Hi everyone! I’d like to share a short preview of my showreel. You can watch the full reel on YouTube here.

Hi everyone, I downloaded Blender exactly a year ago (late August 2025) and posted my first animation 3 months later. Since then, I’ve been practicing every single day, researching the industry for hours, and I recently expanded into Unreal Engine 4.27.2. I am fully committed to becoming a 3D Designer, Animator, or VFX artist when I grow up. Here is my dilemma: My parents are heavily against this path. They literally think it is just "sitting on a computer, making a quick animation, and getting paid $2." They don't believe it's a sustainable career. They are completely fixated on me getting a traditional university diploma—even though it isn't legally mandatory where we live and won't teach me these digital skills. I have tried explaining the industry to them for a year, but they won't listen to a teenager. I am writing this post specifically to show them your replies. Could working industry professionals please answer these three questions for my parents? 1. The Financial Reality: Is VFX/3D animation a real, viable, high-paying career? What does a typical starting or mid-level salary actually look like in this industry? 2. The Portfolio vs. Diploma Truth: If you are hiring an animator or artist, do you care about a university degree, or do you strictly look at their portfolio/showreel? 3. Your Advice: What would you say to parents who are terrified that their kid is wasting time on software like Blender and Unreal Engine? Thank you so much. Your comments are going to directly shape a major conversation with my family.

I do a lot of greenscreen work for microbudget narrative feature work. The majority of the greenscreen shots are locked off (for economy) and don't show the floor. I'm trying to figure out a way to record the sensor/camera height that's faster than a laser/tape measure for each setup (every minute saved on set matters).

Is there some kind of two device system, where one is on the floor somewhere nearby, and one mounted on the camera rig, that will record the height distance at intervals like every two minutes? Matching up the height reading via time and TOD timecode later is no big deal for me.

I know there's the option of wide angle witness camera off to the side, but I'm hoping there's something simpler.

Hoping someone else has already implemented a system like this or knows of such a device.

TIA

So tried getting automated splines out, not just a matte.

The goal was simple: get clean, editable splines out of AI roto instead of just a matte.

The splines are fully automated and generated by AI. You type a prompt (man) and set a frame range, and AI builds the roto as closed cubic B-splines. Nobody draws or places a single point by hand.

It splits the subject into parts (face, nose, head, torso, arms), each on its own layer.

For this 117-frame shot, generation took about 2 minutes.

Tried hard to keep the keyframes sparse. Each shape has only two to four keys, and everything in between is interpolated. That means no per-frame keys and very little chatter.

Also wanted the points to stay put. Every key has the same number of control points in the same order, and each point follows the same feature through the shot, so the shape doesn't boil or swim.

It's not perfect, and there's still plenty to improve.

If you have roto experience, We'd really value your thoughts on what works, what doesn't, and what you'd want next.