A couple of days ago Keith Guerrette gave a great talk on Real-Time VFX field, its peculiarities, tendencies, basic knowledge, and RealTimeVFX community. Today we’ve gathered his general advice in terms of learning materials for VFX production and a large list of awesome artists who you can get useful tips and inspiration from!

Learning Materials

What recommendations would I give to users who want to learn VFX and find inspiration? This is a question that I field frequently, yet have no excellent answers for. The forum (www.realtimevfx.com) is doing an excellent job allowing individuals to contribute to the wealth of knowledge, but there still isn’t a well-curated guide for us to present to beginners.

The path to learning real-time VFX is still required to be largely self-motivated. Fortunately, game engines such as Unreal and Unity allow the curious artist access to every part of our work — downloading example VFX, opening them on one monitor, and recreating them step-by-step on the other monitor is how so many of us learned and is still a practice I use to this day.

For more inspiration, I always look to Jason Keyser’s work breaking down many of the effects in League of Legends, Bill Kladis’s tutorials with ImbueFX, Simon’s fantastic breakdowns at simonschreibt.de, or presentations in the archives of GDC and other conferences. I just tried making a list, but after it reached 30 people I realized that there are far more individuals contributing to this community than I can name. Without intending to be self-serving, following @realtimevfx on Twitter or searching the forum has become my absolute favorite in terms of looking for inspiration.

Inspiration

I’ve thought of a list of the artists to look for inspiration from, here it is along with the usernames on the forum in the brackets. Again, there’s absolutely no way this list does everyone justice so I have to apologize in advance for leaving worthy people out.

Nate Lane (NateLane)