ActionVFX

10/08/2026

A flat, clean panel is one of the hardest things to scan. Rust is one of the easiest.

Photogrammetry software builds a scan by matching points across photos. Texture gives it thousands of points to match. A smooth panel gives it almost none, so you get holes.

Clinton Jones (Pwnisher) took that rule to the American Armory Museum in Fairfield, California, and scanned a tank from start to finish. Two shooters split the work to finish before the light changed. Each quarter of the orbit got 20 photos for 60 to 70% overlap. The focal length stayed locked the whole time. Stereo pairs covered the treads, and linking shots tied every close-up back to the wides.

About 2,300 photos. Nearly every one aligned into a single clean scan.

The full lesson is free to watch. It comes from Gaussian Splatting & Photogrammetry, Clinton's course on ActionVFX Academy, which runs from capture through RealityScan and Postshot to finished shots in Unreal Engine, After Effects and Nuke.

Watch Clinton scan the tank → https://youtu.be/kCAn7Rp2N0Y
See the full course → https://bit.ly/gaussiansplatting

Clinton Jones (Pwnisher) takes you to the American Armory Museum in...

10/06/2026

Gaussian Splatting will replace traditional photogrammetry for environment capture in VFX. Why? No complex mesh cleanup, better handling of reflections and seamless Nuke integration.

Clinton Jones (Pwnisher) breaks down why you should integrate Splats into your compositing pipeline:
👉 Read the blog: https://www.actionvfx.com/blog/clinton-jones-on-gaussian-splats

P.S. Clint will be live on YouTube on October 15th sharing workflows ahead of his upcoming ActionVFX Academy course on Gaussian Splatting & Photogrammetry.
👉 Details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7WDKQeOX_8

Pre-register for my Photogrammetry and Gaussian Splatting Course to...

10/02/2026

Head replacement used to mean a scan, a CG head and weeks of tracking. Now a diffusion model will give you a new face in seconds, and a slightly different one on every frame.

Neither method gets the shot on its own. The first costs too much time. The second can't keep a likeness steady past a few frames.

Doug Hogan's answer is to use both. The AI generates the face. Traditional comp does everything around it: a 3D camera track in Nuke, mattes and roto to seat the new head on the neck, then refinement until the face stays consistent from the first frame to the last.

That hybrid pipeline is the backbone of Advanced AI Workflows for VFX Artists. Doug has 20 years in VFX, credits on Space Jam: A New Legacy and Scoob!, and The Foundry sponsors his work in AI and Nuke. He shows you where AI saves you days and where Nuke has to take over.

If head and face replacements are part of your work, start here:
https://bit.ly/advanced_ai_course

10/02/2026

Applying for VFX roles right now? This one's for you.

Allan McKay has spent 25+ years in VFX, with credits on Shōgun, Star Trek Into Darkness and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. He also runs his own studio, Catastrophic FX.

Here's his advice on getting hired.

Most applications open with "I'm a really good compositor." Yours might too. So does everyone else's.

A job post is the last thing a studio does. Before it goes live, they've asked their references and checked internally. By then, the problem has usually been sitting there for weeks.

So read the post for the pain behind it:

"Needs to be good under tight pressure."
"Needs to work fast."
"Needs to troubleshoot scenes."

Each line tells you what's going wrong.

Write your application to that. "I turn shots around fast and keep big sequences consistent" gets read. "I'm an excellent FX TD" gets skimmed.

Better still, find the studio that's struggling before the post goes up. Then you're the only name in their inbox.

This clip is one lesson from The New VFX Career Playbook, Allan's free course with ActionVFX.
Take the full course free: https://bit.ly/4z2R7KJ

What's one line from a job post that told you exactly what the studio was struggling with?

10/01/2026

Clinton Jones has 20 years in VFX and came up through photogrammetry. For a long time, he didn't get the Gaussian splat hype.

Then he spent proper time with them. Now he scans everything he can point a camera at.

Photogrammetry turns your scan into a mesh, and meshes struggle with anything reflective. Splats have no mesh. Millions of tiny ellipsoids shift colour based on the angle you view them from, so reflections come through intact.

You don't have to pick a side on set, because both start from the same capture. Shoot a location once, then decide in post whether it becomes a mesh, a splat, or both.

Where it pays off:

→ Background plates. Scan the whole set instead of shooting green screen pickups or photo-bashing plates, then pull a plate from any angle you need.
→ Virtual production. Photoreal backdrops for an LED wall.
→ 4D splats. A splat for every frame of video, so you can orbit a scene while it plays. It needs a big array of cameras shooting high-res video, but people are doing it now.

You probably own most of the kit already. Clinton captures with smartphones, DSLRs and drones, processes with mostly free tools, then brings the results into Nuke 17, Unreal Engine and After Effects.

He's going live to walk through the workflow and take your questions.

Join his livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/live/b7WDKQeOX_8?si=GMjY1nGjRZ7YJtxF

Pre-register for my Photogrammetry and Gaussian Splatting Course to...

10/01/2026

🔴LIVE! Join Eran Dinur, Emmy Winning VFX Supervisor (Marty Supreme, Wolf Of Wall Street, Hereditary) answer your VFX questions: https://bit.ly/4rlRcpu

09/29/2026

A public VFX job post usually means the studio already asked everyone it knows.
Nobody on that list could take it.

Now it's open to you, and to everyone else who saw the same post.

Most hiring starts with a supervisor messaging someone they trust. The job board comes after that.

Alan McKay spent 30 years on the hiring side at ILM, Activision and Autodesk, with credits on Avengers: Endgame, Shōgun and God of War. In this lesson he breaks down where artists get hired now.

Keep applying. But spend the same hours on the people who'd think of you first.

How did you land your last role: a referral or an application?

Watch the full video:
https://youtu.be/8YLFysaKkIY

09/29/2026

You're invited to put a question to the VFX Supervisor behind The Wolf of Wall Street, The Greatest Showman, Hereditary and Marty Supreme.

On October 1st at 1pm ET, Eran Dinur is joining us for a live Q&A.

Eran won an Emmy and two VES Awards for Boardwalk Empire, and he's still supervising today. The problem you're stuck on could be the one he's solving on his current show.

Reserve your seat and send your question through the link below.
He'll answer it live.

https://offers.actionvfx.com/ask-a-vfx-supervisor-webinar-register/
We'll see you then.

09/17/2026

You're about to get direct insight from a working, Emmy-winning VFX Supervisor. Insight no film school teaches, and most VFX artists never get trained in.

Eran Dinur has supervised effects on The Greatest Showman, The Wolf of Wall Street, Hereditary, and Marty Supreme.

All you need to do: join the live Q&A on October 1st, and ask him anything.

This isn't a course, and it isn't pre-recorded. You submit your question and Eran answers it live. Direct access to how an Emmy-winning supervisor thinks.

A couple things you might be thinking:

"I don't recognize the name Eran Dinur."
You know his work even if you've never seen his face. The Greatest Showman. The Wolf of Wall Street. Hereditary. Marty Supreme. That's the level of production this insight is coming from.

"This is just another webinar."
It's not a lecture, it's a live Q&A. You ask, he answers, in real time. Whatever you're stuck on right now is exactly what this is for.

Reserve your seat.
https://offers.actionvfx.com/ask-a-vfx-supervisor-webinar-register/

09/17/2026

You have about 15 seconds before someone hits Skip Intro.

Most title sequences don't survive that window. They're built by opening software and playing with visuals before anyone's thought about the story.

The masters never worked that way. Saul Bass used titles as a psychological on-ramp into the film. Maurice Binder built a 10-second motif that defined James Bond for 60 years. Kyle Cooper made title design feel dangerous before a single frame of story played.

None of them were thinking about software. They were directing the first scene.

The real question isn't how you animate a font. It's why that font, for that story. Skip that question and you're building wallpaper, not a title sequence.

Our new course, Cinematic Title Sequence Design, covers the whole pipeline, concept to Cinema 4D to composite: https://actionvfx.lpages.co/course-titledesign-2026/