What about Animation Studios?
interpolator
Most threads and wiki posts focus on game industry side of things.
The scary bits , the struggles people had to go through and the challenges they faced along the way in order to get that 'first job' or breaking in.
From my ( perhaps biased and naive - Having not worked in a studio yet ) perspective there are far less Animation studios than Game studios and the content created in them seems pretty vast in comparison to Games.
So my questions are
If the same struggle applies to Animation studios/Advertisement studios as well for 3d modellers.
Is it harder to break into those studios than in games
Is the exploitation less frequent there.
With struggle I mean constant layoffs , constantly cancelled projects and the likes.
The scary bits , the struggles people had to go through and the challenges they faced along the way in order to get that 'first job' or breaking in.
From my ( perhaps biased and naive - Having not worked in a studio yet ) perspective there are far less Animation studios than Game studios and the content created in them seems pretty vast in comparison to Games.
So my questions are
If the same struggle applies to Animation studios/Advertisement studios as well for 3d modellers.
Is it harder to break into those studios than in games
Is the exploitation less frequent there.
With struggle I mean constant layoffs , constantly cancelled projects and the likes.
Replies
That being said, there are a lot more jobs for modelers in games than in film. Pixar, for example, has something like 25 modelers out of 1200 employees.
Generally speaking, film/advertising jobs pay better but offer less stability (obviously with some exceptions). The hours are roughly comparable, and are going to vary more from studio to studio and project to project than between industries.
If you want to avoid layoffs and crunch, your best bet is looking outside the entertainment industry. I know some people with very steady jobs doing stuff like military training simulations or arch vis.
Alright I'll try and ask there , thanks for the reply though.
But is there a reason as to why film/ads offer less stability?
no patching of the film for months after release?
But I think a lot of VFX houses are just smaller than giants like EA or Ubi, and ads might not keep a whole feature film crew afloat inbetween projects. Also movies have different FX requirements and amount. Now if you have an AAA game title you just know there's a lot of gfx needed, no matter what.
That's just my guess. I just worked on film once, and at the end our contracts were over, since the production company was specifically set up to produce just 1 or 2 titles. So everyone knew what's going to happen at the end...
Part of it is shorter project lengths. A studio will generally work on a game for a couple years. A vfx or add house will normally only work on a project for anywhere from a few weeks to a year or so. And of course, at the end of any project there's the potential for layoffs.
The other part is that what skills are needed varies a lot more from project to project in adds/vfx. One project might need a ton of modelers, but not much animation, while another might need the reverse. As such, they have to hire and lay off a bunch of people each project. Games, at least if they're in the same genre, tend to be more steady in that regard.
Have you guys thought about working in CG company doing realtime stuff? I'm asking because there may be new trend on the horizont where CG companies that till now produced cinematics for games with a help of Vray, Arnold etc. may start to switch their workflow to realtime engines.
Crytek did it with their cinematics for Ryse, where they rendered them straight from CineBox for TV adds. But that's a game company.
But fun thing happened last week. CG company, Axis Animation, posted job offer in which they wanted UE4 guy that will help them develop pipeline for making cinematics
So we got second company in last 12 months that decided that it's time to say f*ck to the old workflow. I think that in next 2-3 years we will see many more moves like this from other CG companies.
But yeh, game engines are prgressively becoming solid enough to attract the interest of CG companies.
Seriously, who likes to brag about their scene or commerical taking 6 hours/frame to render?
We're doing RnD on this now, as we're doing art for games and film. Using Unreal / Unity is tempting, but there's still a huge gap in what's required by feature film and high end cinematics. It's an exciting field for anyone who's into engines and pipeline design to make it all work together. e.g. polycounts, rigs, scene setups, workflows in film are all quite different from what you'd use in an Unreal / realtime production. Changing the workflows, mindsets and tools of film production towards what Unreal offers will be a challenge, and I assume Unreal Engine too will have to adapt, over the next years, if they fully want to support film needs. So far we've been mostly thinking of using it for lower end TV production, because that's the quality we expect to get out of it (for now).
p.s. did I mention we're looking for more UE4 wizards to join us?
I see that you are using Houdini too. Can you share something more about type of jobs it is used for?
We had strong interest from our clients (we do outsourcing) - they were all "Houdini will be THE big thing!", but I think the initial enthusiasm disappeared, even though we invested time in training and all.
That was around the same time Substance got some traction, the PS4/XBox One were launched and everyone was looking for a silver bullet to keep Gen 4 dev time and costs on Gen 3 levels.
Well, Houdini shows its strength after you develop couple nice tools with it. Out of the box many people will be veeery disappointed.
Cameron used Lightwave and Motionbuilder and an Innersense suite for previz on Avatar. Game engines at that point (bear in mind previz started in 2007) didn't have quite the same breadth of tools for that kind of work. Arguably we're only just reaching that point now. And you'd certainly need at least 6 hours of serious farm time to render out a frame of that film, a game engine couldn't come close to that level of fidelity right now.
But back to the OP, depending where you live, animation studios can far outnumber games studios (LA, London, Paris, etc.). The work can be brutal and in my experience there's far more crunch time involved (due to shorter project lengths and more frequency of deadlines over the course of a year). But it can also be fun and far more varied day-to-day than Games work, especially at smaller VFX studios where you may have to jump between a lot of different roles.
As other people have said, though, modellers aren't in high demand - usually some modellers will be brought on for a short contract during the pre-production phase and then let go but they'll often be the seasoned pros. Junior modellers are more likely be somewhere doing retop work (cleaning up cad files for car adverts, arch-vis, etc).
The bulk of the roles are for compositors (by far the most in-demand position), animators, lighting/render artists, motion graphics artists, trackers, etc. If you have a good knowledge of compositing in Nuke you could easily be jumping between film projects at the major studios in London without much in the way of downtime.
Projects can still be cancelled (TV shows getting dropped, ads being pulled from the marketing schedule), studios still go bust - many end up working on minimal profits/investing their own money to try and win bids from other studios, a sudden project cancellation can tip a studio over the edge (see The Life of Pi as a good example of a studio tanking hard after working on an incredibly successful project).
So it's sadly not any safer a career route than working in games...
Which is sad. Seems like the area to save time is going to be the creative part, with Photoscanning stuff. Leaves you just with the awful cleanup and processing work...