How to be a Successful VFX Artist: Be Cost Effective
Be Cost Effective Be cost effective. This is, or should be, the core philosophy driving any employee in any company. When employees are cost-effective, in other words when they do something of value as cheaply or quickly as possible, the company’s profit margins...
Stop complaining about your tools!
As digital media artists and technicians, we deal with many different software applications daily. They vary in quality, from barely usable, unstable, unreliable, obsolete nonsense to generally reliable, mostly stable, modern and user friendly. In my experience, most...
The Trouble With Overtime: A Case Study
Animators & VFX Artists Are Not High Tech Professionals A few years ago I wrote a blog article called Visual Effects Artists are Not High Tech Professionals. I did this specifically to deal with situations like what happened in Sausage party. Shortly...
12-week 3D Foundations Program introduced!
A peak into the world of animation & visual effects. I am very excited to announce that, due to popular demand, CG Masters has added a new animation & VFX training program called “3D Foundations”. This short program was developed around discussions with hundreds of...
Introducing the Foundry’s Katana
I am very pleased to announce that CG Masters is adopting Katana into its production workflow beginning May 2019. Katana is a lookdev and lighting management tool from The Foundry that radically simplifies the management of geometry, materials, textures, and image...
Find Your Fifty – New Blog by William Vaughan
Finding life balance as a digital artist "One Step...and then the next gets you where you're going." - Sister Creep When I was younger, people would ask me what I wanted to do for a living and I always had the same response; "I don't want to lift heavy boxes for a...
CG Masters Students on the Set of Deadpool 2
Advice from VFX industry veterans CGM students get to do a lot of cool things. We tour production studios, learn to shoot, discover all the interesting disciplines of 2D and 3D production, but none quite as awesome as this. 5 CGM students were invited to the set of...
The Trouble with Overtime
Why Overtime in VFX and Animation is a Really Bad Idea. I can’t help smiling (on the outside) when I discuss this topic with certain visual effects production people, especially the managers who haven’t had to do 12 - 18 hours straight busting their brain at a...
The Effect of a Solar Eclipse on Shadow Quality
As the solar eclipse of August 21st 2017 approached, I was thinking about the effect it might have on shadows. After all, the size and shape of a light source has a significant effect on shadow quality, and the size and shape of the sun was going to change...
How a Scrappy little 3D Animation & VFX School helped NASA
Working with NASA - Dreams do come true Always dreamed of working with NASA? Us too. Earlier in 2017, students at CG Masters were given the opportunity to 3D model, 3D print and build a scale model of a NASA Mars Rover concept vehicle. It was the chance of a...