There is a bus company in Nigeria called the Young Shall Grow motors. There is truth in this name. Everyone on this planet started as a young person. Everyone had to learn the ropes and gradually developed skills and capabilities. At PAITAN media, we prioritise learning and celebrate achievements as we learn.
Today we are celebrating our one year anniversary in VFX. Yes, it has been one year since we decided to develop our in-house capability to use VFX to enhance our storytelling. Our reflection after one year is that we are on a journey of a thousand miles and we have just taken our first few steps. The VFX landscape is truly wide and with innovations happening daily, we have to be in a state of continuous learning to remain competitive.
That being said, I'd like to discuss our motivations for for this learning journey. At PAITAN media, we were particularly interested in VFX for set extensions and 3D animation. Set extensions are computer generated environments that can be composited with real world footage(ie camera footage) to create a unique scene that brings the creative vision of a story to life. Set extensions are particularly useful when building the sets of a story in real life would be too expensive. At PAITAN media, we knew we needed mastery of this technology to deliver cost competitive and creative stories. We were also interested in 3D animation, which is simply creating change over time in a 3D object or character. We knew that we would need this to build and style the unique worlds and characters in our stories.
Our starting point on this VFX learning journey was to learn more about the different 3D digital content creation (DCC) software available in the market. There are many and they include Maya, ZBrush, Houdini, Cinema 4d, Autodesk 3ds Max and game engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity. Each of these 3d DCC softwares have their unique area of specialisation for which they are the best suited, On our learning journey, we realised the years we spent learning technical drawing and applied mathematics did not go to waste and found practical application in manipulating objects in 3D space. We also learned about creating and applying materials, lighting , 3D animation and rendering in DCCs. 3D animation was particularly interesting as we also explored motion capture (full body and facial ) for 3D character animation. Another interesting area was physics based simulations, including water simulation, cloth simulation, rigid body dynamics and fire simulations. It was awesome applying concepts we learned in our childhood physics classes to simulate, physical phenomena such as explosions, collisions or the movement of water bodies.
So what's the final verdict one year in? VFX is an extremely exciting field. We love it and our vision is to become one of the top VFX studios in the world.
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