VFX Fight Club Quotes

You are not your fucking render farm!

You are the pixel pushing crap of the industry.

Hey, you created me. I didn’t create some loser VFX artist alter-ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!

It’s only after we’ve corrupt a Max file that we’re free to do anything.

When you have deadlines, you’re never really asleep… and you’re never really awake.

How much can you really know about yourself if you’ve never been in dailies?

You did lose a bunch of versatile solutions for particle simulations.

This is your life and it’s ending one render minute at a time.

Listen to me! You have to consider the possibility that NukeX does not like you. It never wanted you. In all probability, it hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen, besides losing your script.

I am Jack’s complete lack of render nodes.

A guy who works double OT for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of coffee and booze.

Fuck off with your VRay server licenses and Nuke nodes, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let… lets evolve, let the frames fail where they may.

You’re too old, lightwave man. Your renders are too long. Get the fuck off my farm.

Now, a question of etiquette – as I script, do I give you the .ms or the .mse file?

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every animator drops to zero.

With insomnia, nothing’s real. Everything’s far away, everything’s a “Could Be Better”.

His name is Daniel Lay!… His name is Daniel Lay!!!

“OK: any historical figure.” “I’d fight Vlado.” “Good answer.”

Fuck unions, man! Fuck healthcare! We’re the industry’s unwanted children, SO BE IT!

The VFX artist’s fingers are still wrapped around the wacom pen and keyboard. Might make a good pro-union ad.

If I did have a tumor, I’d name it Turbo Squid.

You said that if anyone ever changed LAL_058_110 priority on the farm, even you, we gotta get his balls.

Vray 2.0 update. I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school.

Just tell him you fuckin’ did it. Tell him you forgot to click “Save As”. That’s what he wants to hear.

If I didn’t say anything, people always assumed it was the network.

“I need some clean renders, please.” “In that case, sir, may I advise against the lady using Final Render?” “No Final Render, thank you.”

“Do you know what a bezier curve is?” “It’s a type of spline object…” “It’s a line. Just a line. Now why do guys like you and me know what a bezier curve is?”

Well, I’m still here. But I don’t know for how long. That’s as much certainty as anyone can give me. But I’ve got some good news: I no longer have any fear of displacement.

I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every render wrangler that wouldn’t press “re-submit” to save my ass. I wanted to open the dump valves in the server room and smother all the render nodes I’d never see. I wanted to breathe redbull.

Reject the basic assumptions of rendering, especially the importance of material multpasses.

I am Jack’s raging 3dsMax Error Report window.

Why would anyone want this shit job? Because it affords him other interesting opportunities. Like splicing single frames of Max Scripts into ILM films.

Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me. That shot was my life, okay? I loved every model in that shot. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got cut, it was ME!

People are always asking me if I know Vray…

Life insurance pays off triple if you die on a Pixar movie.

This chick Marla Singer did not have Max experience. She was a liar. She had no shots. I had seen her at Gnomon, my new guy group Thursdays. Then at Siggraph, my bi-yearly tech circle. And again at Warszawa’s, my fake Friday night.

It’s a torrent. Of course it’s company policy never to, imply ownership in the event of a torrent… always use the indefinite article a torrent, never your torrent.

I got in everyone’s hostile little face. Yes, these are displacement maps from Zbrush. Yes, I’m comfortable with that. I am enlightened.

By the end of the first month, I didn’t miss a pipeline.

Except for Dailies, the producer and supervisors were never in the same room. My parents pulled this exact same act for years. 😉

My supervisor loved me because he thought my renders were done too. Being there, pressed against the render window, ready to cry. This was my vacation..

“Nobody knows that they saw it, but they did…A nice, big matte line…Even a hummingbird couldn’t catch Dave at work.”

Every evening I died, and every evening I forgot to checked my renders, resurrected.

And this scruffy, extremely loud compositor might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into lighters and coordinators. This might be someone you’ve known for years. Someone very, very close to you.

WHOA! WHOA! WHOA! Ok, you are now writing a script for your ‘imaginary compositor”‘ with 400 frames of black

Mike’s philosophy of life is that the farm might die at any moment. The tragedy, he said, was that it didn’t.

So when the snooty cat, and the courageous dog, with the celebrity voices meet for the first time in reel three, that’s when you’ll catch a flash of Justin’s contribution to the film.

I can’t get married – I’m a thirty-year-old VFX artist.

Tom was a night person. While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked. He had one part time job as a compositor. See, a movie doesn’t get rendered all at once. It requires a few passes…

“Reject the basic assumptions of image quality, especially the importance of rendering full resolution.”

Sticking A over B does not make you a compositor.

What do you want? Wanna go back to the shit job, fuckin’ roto artist, makin’ garbage mattes? Fuck you, I won’t do it.

It had it all. It had a model that was very decent, a texture that was getting very respectable. It was close to being complete.

Tyler, you are by far the most interesting freelance Compositor I’ve ever met… see I have this thing: everything in VFX is single-serving…

You can swallow a lot of shitty art direction before you get sick.

Did you know that if you mix equal parts of FinalRender and Vray you can make napalm?

I have a better solution. You keep me on the payroll as an outsourced artist and in exchange for my salary, my job will be never to tell people these things that I know about all your cracked software. I don’t even have to come into the office, I can do this job from home.

Coordinators with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one.

It’s just, when you buy VRay, you tell yourself, that’s it. That’s the last renderer I’m gonna need. Whatever else happens, I’ve got that radial motion blur problem handled…

When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything, the Adobe Stellar Sphere, the Cebas Galaxy, Planet Autodesk.

First person that comes out this fucking door gets a… gets Maya swag, you understand?

It’s called outsourcing. The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea.

How embarrassing… a render farm full of nodes and no renders.

First you have to give up, first you have to know… not fear… know… that someday you’re gonna delete the project folder.

It had it all. Even the trailer shots with tiny flaws and imperfections, proof they were roto’d by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of… wherever.

For a second I totally forgot about render passes and I wonder how clean that wacom pen is.

When the project was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. We all felt saved.

We’re a generation of artists raised by Producers. I’m wondering if another fake Friday is really the answer we need.

Like so many others, I had become a slave to the 64bit memory architecture.

I wrote little useless scripts. I emailed them to everyone

Do you want me to deprioritize my current renders until you advise me of the new camera angles?

“I’ve found a new one. For men only” “Oh, is it a Thinking Particles thing?”

Like so many others, I had become a slave to the Amazon Prime.

I don’t know John. I mean, I know him, but… he left when I was like two shots in. Started comping this other shot, had some other artist. He like did this every six days, he goes to a new city and starts a new vfx studio.

Human sacrifices were once made on the roof above this studio. Artists burnt out, negativity seeded throughout the office to create chainsmokers.

Interns were the beginning, now it’s moved out of the basement, it’s called Outsourcing.

Look around, I see a lot of new “how do I?” posts…Which means a lot of you have been breaking the first two rules of VFX club.

The 1st Rule of FX club is: Bitch The 2nd Rule of FX club is: Bitch The 3rd Rule of FX club is: Do exceptional and completely unappreciated work…while bitching.

I am Jack’s stuffed inbox

I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise that you’re all on reddit and not finishing your shots

“I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Max user that wouldn’t use slate editor to save its species. I wanted to clear the logs on deadline and suspend all the renders over the weekend. I wanted to breathe nodes.”