I would like to master another software as well as Flame. I’m interested in Nuke, Resolve and Baselight.
I’ve already worked with Nuke and Resolve, so it wouldn’t be completely new to me like Baselight.
I would be interested to know what you would decide if you were planning to learn another software.
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Depends on what skill you want to augment. Nuke is primarily compositing, Resolve is primarily colour, although it seems to be growing in the composite direction as well. I haven’t heard much from Baselight users in a while.
Houdini
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Baselight is having a moment in the sun with their new subscription offering. You’ll see a few more Baselight users soon, but not a flood. It’s about 2x the price of Flame, still a bargain relative to the previous offering.
I’ve done some test driving the last week.
But if you want to expand your horizon, I wouldn’t pickup Baselight, as it wouldn’t expand your skill set massively. It would just open up specific clients/ job avenues.
I think the best expansion of skills would be to move towards CG. That’s a huge field, so you have to pick and choose. Houdini is popular. But also consider C4D, Blender, 3DsMax, Maya, etc. Blender having the benefit of being free. Some of these have specific industry affinity - 3DsMax for arch-viz, C4D for MoGraph.
There are many jobs that can cross over between 3D modeling and shading with Flame. And working with materials and CG lighting/cameras will sharpen your skills in seeing an image and understanding lighting quality, which can then help you in your Flame work.
As you get into CG you also have to pick a renderer to go with that, such as RedShift or VRay, and then various extensions, such as particle systems and sim softwares.
It can be a lot of fun and I definitely enjoy it whenever I get the chance.
I’ve recently done a beauty job, where the logo/deco changes were so extensive, it ended up being easier to replace the entire product with a CG render, rather than removing and re-applying deco. Came out great.
If you need to take a total detour to another side of your brain, get into audio engineering. If you’re musically inclined, get into mixing whether in studio or FOH. If less musically inclined sound design for film is a fantastic field to work in.
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If I was going to learn another software it would probably be a 3d app. Blender or Houdini, depending on if it’s for personal reasons or work.
I don’t have the right eye to be a decent colorist, but if you do those are good options.
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Cg is a difficult speciality and an even tougher industry.
You really need to do some research and figure out what you’re trying to solve with learning additional tools.
After flame and its core tool set of timeline, compositing, versioning, etc., I strongly feel that match moving is the next logical evolution of learning. Not to do it for other people, but to do it for yourself when necessary. It saves the day and makes things super easy.
After match moving, maybe a little bit of hard surface, modeling for layout and projections would be beneficial. But beyond that, I don’t think CG is worth it for the modern compositor.
Learning baselight means an insane investment in probably the most difficult post specialty to break into. Of course, the high wages and potentiallly high utilizations are worth it, but unless you have a following and are doing at least 45% utilization, I don’t see how you can make any money in it.
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I agree with the matchmoving progression. I use syntheyes all the time. I learned it because I got tired of begging for tracks.
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I think it could be argued that learning some Python would be a good thing. But I dunno, chatGPT and whatnot, I think for what Python needs the average compositor might need, maybe not worth investing a huge amount of time unless you’re looking to get heavier into some coding in general
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I generally agree that getting into CG would require some thorough research and a plan. And match moving, if you don’t already have good skills there, would take priority.
My one counter argument for CG is that there may be a trend similar to what we’re seeing in color - that roles are collapsing. Where in the past you had dedicated artists, today increasingly there is the expectation that artists can work in adjacent disciplines. Colorists increasingly are expected to retouch and do some compositing. And vice versa, compositors need to know ever more about color.
And I’ve had a number of jobs in the last year, where some level of CG was part of it by design, or made the job easier. Being able to service both sides of that equation it positions you in a better place, especially at a time where there’s so much change and where a bit of diversity is not a bad thing to smooth out the bumps.
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Syntheyes, Blender, Python.
I would get familiar Nuke’s Scope Variable system as us perfect for solo artists and small teams.
Been meaning to learn Syntheyes as I think it has a few advantages over 3DE.
I don’t know if the market opportunities of Baselight will evolve and growth in the future, but the open download version V6 is very interesting and promising. I’m more Colorist than VFX and I was using Daylight in the past, and products suit very well with Flame when I tested using BLG for flame (from Baselight). Interoperability is pretty good and personally, the image processing in Baselight tools is very different from Resolve or another grading tool.
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