In March of 2017 I posted about Bill Melendez, an animator who ran the company responsible for producing, among many other things, the holiday classic "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Melendez was a key player in the Disney animation strike of 1941, which eventually led to the creation of cartoonists union Local 839 IATSE. 

So it's heartening to see a new generation of voices rallying behind the creation of a VFX union. VFX animators often work in incredibly stressed environments filled with impossible deadlines and last minute changes, things easily addressed with the establishment of ground rules limiting work hours and studio second-guessing of effects shots.  The following articles make for great reads:

https://gizmodo.com/disney-marvel-movies-vfx-industry-nightmare-1849385834

https://www.polygon.com/23291038/she-hulk-creators-disney-vfx-union

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Special thanks to Audrey Wong, Principal Technical Artist, Pixar Animation Studios, for providing this link to a technical paper authored by Theodore Kim, Fernando de Goes, and Hayley Iben, describing technologies used to create Hank the octopus in "Finding Dory." Some of these technologies were later incorporated into SideFX's Houdini software and Vellum. Unlike Cinema 4D, which uses quadrangles and N-gons, Houdini employs tetrahedrons to create meshes. 

https://graphics.pixar.com/library/AnisotropicElasticitySIGGRAPH2019/paper.pdf
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