An article by Saber Jlassi from GridMarkets full of things you should know about getting started with special effects.
Art, Art and Art
At the end of the day we are producing art. Art has rules, and everyone creating CG imagery should have a very good understanding of composition, colors and light physics. What follows is a list of useful guides that can help familiarise everyone with the basics:
3D world is all about tools. The first thing to do is to pick a tool and master it. There is no other way. You have to know its possibilities, its hotkeys and its limitations. But that’s not it. The artist also points out that you should focus on learning how to look at things and finding out what makes certain materials look the way they look:
Let’s take water as an example: It is transparent, reflective and has 1.33 IOR. If you take these exact inputs and apply them to your surface in CG the renderer should give you a good starting point to create realistic water, right? Most likely it will not, and this where it is very important to learn how to look at things and analyse what we see. Water looks very different depending on whether you are looking at waves lapping against a beach, a river, an ocean, antarctic water or water in a glass. If we look at each of these scenarios, we will see that it is the same liquid, yet each situation is visually very different. We need to develop the skills that will allow us to accurately recreate every one of those surfaces and analyse the visual characteristics that make each one of them unique.
Saber also discussed the importance of creativity, learning from 2D and anime, and other important aspects.
In the end, you have to present your work, right? Here is something you should know about presentation:
This is something that is hardly talked about and generally ignored by young talent and students. But I cannot stress how important it is to properly present your work. Here are few things to consider:
Make sure to read the full article on GridMarkets here.