Hi, I'm Raf! One of my hobbies is creating arts and short movies: https://www.artstation.com/toyu The process of creating art, like creating software, is a thrilling journey of achieving your goals, step by step.

This process requires months of work and several iterations to not only create beautiful work, but also to convey thoughts and feelings through it.

However, there is something that makes learning 3D graphics and visual effects easier and more interesting than programming: there is no need to debug the program. I can focus and come up with even more ways to improve the image and how it looks, without getting bogged down in solving problems with the creation process itself.

From a professional point of view, my activity is called "compositing". It also includes work on visual effects. So, what actually is compositing? It is the process of creating a finished image from a set of layers and fragments.

The layers can be various 3D models, separately filmed effects, superimposed effects, and the background. However, you can't just put them all together and get a masterpiece of art. They need to be polished separately to ensure that all the separate parts look harmonious together and form what is called a "composition". Composition is the organized arrangement of objects in an image, in which each object is necessary and serves as a "tool" for conveying the artist's idea.

3D graphics is just one of my tools that allows me to visualize worlds and their lighting. Cinema 4D, which I consider one of the best digital tools, has helped me a lot in this regard: a customizable interface, unusual shortcuts, toolbars, changeable menus, the best render engines on the planet (Magic Bullter, RedShift, etc.).

In any case, compositing in After Effects (or the holy Nuke) is the necessary brushstroke to complete the image.

As a result, my activity is, in a sense, the organization of things in space and knowledge in my mind. That's why programming is my second hobby. Programming requires solving various problems and some internal fight with my habits, with my brain's desire to be lazy. It was a way to change my perception of the world. 3D graphics teached me to see how light falls in real life. I was impressed how it can change my perception of an object. Physics and programming teaced you to set goals correctly and explore ways to achieve them. However, my interest in physics cannot be fully expressed here, because my passion for light behavior and color theory requires a lot of context to inspire the reader to study them.

3D graphics is my tool for creating my fantasies. The programming is my tool for creating powerful working tools for creating my fantasies. That is why I write mainly in high-level programming languages (not Python): simple, yet powerful languages allow me to create a finite thought, which is very important to me as an artist. It is evident that overly simplistic languages such as Python encourage the habit of utilizing ready-made libraries or writing syntactic sugar for brief solutions to complex problems. This is precisely why I consider AutoHotkey to second best tool on my drive. It allows me to create ready-to-use programs and learn some programming techniques. At first glance, AutoHotkey is just a language for creating scripts and writing macros, and in this sense, it has created a trap for itself that prevents it from spreading like Python. But few people in the world have noticed that AutoHotkey has prototyping and the best syntax for creating GUIs (not syntactic sugar, but syntax as a way of expressing the programmer's thoughts in text form).

Prototype-based languages allow you to extend the functionality of the standard library and language syntax. One notable example is AquaHotkey, whose author recently introduced a new syntax for checking types of elements inside containers. This library shows what AutoHotkey is really capable of: working with data through different containers, extending and reusing methods and functions, making queries to the system kernel (Win32 API) in a readable form, importing functions from DLL libraries, connecting machine code, and more.

Although I have been writing code for quite some time, I only recently immersed myself in version control systems. The third best tool is GitButler, which saved me years of learning Git and allowed me to focus on what I love most instead of struggling with branches: creating tools and making art. It allowed me to structure my work on Quick Switch and the Markdown to BBCode converter, sped up the opening of Pull Requests in various tools that I was quietly changing on my machine, and made programming truly enjoyable.

So who am I: a physicist, an artist, a programmer, or a lammer? A zoomer or a geek? An engineer or a self-taught person? Personally, I prefer not to label anyone, and I advise you not to either. But one thing I know for sure about myself is that I love to create and share my ideas with the world. I love to learn and improve myself, and to do that, I need to look at the world like a physicist, create like an artist, and love to build things like a programmer.