The software is largely unimportant. It’s like asking “What would be the best to study for a BA in music: guitar or piano?”Ideally, you’ll want to learn all three, plus Photoshop, zBrush, and some others. If you go to work for a large studio, they’ll have their own tools as well you’ll have to learn. It wouldn’t hurt to have some experience shooting practical elements as well. You probably won’t be doing practical effects, but you may want to shoot reference for your VFX work.Go to the place that will give you the best foundation. Look to see which place has the teachers with the most experience in the industry. When you get hired for VFX work, you’ll be expected to solve specific VFX problems. Those problems exist outside of software. Knowing the right function to build the solution is valuable. Knowing where to find the button in Maya or Houdini isn’t valuable - it’s something that can be learned very quickly. Learn with whatever software they’re teaching, then do the same exercises in some other piece of software.

This will help mitigate “2nd package” hurdle. This is where the concept you learned was taught so connected to the specific software used that you have to completely break the way you think about solving problems. It’s pretty common for students to have this problem, but once you know 2 pieces of software, the 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc. become easy.Some additional comments:Learn to code. You will be immeasurable more valuable if you can script your 3D package yourself. Being able to automate tasks multiplies your efficiency, and often in VFX, especially in Maya, you end up needing to rewrite some built-in feature because it doesn’t work right for your solution.I don’t know anything about either of those schools, but be very careful. You don’t need a degree or certificate to get hired in the VFX world. All anyone will care about is your demo reel. It’s great to have a classroom structure to learn the software, if that’s what works best for you, but be careful of what the school is offering, or promising, for what they charge.

There are some entertainment industry schools here in the US and in Canada that cash-in on the promise of “working in Hollywood”. Some of the teachers have never worked on a production or were people that were so bad they couldn’t get another job in the industry. Schools sell TV and film degree programs to students and parents as something lucrative and glamorous, and then charge outrageous tuition for an education that is unnecessary at best, and harmful at worst. No one in the industry cares if you have a degree or not, or where you went to school. Glisten Window Cleaning SolutionThey only care about your portfolio/reel. Appliance Repair Tuscaloosa AlI don’t want to discourage you. Sheltie Puppies For Sale In York Pa

The two schools you mention could be excellent and priced fairly. Just be aware there are a lot of education companies out there, and TV and Film attract a lot of slimy ones. (I mention this because the one I looked at - Escape - is part of a business school, not an arts school - though I don’t know anything about them beyond their landing page.)If you’d like to get your feet wet to see if you like either piece of software better, both Autodesk and Side Effects use to offer free or very cheap intro classes to their software. Sometimes they were done through local user groups or resellers. You could check with the rep for your area and ask if there are any classes.Both softwares are in demand in market! Now a days Houdini is in hype, if you already know Maya then it will be beneficial to go with and Houdini. I dont know about the financial situation.I would pick Bournemouth since I prefer Houdini over Maya. Houdini is a better tool for VFX in my opinion.Gone are the days of PowerAnimator’s $30,000 software price tag running on a specialized hardware in an SGI system that cost more than many small homes these days.

Gone, too, are the days of needing the size of a small home just to have enough processing power to run what can now be run from the palm of your hand. Sometimes things get bigger and better, but when it comes to technology when things get better they usually also get smaller. Computers have gotten much smaller than their counterparts from decades ago. Despite this, the power in those systems have continued to increase and today it’s easy to get a reliable and powerful laptop computer that’s capable of running just about any high-end creative software program for a relatively cheap price. Creativity can strike anywhere, so we want to hear from you. When you’re doing creative work, what is your favorite laptop to get the job done? Simply use the comments below to nominate your favorite laptop to use for creative work. It could be the laptop you’re using right now or maybe it’s your dream mobile system. There’s no restriction on what sort of laptop it is or what sort of creative work you’re using it for, so make sure your favorite laptop gets nominated!

When nominating, please use this format: Favorite laptop: Brand and model name of your favorite laptop. Feel free to include a URL, but it’s not required. Why: Give us a brief explanation (a sentence or two) on why you love this laptop. We’ll do an initial nomination so you can get an idea of the voting structure. After gathering nominations for about a week, we’ll close the comments here and then announce the top five most-nominated laptops. From there, you’ll be invited to vote on any of the top five nominees and see what the overall community-favorite laptop is for creative work.Volume 133 >> Issue 62 : Wednesday, January 15, 2014PDF of This Issue Illustration by deena wang—The Tech Search in YouTube for “too weak, too slow” and you will find a video of two young men sitting across from each other at a small table, frantically moving carved tokens on a wooden grid and slapping a clock mercilessly. They are fighting each other to the death, with bravado and gusto, in one of the oldest battlefields known to the human mind: the chessboard.

The cocky guy in the green shirt, with the looks of a Viking and the nose of a boxer, is a 22-year-old chap named Magnus Carlsen, who happens to be the strongest chess player to ever walk the earth. The other guy, at the receiving end of Magnus’ Muhammad Ali-esque taunts (“Too weak, too slow! What, you wanna play?”) is his close friend and sparring partner, Grandmaster Laurent Fressinet. Mean as he may sound, the awful truth is that Carlsen is right: Fressinet, and almost everyone else on the planet, is indeed too weak and too slow for him. None of us mere humans stand a chance against him: he is too fast, too strong and too accurate. Less than two months ago, he beat World Champion Vishy Anand in a match without losing a single game. Yet even Magnus, at the peak of his powers, refuses to meet one opponent in a match, notwithstanding the incessant pleadings from chess fans. That opponent is here in front of me as I type, quietly waiting for the champ to accept the challenge.

Carlsen won’t budge, and is wise in doing so, because — as he and all other Grandmasters know — even he himself is too weak and too slow to stand a chance against this opponent. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the opponent I’m talking about is my laptop… and yours! Back in 1996, when most of the current MIT undergrads were still in the process of being potty trained, Gary Kasparov — the Carlsen of the previous generation — lost his first game ever against Deep Blue, a top-secret, multi-million dollar supercomputer that IBM built using thousands of chess-specific processors with the sole purpose of defeating this one individual. Today, thanks to the increase in computing power of the average computer and to the appearance of a new generation of chess software, there is no longer need of specialized hardware to beat the best human: any decent laptop would maul World Champion Magnus Carlsen in a match. At the core of this new software are algorithms that evaluate chess positions and calculate variations in order to decide on the best move.

These algorithms are called chess engines, and — among the myriad currently available — at least two dozen have an estimated playing strength (or ELO) higher than the best human ever. Seldom have humans reached the rarefied stratosphere of speed and precision where these chess engines fight. Arguably the strongest chess engine of all is Houdini, developed by Robert Houdart. Since its appearance in the chess world back in 2010, Houdini has been widely regarded as the best chess player ever in the long and rich history of the game. A new version is released every year, and each one exceeds the previous one. The current release, Houdini 4, is the de facto gold standard against which all other chess engines are measured. Humans are not real competitors against Houdini, and for a long time, neither were other engines. But now, for the first time in four years, something else has reached Houdini’s level of play. Not one, but two engines have risen with a legitimate challenge to the alpha dog: Komodo and Stockfish.

Together, they made headlines in chess circles when they obtained the two highest scores in the most recent Thoresen Chess Engines Competition (TCEC), above Houdini and many other engines. TCEC is regarded, against the wishes of its organizer Martin Thoresen, as an unofficial world championship for chess engines. The TCEC final between Komodo and Stockfish was a very dramatic event, for many reasons. Not only was it the first time such a final did not feature Houdini, but also it was being played at the same time as the human World Chess Championship was being decided in Chennai, India. At least for this author, the TCEC final was more exciting than the human championship. Stockfish qualified first for the final without losing a single game, while Komodo qualified second with no loses to Houdini. After a long and hard-fought series of 48 games, Komodo won the final by a narrow margin over Stockfish. In a dramatic twist, Komodo’s main programmer, Don Dailey (who once worked at MIT) didn’t get to see the triumph;

he died of acute leukemia on the same day the final started. His partner in the development of Komodo, Grandmaster Larry Kaufman, an MIT alum himself, dedicated the victory to Don. Together with Komodo’s new programmer, Mark Lefler, Larry released the victorious version of Komodo under the name Komodo TCEC, to a fan base that was clamoring for it like teenagers in line for a Justin Bieber concert. In a touching gesture of gallantry and admiration, Stockfish’s team, led by developers Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, and Joona Kiiski, also released the runner-up version of Stockfish under the moniker “DD,” an open homage to Don Dailey. The three-way rumble between Houdini, Komodo and Stockfish in the latest TCEC season revived enthusiasm in computer chess and spurred a sort of arms race, as the teams behind each engine prepare stronger versions for the next TCEC, due to start in late January. Larry Kaufman, regarded as an expert on how to evaluate positions in chess, has thoroughly “taught” Komodo the ropes.

As a result, Komodo’s play in long games is rock solid, earning praise from world-class experts such as Boris Avrukh and Roman Dzindzichashvili. Not to be outdone, team Stockfish is leveraging the power of open-source to summon the creative power of a dozen developers spread around the world, and is constantly testing new ideas using a cloud-based network of computers volunteered by Stockfish fans, who like the fact that Stockfish is offered free of cost and its code is available online. There are a lot of expectations from thousands of fans around the world: Will Komodo retain the crown? Will Stockfish prove the superiority of the open-source model? Will Houdini regain and retain the top spot it enjoyed for so long? The answers to these questions remain to be seen. But, regardless of the next TCEC’s result, the clear winner in this new rivalry is the world of chess, which has now access — even for free — to top-class chess analysis tools that were thought impossible just a generation ago.