Patrick's VFX Blog

Here's a great keynote speech by Andrew Kramer of Video CoPilot , at AE World 2014. He has great humour, and it was very inspiring and motivating talk. It brings us to revisit the question of why VFX artists and motion graphics designer do what we do, and somehow it is a bit like rediscovering our first love as Andrew shared some of his adventures working in the industry. As a matured artist who is well skilled in his craft, he gives very sound advice that I feel, is very applicable to every artist across all artistic disciplines.  He has advice to artists just starting out, artists trying to find their direction, trying to get noticed, or even how we should be approaching our craft with relation to the other aspects of our lives.  All in all this was was great presentation, highly entertaining and with plenty of reminders and checkpoints for us to think about what we really want, where we really are, who we want to be and where we want to end up.

Here's a demonstration of the use of Shading Switch utility node. This tutorial shows how you can have a same shader with different properties when applied to different objects. This is a huge help when your scene and assets increase in complexity. With the switch shader node in your shader tree, there will be no need to maintain multiple copies of the same shader and keeping them in updated when one of the values change. For years I have tried to find out to do this since a very similar thing could easily be done in 3D Studio Max (creating instanced texture nodes). Finally I have found the solution on how to do this in Maya. I hope this is beneficial to you in some way. Enjoy! :)