For both Mike and myself, one of the great things about fxphd has been the creation of an incredible worldwide community that has grown from the site. Mike was recently in New Zealand and will be traveling to China for meetings. I made many trips last year, including two weeks flying around Asia doing flame master classes in five countries. Everywhere we have been, fxphd members have been incredibly warm and welcoming — going out of their way to make us feel comfortable and introduce us to their countries and cultures.

I guess I started thinking about this and the global community because one of our longtime profs Tahl Niran recently returned from India where he also experienced this strong support from phd members and other artists. He posted a few short paragraphs about his trip to India in our members forums and with his permission I thought I’d share them with the wider audience. Click through for that and more….

I think many of us artist-types can be fairly cynical at times and I suppose we see this in a lot of literature and artwork. But when I experience something like the fxhpd/vfx community built from members from the far reaches of the globe, it is hard to remain cynical about the possibility breaking down the invisible (and visible) barriers between us. The more we have this kind of interaction with each other, I can’t help but feel good about the possibility of building a truly collaborative global community. A community where our differences are not only accepted, but celebrated and used to teach other about ourselves and become better.

OK…OK…so now that cynical side I mentioned is beginning to think that this might come off sounding a idealistic and sappy (group hug time). But that being said, I truly am proud of the community and inspired by the possibilities it brings. And that’s not because of Mike or myself….it’s because of what our members and others we’ve met bring to the party. So members….thanks for that…

So…with that off my chest…this from Tahl Niran, vfx artist and fxphd Professor…

I thought it might be interesting to tell some of the folks about my experiences over the past two weeks. I have just returned from a fortnight in Mumbai helping one of the Vfx vendors with some on-site training in some studios. Frankly the Indian vfx scene is HUGE and looking to get a lot bigger in small amount of time.

First off let me say a great big thank you to all the folks in Mumbai who helped me out. Including some FXPHD members who really made the whole expereince enjoyable.

There is a lot of really great complex feature and commercial vfx being done over there and I believe that folks will be amazed at some of the stuff that is coming in the next few months. I managed to get to a couple of the larger studios in Mumbai and was blown away by the numbers of artists and scope of the projects being worked on.

We are talking hundreds of shots and good sized teams doing full blown 2k and 4k feature work. It seems that a lot of the 3d is Maya based with big smatterings of Max as well. Compositing is pretty much moving to either Fusion or increasingly Nuke. I spent a lot of time with the guys at Eyeqube talking about pipeline and development and was really impressed with the kind of projects they will be fielding in next few months. Similarly I was blown away by the work being done at Pixion and the skills of some of their Fusion guys.

There seems to be a really big wave of hardcore stuff coming and I don’t think it will be long before we see some huge vfx heavy features coming out of that market. Every studio I spoke to was telling me that they where being offered more work than they could handle and that there where some BIG players moving into the market. Given that Imageworks and Rhythm and Hues already have studios in India I think it gives us all an idea of how much of marketplace for vfx India could shortly be.