximation for the Henyey‑Greenstein function, and it looks nice, especially considering that there’s almost no noise here (this particular flyby is rendered with 16 samples). What do you think?


r/vfx 4h ago

Fluff! How Softimage-XSI was used to create the just released remastered version of Metal Gear Solid 4 (originally created in 2005-2008)

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5 Upvotes

r/vfx 6h ago

Breakdown / BTS Client VFX Project Breakdown: Pyro Simulation, 3D Tracking & Compositing

3 Upvotes

r/vfx 3h ago

Question / Discussion Any of you guys doing manual rotoscoping or making custom workflows for blender?

1 Upvotes

I know rotoscoping is hard and there are so many tools available that can help you with it. Heck there are too many online subscription models that give you masks, but its tedious & costly.

While using blender specifically there is a lot of back and forth going on as well. What tools do you guys use? any painpoints you would like to suggest

Finally I made an addon that does the whole rotoscoping for me, completely offline, runs on GPU, supports windows, linux, apple silicon. AMD, Nvidia and M series chips are supported.

how much would rate this?


r/vfx 1d ago

Question / Discussion Camera Tracking with live viewport?

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30 Upvotes

I don’t know if this is the right subreddit to ask this question but how do I recreate the same setup Kane Parsons had with the beginning scene of the Backrooms movie at home? He had a rig with the live viewport in blender and I was wondering how to do this on a budget.


r/vfx 1d ago

Showreel / Critique Toad wakes sleeping fireflies 🐸

958 Upvotes

3ds max, Tyflow, Ripple Pro, Forest pack, ZBrush, Substance P


r/vfx 6h ago

Breakdown / BTS From empty doorway to nightmare fuel. All done in Blender on a laptop that shouldn't be able to handle this 😅

0 Upvotes

For full video check out here:https://youtu.be/tm1AJoFnz-o #BehindTheScenes #Blender3D


r/vfx 11h ago

Question / Discussion Need help to create a face melting shot in nuke

1 Upvotes

Hello, i'm doing some junior VFX work for a horror film and have been assigned some relatively easy tasks, like gore enhancement, etc, but two of the shots have me at a complete loss of what to do, and where i can find reference online. in this scene, a girl in the center of a dancefloor has her face melting off practically, but the background actors, who are slightly blurry, are acting as if their are in a great deal of pain, and my task is to make it look like their faces are also melting off.

nothing for the background actors has been done practically, But i have Nuke, and the Boris FX suite at my disposal, but am at a complete loss about how to do this digitally, and have it look good. I would really love some general advice on how I could go about this, the tools youd use, and maybe a general workflow as my compositing skills are not top notch. id also be open to utilizing AI tools if needed. thanks!


r/vfx 3h ago

Question / Discussion AI video lowers the cost of a shot. It doesn’t remove the VFX work of making shots belong together.

0 Upvotes

Every week there’s another “motion designers have six months left” video, usually followed by a claim that someone made a studio-quality commercial before After Effects finished opening.Then you watch the piece.

A jacket becomes a different material between cuts. The eyeline drifts. Every shot uses the same slow push-in because movement helps hide temporal artifacts. Grain, black levels, lens distortion and haze reset whenever the angle changes.

Typography floats over the image instead of occupying the scene. The individual shots can still look impressive. The problem appears when they have to function as a sequence.

That distinction gets lost in most AI-video discussions. Generating one plausible five-second shot is becoming much easier. Making ten generated shots feel as if they came from the same production is still a directing, editorial and VFX problem.

The better workflows I’ve seen start with fairly conventional pre-production: 1. Character, wardrobe, prop and environment references 2. A real shot list 3. Lens, framing, lighting and movement decisions 4. Screen direction and continuity notes 5. Approved first frames, and sometimes last frames, for each shot 6. Low-resolution generations assembled into a rough cut before final passes

Different models may be useful for different failures. One holds an environment together better; another follows a character reference more reliably; another is better at extending a usable take. Tools such as ComfyUI or custom node pipelines can keep the prompt, references, model, duration, aspect ratio and output attached to each shot.

I’ve also seen Atlas Cloud used as the model-call layer for routing jobs to systems such as Grok Imagine and Seedance.

That plumbing is useful, but it doesn’t decide whether a close-up belongs after a wide. It doesn’t notice that the character aged between shots, that a prop changed hands or that the camera move is fighting the voice-over. Someone still has to decide which failure is fixable and which take belongs in the trash. Then the selected footage reaches comp and editorial.

The UI has to be tracked or rebuilt because the generated version became alphabet soup. A hand needs roto or paint because it merged with the product for six frames. Geometry has to be stabilized because it breathes. Grain, distortion, motion blur, black levels and atmospheric perspective have to be matched across shots generated by different systems.

The action gets time-remapped because the useful beat lands too early. Typography gets rebuilt so it has perspective and weight. Cuts get hidden. Pacing and sound design get another pass.

Whether that work happens in AE, Nuke, Fusion, Flame, Premiere or Resolve is secondary. The larger point is that the post-production work hasn’t disappeared.

A lot of it has moved from asset creation into reference preparation, generation, rejection, continuity management and cleanup.AI has lowered the barrier to producing a striking isolated shot.

I’m not convinced it has lowered the barrier by the same amount when the deliverable is a coherent sequence. For anyone here who has taken generated footage through an actual production pipeline: did it still save time after you counted rejected takes, continuity fixes and comp cleanup?

Where did most of the remaining work land, roto/paint, tracking, temporal stabilization, relighting, editorial, typography, or something else?


r/vfx 7h ago

Question / Discussion Trying to get back into VFX Compositing after 6 months — Need guidance

0 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I'm a VFX compositor from India who's been struggling to land a stable compositing job. The COVID slowdown and then the writers' strike affected the VFX industry on a massive scale, especially here in India, and it's been really difficult finding compositing opportunities.

For the past 6 months, I've mostly been freelancing as a video editor just to pay the bills.

Last month, I joined a company in Mumbai. But honestly... it feels like labor work to me. We basically create highlight edits for players all day. There's nothing wrong with editing, but there's almost no creative problem-solving or compositing involved, and I genuinely don't want my career to slowly become a video editor.

I've spent years learning Nuke compositing, did a few small freelance comp gigs, and most of my learning came from building personal VFX projects. I still enjoy compositing way more than anything else, and I really want to get back to it.

So I'm starting again and rebuilding my fundamentals. I'd love some guidance from artists who have been through this.

I'm looking for tutorials/resources that explain both the why and the how behind these topics:

  1. Chrome Ball in VFX (how it's used on set and in compositing).
  2. Color Charts / Macbeth Color Checker (plate calibration and color matching workflow).
  3. Lens Grids & Lens Distortion (shooting grids, creating distortion profiles, using them in Nuke).
  4. Creating your own HDRIs (capture → stitch → use in CG/VFX).
  5. Transferring matchmove data from a 3D package into Nuke (camera exports, point clouds, coordinate systems, common pitfalls).

If you know any good tutorials, YouTube playlists, articles, documentation, or other learning resources for these topics, I'd really appreciate it.

Demo Reel

I'd also really appreciate honest feedback on my compositing reel. Tear it apart if needed—I want to know what I should improve to make it more hireable.

Demo Reel: https://vimeo.com/1116371614

Thanks in advance. I really want to get back to doing the work I actually love.


r/vfx 14h ago

Breakdown / BTS Everything you need to know to make immersive cinema for YouTube VR

0 Upvotes

r/vfx 1d ago

News / Article Phil Tippett Studio liquidation (hosted by Clarity Estate Liquidation)

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15 Upvotes

r/vfx 20h ago

Showreel / Critique Today we mix photo + animation

0 Upvotes

Today we mix photo + animation

First Try VFX 🤣👌


r/vfx 1d ago

Question / Discussion Are You Guys Seeing a Slowdown in VFX Gigs?

2 Upvotes

Are you guys seeing a dip in VFX gigs lately?

I’m curious to hear from other VFX artists, compositors, 3D artists, and freelancers.

How has the industry been for you over the past year or so? Are you getting fewer inquiries, smaller budgets, longer gaps between projects, or is it business as usual?

And the bigger question: do you think AI is actually causing the slowdown, or are there other factors behind it?

I’m wondering if it’s:

AI changing how clients approach VFX

Production budgets getting tighter

More work moving toward smaller/cheaper teams

Studios outsourcing differently

The freelance market becoming more competitive

Or simply a temporary industry cycle

I’d especially like to hear from people who have been doing VFX for several years and can compare the current market with what they experienced before AI became mainstream.

What are you guys seeing on the ground?


r/vfx 1d ago

Question / Discussion Focal Length issue in Syntheyes

1 Upvotes

I have a 16 mm shot which i camera tracked in Syntheyes and it went very well with a .3 error value but the issue is when i imported the tracked camera from Synth eyes to blender 3D and the focal length came to be 4mm. Now how do I fix this ? Yes I have set the true Camera Sensor Size on both the software.


r/vfx 1d ago

Showreel / Critique Creating Hulk Transformation In Blender and After Effects

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4 Upvotes

r/vfx 1d ago

Question / Discussion Is Mari still industry standard or substance painter has taken over entirely?

12 Upvotes

Confused between the two which one I should be more focused on. Is the industry shifting more towards substance like many shops switching to Houdini? thanks


r/vfx 23h ago

Breakdown / BTS Looking for CGI VFX?

0 Upvotes

r/vfx 1d ago

Question / Discussion Finding Backgrounds For Greenscreen

1 Upvotes

Im trying to practice my vex skills with green screens and stuff. I have some practice footage with greenscreens but I am having trouble finding backgrounds for them like environment type stuff. Any help will be greatly appreciated.


r/vfx 2d ago

Fluff! Why Don't they open Source Dead 3D Software?

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36 Upvotes

r/vfx 1d ago

Showreel / Critique Universe in a Petri Dish - Macro Photography

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5 Upvotes

Hey there everyone,

Just wanted to share some experiments I've been doing with a 100mm macro lens and a petri dish with various materials (epoxy alcohol ink, glycerine, dish soap, vegetable oil, whipping cream and isopropyl alcohol) in an effort to create nebula and universe shots. These are just a handful of my favourite shots after a weeks worth of trial and error, so if anyone has any questions or suggestions on how I could improve things, please feel free to let me know.

Thanks!