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Welcome to the Netherlands Film Academy’s VFX department documentation! This documentation is made by students for students and focusses mainly on explaining how all the VFX tools at school work. Our VFX department functions much like a studio, with many facil...

If you've used Nuke before you'll probably be familiar with the many ways it can be customized and the huge amount of gizmos and tools available online. Nuke at school comes with many of these customizations pre-configured for you.  Color management Color ma...

Submitting your comp to our render farm is quite easy. First you need to make sure that all the files used in your comp (and your Nuke file itself of course) are stored on our Storage server. After that just select the write node you want to render and click t...

Our ShotGrid versions can be easily viewed in our viewing room using a program called RV. RV allows you to play our high fidelity EXR publishes in real-time. You can also use it to write notes and it comes with some color operations for tech checking. You shou...

Above the door of the viewing space you'll find a small screen that displays the booking information for today. You can make a reservation using our "Viewing booker" Slack bot. Sending /viewing book in any Slack channel will cause this pop-up to appear: ...

Over the years our students have made a lot of nice additions to our Nuke. Here's a showcase of some of these tools. Snippets - By Gilles Vink The snippets tool, which can be found in the top menu bar, makes it easy to store a part of your node graph so othe...

You can load in files other people have published by going to the "NFA ShotGrid" -> "Load..." This will open up a new interface: You can use this interface to browse all files others have published. Double clicking on a file loads that file into your com...

Rendering when working in our ShotGrid pipeline is slightly different but way easier! When you press "W" a new menu pops up (you can also find it in the side bar): This menu has a couple options which you should know a bit more about. The output field is...

Once you've rendered some frames using the ShotGrid write nodes it's time to publish them. You can do this by going to "NFA ShotGrid" -> "Publish..." Here all your write nodes show up. Notice how the main write node has an extra option called "Submit for Re...

The green screen studio is equipped with customizable DMX lights. These lights are used to illuminate both the green screen and the subject. To turn on the lights, you need to activate the correct switch in the fuse box (this will no longer be necessary in the...

Houdini at school isn't all that different from stock Houdini, however there are a couple of things to note. Color management Color management is globally configured for all our applications at school and Houdini is no exception. Luckily you don't have to wo...

You'll probably want to render your Houdini projects on our render farm. First you need to make sure that all the files used in your Houdini file (and the Houdini file itself of course) are stored on our Storage server. You should also make sure the output pat...

You can load in files other people have published by going to the "ShotGrid" -> "Load..." A lot of file types can be loaded into Houdini, but here's a short list of the main loading operations you'll be using: USD files can be loaded into your stage thro...

We have some automated tools which make shading assets a lot simpler. Here's what you need before shading your asset: A model published in Maya using the Alembic publisher. Textures for that model published in Substance or Mari using the ShotGrid publisher...

We mostly render using Karma in our ShotGrid pipeline. It's fast, reliable, and SideFX actually responds to our emails if we need help! To get started, add a SGTK Karma Render node at the bottom of your node tree. We used to have Arnold and RenderMan inte...

This page shows examples in Nuke, but the same workflows apply to all software you can launch using the ShotGrid launcher. A new menu bar item titled "ShotGrid" appears when you open software using the ShotGrid launcher. This is the menu you'll use for pretty...

When working in our ShotGrid pipeline you should always launch software using the ShotGrid launcher. You can find it in the Windows start menu by searching for "Shotgrid": When you open it up you'll be asked to log in, once you've done that you'll be greete...

Once you've rendered some frames using the Karma node it's time to publish them. You can do this by going to ShotGrid -> Publish... Here all your renders and other files show up. Notice how only your main render has the Submit for Review checkbox checked, t...

We use the version control tool (also called Breakdown) to update loaded files to their latest version whenever new publishes are available. You can open it by going to the ShotGrid menu in your software and clicking on Version Control. Outdated files will ...