Take your visual effects skills to the next level

Not at this point in time. There's really no way we can affordably certify that someone has learned the material or even watched the courses, so we've decided to not issue certificates.

The founders of fxphd are the team from fxguide.com.

If you want a serious job in the post-production or gaming industries, in feature film or video - locally or overseas - or you want to produce your own work, the professors at fxphd will teach you the real world facts and techniques you need to know. Each course in fxphd is run by a practicing vfx or editing professional -- what we call a Professor. Each has been hand picked for the expert knowledge in the field. The professors come from a background of working on a wide variety of projects.

Here are some of the projects the professors of fxphd have worked on:

Films: X-Men 3, Poseidon, Fantastic Four, Aeon Flux, Lord of the Rings, Hunt Angels
Music Videos: Sugarbabes, Will Young
Broadcast Design: Bravo Networks, Discovery Channel, ESPN, BBC
Commercials: Ford, Samsung, Sony, Disney, Budweiser, ESPN, McDonald's

The key is that fxphd is not random tips or disjointed quicktime tutorials. It is a full professional training center online and 24/7. You can learn during renders, at night or weekends -- it is up to you. There are practica

Yes, the standard membership provides streaming access.

In addition, Premium Membership subscribers can download our class tutorial movies and watch them wherever and whenever they wish.

Not all courses, but most of them.

We aim to provide footage whenever possible, but sometimes we don't have the rights to distribute the footage due to ownership copyright. We do this in cases where we feel the course content is valuable even without the footage.

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: The download functionality of the premium membership is primarily intended to allow members to download the assets and footage which come along with the courses. In addition, members can download a limited number of class movies (approximately two courses per week) to watch them when they don't have access to internet and make it easier to learn on the go.

Regrettably, some artists join for a month and attempt to download hundreds of class movies and footage in a short period of time. Frankly, as a small business we couldn't survive if everyone did this...and we couldn't continue to support the artists creating the training as well as those who want to learn. So we've placed reasonable limits on both footage and class downloads over various time periods.

If you're going away for a while or will be offline for an extended period, feel free to send us a message via our support page and we can increase the limit for you.

In order to access and watch the class movies, you'll need a fairly recent web browser. We aim to support Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Brave.

For the software packages we offer on the VPN, we suggest you check the manufacturer web sites for their specific requirements. These vary widely from application to application.

Each course contains between five and twelve classes, each with an instructional video (or two).

As far as difficulty or level, we use a university metaphor to help you understand our class structure. Consider going to university -- you start out your first year in 100 level courses and then work your way up to 300 level courses or higher.

It's the same at fxphd, but you don't have to start with the 100 level if you feel your skills are up to it. If you are a more experienced artist, you can jump in at the 200 or 300 level. The bottom line is that the 100, 200 and 300 numbers give you some guidance as to the content level of the courses.

Each course at fxphd has a "course number" assigned to it which reflects these levels (visible on the courses page).

We offer introductory 100 level courses for many applications. These get you going and allow you to learn an application fully -- we assume a basic knowledge level of the application and that you have been through the manual. Maybe you are flame artist wanting to check out toxik, or a shake artist wanting to learn some 3D, or an editor who wants to learn advanced Final Cut Pro, but also get into keying and compositing.

After you've completed the 100 level courses -- or if you have been using the software and have a base understanding of its concepts and feel you don't need to take the 100 level courses -- you move up to the 200 level intermediate courses. These dive into the more complex details of the software and approach learning the application from a project-based level.

You then move up to the 300 level courses which are our advanced courses.

We recommend you have access to the software for the courses you are taking. Technically, there is no reason you couldn't take the course without the software, but you'll get way more out of the material by being able to trying things out yourself.

We have access to several major software packages on the site via secure VPN licensing. Read on to the next several questions for more details.

We currently don't have previews of our courses available for non-members. When you pay and become a member of fxphd, you can access all our courses.

We provide downloads and VPN licensing of the following applications as part of fxphd. :

• Houdini
• NUKE (NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE Studio)
• Autodesk Maya, Arnold, Maya, Flame
• RenderMan ProServer
• RenderMan for Maya
• RenderMan for Houdini
• Mocha Pro
• Silhouette Paint and Roto
• V-Ray
• MARI
• HIERO
• Ocula from The Foundry

Access to VPN versions of software is only to be used for non-commercial personal, educational use to follow along with our fxphd training. Acceptable use also includes generating material from our footage for your personal demo reel. In other words, you can't use the software to create shots for paying or non-paying jobs or projects for others. It's available for you to learn and build shots for your reel so you can get job you really want.

You are limited to using a VPN license for a maximum of 8 hours a day or 30 hours a week which allows the licenses to be available for other users and prevents abuse of the VPN software. . If you exceed this amount, you may be locked out of using the software. If you need extra time to get a shot done for your reel (such as for rendering), please contact us via support and we are happy to make occasional exceptions and extend the time allowed.

You must quit the application when you are done using it in order to free up the license for others to use.

ou download the software either from our site or the manufacturer site.

Then, you use OpenVPN or Tunnelblick to create a VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection which securely connects your computer over the internet to our VPN license server. When you’re connected to our VPN, you start the software and they ping our server to make sure you can run the software. This way, you can obtain licensing to run VPN versions of different software packages we have here on fxphd. You must be already connected to the internet in order to access the VPN.

VPN connections can be dicey at times and many business don’t allow VPN through their firewall…so we can’t guarantee you’ll be able to run the software from your workplace and/or home. Where you have control over the firewall, we can generally quite easily make things work but it is no guarantee.

Access to VPN versions of software is only to be used for non-commercial individual, educational use or generating material for your personal demo reel.