These cost add up very quickly and vfx jobs even at big studios generally end up having a razor thin profit margin of 3-5% So it's strange that these vfx studios haven't embraced open source software to cut costs.Īs someone who works in the industry developing software, it's because for the high-end VFX studios, software like Blender and Natron just don't cut it in terms of efficiency, power and flexibility.Īrtist time costs more money than software licenses do, and as the open source software isn't generally good enough for their needs, using better off-the-shelf software that have fairly decent and flexible plugin APIs is good enough for them.Ī lot of the code VFX studios have is proprietary (as in unique to the individual studio who wrote it) plugins for host apps like Maya, Katana and Nuke, and shaders/integrators for renderers like PRMan and Arnold. Nuke licenses cost between $4,000 and $8,000 per seat, plus a maintenance cost of over $1,000 per year per seat. I've always been surprised that open source software like Blender and Natron has not really caught on at studios. Fusion has a free version that has a few restrictions and a paid version that is $1,000. Fusion is a node based compositor, like Natron and Nuke. Another free compositing option is BlackMagic Fusion. I've never used Natron, but I've done a lot of compositing in After Effects and a little bit of compositing in Nuke (which is the industry standard for photorealistic vfx compositing).
I'm a compositor & motion graphics artist.
0 kommentar(er)
