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We don't have a great USD pipeline at school, but we do have a couple integrations that are useful when working with Solaris. One of these tools is the SGTK USD ROP. You can find it in the TAB menu when you're working on your Stage. The node has a couple se...

If you're new to the Netherlands Filmacademy and new to the VFX industry in general you might be wondering a few things: What is ShotGrid and why are the third and fourth years mentioning it so much? Everybody keeps using the word pipeline, but what does t...

The first step in any project that uses our ShotGrid pipeline is to create one using our project creator software. The project creator makes it easy to set up a project and makes sure your project gets created using the correct settings. You can open it up by ...

In the ShotGrid menu you'll find a button titled Flipbook: This tool allows you to easily make a render of your viewport and upload it to the ShotGrid website for review. If you click it this menu  opens: Most settings speak for themselves. Make sure you...

Playlists are a handy way of grouping together versions (the preview videos in ShotGrid) so you can easily review them. To get started, go over to the Review tab on your ShotGrid project page. There you can create a playlist by clicking on the Add Playlist ...

Unlike all our other software, Substance Painter isn't installed by default on your school PC. This has to do with Adobe licensing. To install it, first, open up Adobe Creative Cloud from the Windows start menu: Log in with your school email account, this w...

Because of some obscure reason Substance Painter can't load files from a network share, like our \\nfa-vfxim-storage.stud.ahk.nl\ storage server. The fix for this is to mount the storage server using windows explorer, which causes the storage server to appear ...

Substance Painter requires a little bit more setup than other programs in our ShotGrid pipeline. This page will guide you through setting up your project file when you're starting with a new model. First, open Substance Painter using the ShotGrid launcher. S...

Publishing in Substance Painter is very similar to publishing in our other tools, you'll just have to make sure your export settings are configured correctly before publishing.  Open the Export textures menu (ctrl + shift + e). Make sure the output template i...

This is a beginners guide to working with perforce as a source control for Unreal engine. At the end of this guide you'll have setup your p4v and unreal. Why perforce? When you're working on a Unreal project, you often times work in teams. So, you want to ...

General rules First and foremost, treat you render time and performance as a budget. You only have so much performance on your PC. You can only spend it once, just like money. Some asset van be very cheep in performance, to make budget for another expensive a...

Maya at school has a couple of small additions. Color management Color management is globally configured for all our applications at school and Maya is no exception. Luckily you don't have to worry about this too much. Textures going into Maya should already...

Once your scene is set up you might want to render it on the farm using Maya (have you considered Houdini, though?) First make sure all your files, including your Maya file, are stored on our storage server. Then browse over to the Deadline shelf and click the...

In this guide, you'll learn about file statuses and common errors (And how to fix them) File status When working with perforce, files can have several statuses. Depending on the status, the file will react differently. New file When you add a new file to y...

Once you've done some animating you'll probably want to upload a video of it to the ShotGrid website for review. We have a tool for this which makes this easy, open it by clicking ShotGrid -> Playblast...  This will open a new menu: Here you can configur...

Our Maya publisher has quite a few options available. Let's go through them so you know what to publish! To start, open the publisher interface by clicking on ShotGrid -> Publish... You'll notice there are a couple of options available that you won't find i...