junior reel advice

[cerokyn]

Hi guys! I started learning houdini in late 2019.

And made my first reel of personal works, i want some critique. Can you give some advices what to remove or add to it. Im kinda think Im good at basic technical skills and problem solving, but lacking creative skills and ideas for personal work and cant show what im good in. Maybe you can give some ideas for personal work to add to reel.

Thanks. Sorry for my English

reel - 

 

Edited February 4, 2021 by cerokyn

[haggi]

Indeed that can be a problem. There are a lot of Houdini TD's with technical skills. If you want to do VFX the most important thing is that the shots should look good and that you can find good references and try to recreate it and go a step further and make look it great. Your helicopter explosion is a good example. It simply does not look like an explosion, it looks like a toy catching some sort of fire. There are a lot of references on youtube or other platforms or in movies. Have a look how an explosion looks like, what happens with the object and how incredible fast it is in the first few frames. The idea of handling a complex shot is good, but I'd concentrate on one shot, e.g. the exlosion or the crash with explosion. One good shot is worth more than a hundred not so good ones. Experiments are nice, but that's something every TD will do and can replicate. If you want to show the experiments, then make a short sequence of 10 secs and make it look nice. If I look for some VFX TD, I need someone who is able to make an fx good looking, not techically correct. It helps nothing if you are technically perfect but the shots needs a lot of iterations because it does not feel correctly. Another example can be fire. CG fire in most cases looks quite wrong because it is too slow, so if you can do it right, you will have a better chance to get a job.

[cerokyn]

8 minutes ago, haggi said:

Indeed that can be a problem. There are a lot of Houdini TD's with technical skills. If you want to do VFX the most important thing is that the shots should look good and that you can find good references and try to recreate it and go a step further and make look it great. Your helicopter explosion is a good example. It simply does not look like an explosion, it looks like a toy catching some sort of fire. There are a lot of references on youtube or other platforms or in movies. Have a look how an explosion looks like, what happens with the object and how incredible fast it is in the first few frames. The idea of handling a complex shot is good, but I'd concentrate on one shot, e.g. the exlosion or the crash with explosion. One good shot is worth more than a hundred not so good ones. Experiments are nice, but that's something every TD will do and can replicate. If you want to show the experiments, then make a short sequence of 10 secs and make it look nice. If I look for some VFX TD, I need someone who is able to make an fx good looking, not techically correct. It helps nothing if you are technically perfect but the shots needs a lot of iterations because it does not feel correctly. Another example can be fire. CG fire in most cases looks quite wrong because it is too slow, so if you can do it right, you will have a better chance to get a job.

thanks a lot!