Deciding on a University (UK)
polycounter lvl 3
So I'm in a bit of a pickle as I'm struggling to decide where I should go for University.
I'm just like everyone else, I want to make the best decision and I want to go to the best to ensure I make the most out of my educational experience.
I already practice alone and put work into my concept art outside of college and I'm trying to learn Zbrush.
I just don't know where to go. I've looked into many universities and have offers but I'm so stuck with where I should go. I've reached out to other students and gotten their feedback on the universities and that's great but I'm still so indecisive!
So i guess what I'm asking is, what do you look for in a university in order to be successful?
I'm just like everyone else, I want to make the best decision and I want to go to the best to ensure I make the most out of my educational experience.
I already practice alone and put work into my concept art outside of college and I'm trying to learn Zbrush.
I just don't know where to go. I've looked into many universities and have offers but I'm so stuck with where I should go. I've reached out to other students and gotten their feedback on the universities and that's great but I'm still so indecisive!
So i guess what I'm asking is, what do you look for in a university in order to be successful?
Replies
Studios don't really care about what degree you have, rather they want to see a cool portfolio that shows you can a) make cool art and b) understand the technical process of taking a project to completion. So just doing well on a uni course and getting a degree doesn't guarantee anything. So if you wanna go to an art school I'd recommend getting into the best or not at all. A mediocre one just isn't worth the money.
Look to see the quality of the graduates work, and how many are getting hired in industry after leaving. Is the uni / students winning awards? Who are the lecturer's / what have they worked on?
Also worth noting that many industry artists never went to art school, and many others have. Look around here on Polycount and you'll find plenty of examples / anecdotes of people who never went to art school. There are a lot of online resources (free and paid) that can really help, so it is possible to do it without traditional school.
1) The resources (professionals who were teaching, USC's resources in general, networking that was super dope and connections that could get you there if you wanted it)
2) The talent it attracted across the board. Classmates I know are at Oculus, Biizzard, Riot, Microsoft, 2K, Bungie, eSports companies, Big indie teams, award winning indie teams, their own start ups, etc.
Not much about the actual classes did a majority of the work for where I was at by the end of graduation. A lot of that was elbow grease on my end to take advantage of the two points above to be a strong candidate as a junior artist. There was so much I had to do out of class to get anywhere close to competitive for the games industry job market.
So i say all this great stuff about Teesside. The other and maybe even better is University of Hertfordshire. A fair amount of the uk industry come from there or Teesside. But we would need a Herts grad to comment on that.
One of the big things that swayed me was the 4-in-1 degree - there are 4 different degrees under the animation department, and in first year you're exposed to all 4. The tutors are very happy to let people swap between them, which gives you a lot more options. It also means that you're around peeps doing other 3D disciplines, so you can learn from them too. 2nd/3rd years also like to mingle with music and film departments.
This does mean that if your heart is 100% dead-set on 1 specific thing you'll have to put up with some other stuff in first year, but I personally found that this opened my eyes to a lot of other cool options career-wise that might have never occurred to me.
The tutors and other students are all really cool and eager to help. Seriously, this is IMO one of the main advantages to shelling out all that moolah for 3 years. I can approach anyone (incl. older years) and be like ''hey, could ya help me with something?'' or ''how'd you do that cool thing you posted on the animation forum"? They'll all be happy to help.
Uni also has it's own forum for posting work, receiving crit etc. Alumni still browse it too so there's a chance you'll get some relevant crit (or even an internship, if you're good enough they show your stuff to their supervisor).
There's a whole Herts thread floating around Polycount somewhere. Worth noting that Herts is focused around making their students great artists. When it comes to games art we don't do much gameplay stuff, just art.
To my knowledge there are No universities on Earth teaching Game Art properly. None of them are worth the money + time they ask. I say all this as a man with a Game Art Degree.
You would be better off going to community college to learn C# and practicing game art on own time. Or, doing unpaid work for a mod team. I am not joking.