Looking for a career change...maybe...
polycounter lvl 9
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, mainly due to the stability of the industry as well as the lack of UK based character art positions available. Im in a position where I think im ready to settle down in one place so I was curious about alternative career paths which would offer more stability.
I've heard teaching is a good position to take but I wouldn't know the first place to begin regarding enquiries or the route to take to get to that position.
Any other artists ever taken the alternate career approach after time in the industry?
I've heard teaching is a good position to take but I wouldn't know the first place to begin regarding enquiries or the route to take to get to that position.
Any other artists ever taken the alternate career approach after time in the industry?
Replies
About teaching, I have no clue about the UK but in the US you need one degree higher than the course your teaching. So to get up to the decent paying positions you have to go through a lot of schooling, the cost and time investment is why a lot of industry people stay out of teaching. I think the rules are different at for profit schools (not sure if you have those) but generally those are the schools everyone is told to avoid... Still if they had decent teachers it might improve their standards but that doesn't change the fact that there aren't jobs to support all those students.
Overall it sounds like, training massive amounts of people, for positions that aren't there seems like a short term fix that will eventually fall apart too due to lack of available openings?
And I'm pretty sure I just convinced you to throw yourself off a bridge... what about working in Canada?
But have you thought to yourself that it might be time to jump over the Atlantic pond or try another studio instead of changing career? You have after all worked at Jagex your whole career, that's going of your LinkedIn profile anyway.
In terms of teaching, I know a lot of my tutors at University came from the industry. Although generally at a very low level, your work blows away anything I saw of there's. Most of them came straight from the industry on part time work schemes where they work and study for there degree, pretty much fast tracked through the system to get up to senior tutor level over the years.
But in terms of teaching as a whole, its a completely different world. You generally have no control over what your allowed to teach until at a senior level. You have to deal with students who just don't give a fuck, many just doing what is needed to pass. Obviously this all depends on the school and at what level.
Teaching for me is the retirement plan for when I'm wrinkled, dying and grumpy.
That would be most Universities
I think my major worry is, when I do get older and games development isn't for me or the work just isn't coming in....what do I move onto with my skill set.
I totally jumped ship and started a bakery though.
How's that working out for you by the way? I'm not asking to be "cute" or an asshole. I'm honestly curious since I've also had these "what if" thoughts, like... what if I went and did this thing that's 100% different from the game industry, would i survive? Would I be able to?
I'll probably not do anything drastic like that though
On career changing;
As for teaching, you need any degree to go into a teaching school, its about three years long and you'll be required to do alot of time in placements. You'll most likely be fast tracked with your skill level so i'm not sure if you'll need to take an extra year for the university level teaching. It depends on your past workings ect but that's the normal layout for a fresh student.
Contact any of the career advisor's at your local job centre plus for further help. They will give you information courses and show you every option available for getting into teaching. It's there job keeping you off the doll so they will do there dammed best to get you a job
Best of luck!
so you still can work in 3d related and teaching at the same time .
Anyways, on a more helpful note. I have actually been talking to lecturers at my uni (Sheffield Hallam) about this. In order to become a lecturer you need 3 years teaching, however two of my lecturers are associate lecturers. This means that they are lecturing but have slightly less responsibility and aren't salaried. Once they have done their 3 years than they can then be taken up into the ranks of lecturers etc..
Obviously the not being salaried means that they only get paid what they actually teach. This means that they are unpaid during the summer, 2 weeks at easter and 3ish at christmas. However, the hourly rate is around £45 before tax for both of them and they both freelance during their summers, so every cloud...
On a side note, VFX in the UK seems really stable right now
A couple of years ago I got so burned out on games I decided to jump ship and do custom painting. Motorcycles, helmets, whatever. It was fun but very labor intensive and hard work. After a year of doing that I realized that my passion is and always has been games. But if I went back it had to be what I wanted to do. Being a cog in a large 200 person studio doing the exact same thing game after game wasn't what I really loved. Not to mention the always looming thread of layoffs and cancelled projects. I made a list of what I wanted out of a game job. And if I couldn't find it I'd stick with something else. I wanted a small team, as much stability as possible, and projects I'd have fun making art on (Don't really enjoy photoreal). Luckily I found a job that met my requirements, though I had to move 2,000 miles away. But it was worth it!
I switched to being an electrician after ten years in the games industry. I'm very happy with my decision.
For me, the change in jobs was the best solution to improve my lifestyle.
I still do occasional contract work and I sell assets online. Its a great way to make some extra money.
My advice:
- be prepared to start at the bottom
- choose a career that has long-term potential
- don't work in unskilled trades (drywaller, demolition, data-entry, retail, etc.)
- have a big cash cushion for those dry times (Christmas is often slow in construction for me)
- keep up your art and tech skills to make some extra money
- if you don't know what you want to do, take a part-time course at a trade school in something new (welding, carpentry, baking, autobody repair, etc.)
- don't pick a job where you sit in front of a computer all day unless you really love sitting in front of a computer all day
+1!!!!
I used to do that myself. Was pretty nice. The only downside is that I don't know if there's much work for character work. It seems to mostly be for Environment art, which is what I did. But I've been out of the loop for a long time, maybe it's possible to get contracts as a char artist.
I read 3DWorld and 3DArtist regularly and they're constantly packed with great character art for other industries, you've got animation, shorts, low budget etc, advertising, print, educational stuff, mascots, motion graphics etc etc. If you can back up your skillset with a bit of After Effects, animation/rigging etc then I'd have thought you'd be a pretty attractive hire.
I'm speaking from a position of little experience in any of the above fields however so take it with a grain of salt!
I have to say I wouldn't advise teaching though. I'm a guitarist of 17 years and I'd taught a few private students for a while and moved into teaching in schools and it was horrible, I was paid £24 an hour full time and quit after 2 weeks. It's pretty crushing to try and teach a subject you love to a class where 2% of the students are desperate to learn while the other 98% piss about and ruin it for everyone.
That said, if you are serious about teaching, I think you can get some positions at College level without a teaching degree. If you have an undergrad degree you can work towards your PGCE whilst you work.
Maybe I could open an Australian branch of Ben's bakery.
you might want to think about putting a generalist portfolio together. maybe you can find a more stable position if you can switch roles and take on other stuff. environments, hard surface stuff, props, etc. i know people like that that have stable positions. try to talk to some people you worked with that you trust. put together a list of stuff. it might not be that big of a stretch.
Ive thought about this however the problem is...I dont really enjoy environments that much and I wouldn't want my character work to suffer as a result. I would rather be really good at one thing than be an all-rounder.
Freelancing is a possibility....I wouldn't know the first place to begin though....
It's sad to see someone with your skills even contemplating getting out, but I was in the same place about 7 or 8 years ago.
It's nice if you want to travel around with your work - once you've got the experience down you'll have the possibility to work all over the world, but the down side is you'll likely have to work all over the world if you want to keep employed and getting decent projects. If the vagabond lifestyle doesn't sound too appealing then it's probably not the path you want to follow unless you can find a studio that keeps its team from project to project.
This isn't entirely true. There are pretty stable jobs in the vfx studios of London. I've had friends work at a single place for years. Some people prefer working freelance because of it's higher income.
If I could I'd love to be a tenured teacher.
That said Montreal is a pretty big hub, so hopefully my current career still has a lot to offer in terms of stability.
That is VERY important to me.
Vancouver used to be a pretty significant hub, so I understand how quickly that can turn.
I agree, the only people I speak to on a regular basis from VFX have both been in the same london studios for over 10 years.
Seemingly well, though I'm right at a transition point where I've done all the ground work, tested with a small group of people, and now just waiting for my health permit to come through. I'll know the commercial success by next year.
Tough times.
none of this retopo bollx:)
Turnaround is generally fairly quick, so you don't have time to polish so much.
worked at nexus for a while and then at keyframe studios on various stuff.
it can be fairly pressursed but on the whole people are more pleasant and grown up
Obviously rendering skills are required like mental ray and vray are helpful.
You should give it a shot man, your work is certainly good enough
Atleast now i have a bigger picture that people who are in the Industry are worried about job security.
Baj after looking at your portfolio I think you can start up your own business for teaching and stuff here in SCotland as I too plan to do that if "plan A" fails lol. But again when there are no jobs in this sector people wont come to your school but its not gonna happen so soon as Industry in Pakistan and India and Singapore is rising in character animation + there are loads of interesting stories that can come to life through animation from that part of the world. You should check top studios there too as some of them outsource their work.
Also you have example of Feng Zhu 2D concept artist on almost all Star Wars and top sci fi movies, he also is running up his own School now FZD.
However would like to know your experience how you got in the industry.
way to much to go over here in a post. a few things off the top of my head...
number one thing is nailing photo real human anatomy. you need to show a really nice head with tight detail and correctly proportioned and muscled anatomy that looks natural etc. big dudes with crazy muscles and tons of armor and other over the top game type stuff is not going do to much for you on a film reel. there are serious reasons for this its not film snob b.s.
tight detail is very important. wrinkles, veins, surface texture etc, have to be as close to reality as you can make them.
you model to camera. ie, your camera is nailed down and there is an animatic of what you working on. you know whats going to be seen and whats not. how far shit is from camera etc. you end up refining detail for those shots specifically in some cases. so you literally go frame by frame on a shot and get changes that you need to do
cloth is always done by simulation so you might want to tone down the wrinkles and make the clothing look and fit correctly with some natural small wrinkles. geometry should be all quads and as uniform as possible. for the sym.
creatures have to look real when put in the film frame. you will be surprised at how tame film creatures look in neutral pose for the most part. it may look over the top when its moving but its usually not. there are muscle systems extremely high res meshes that have various secondary motion effects etc. in order for all that to work the structure has to work bones muscle joints etc all have to be close to how real animals work. also you can never ever have overlapping interpenetrating geometry at render time. so if the bones and muscle are wacky and you get interpenetration all over the place your fucked. and on top of not rendering correctly its probably not going to feel right on screen and look fake.
rendering lighting scene integration effects and compositing is 'most' of what film is. anything you show needs to be rendered in mental ray or prman. with full gi fg etc. you need to at least learn how to set up some nice turntable lighting and how to set up some nice materials. everything you will ever show for dailies etc will have to be rendered out that way. eventually with displacement maps and textures. you probubly want to use sss also. you will probably not have to do that as a modeler for work but to show your stuff its kind of important if you have textures etc. dont even think about sending in game rendered stuff. trust me on that mate don't even...
man there is a lot of other stuff....
textures, in small studios that do commercials and some movie work they will probably want you to do texture. get ready for 50-100+ 2k textures or the equivalent 4k... per texture channel per character.
geometry, one big thing is that you will end up with 200k + base meshes. and then we sub-div that down to the limit surface and capture the difference between that and the sculpt in 32bit float displacement maps. so what you need to show is...
your base mesh smoothed. with displacement maps applied to that. rendered in mentalray. then an um-smoothed turntable showing the wire frame of the base mesh. and a texture pass for some stuff but not needed for everything.
there is a HUGE difference from small commercials to large movies so keep in mind most of what i laid out is for big films. and none of what i said applies to toon shows. that's a totally different animal.
I think you could pull it off looking at your work. but your going to have to show some stuff how i described. re-surfed film res. and punch some of the surface detail on the humans. i would not put the big dudes on there. primitive guy is nice. and the heads. ie stuff that is more realism. the fact that you can do textures is a big + atm.
I've looked into other fields but really there is not else I want to do so I just continue to hold my head up and work on my skills. Hoping to get back to a studio I'll be happy at and is a bit stable for more then a few weeks or months.
If you are single these decisions are usually a lot easier as you only have yourself to worry about but having a family and little ones it makes it a lot harder to just make drastic changes.
It's a new year and good things will come your way if you work hard and stay focused.
But non the less... many of us are in similar situations.
One thing at a time and see where the future goes. Good luck to everyone else!