Online courses with mentors - are they worth it?

Zot

Hello, I am learning as character artist and I had a though about courses with mentors from cgma (are there other cg schools?). Did anyone passed the courses? Are they worth it? I just not sure about full pipeline of char creation, well I know the pipeline, but I didn't do it myself yet, and I thought that a course with a good mentor will give me a boost as char artist...

What do you think about? Or it's better to try and learn by myself?

PixelMasher

thb I think the price level for cgma courses are a steal. Traditional art school is what....$10k-60k a year? a couple cgma courses for $1.2k or whatever they are, focused on your niche and you could be well on the way to being industry ready. you are literally learning from pros actually in the industry and not some old washed up art school teachers who last shipped a ps2/ps3 game. 

it would probably shortcut your learning curve dramatically, it just depends how much you value your time and want to invest in yourself. I would happily pay 2-5k in courses if it would net me a 40-50k entry level position in a couple years with plenty of  hard work and practice.

Ashervisalis

You might want to find students who took the class and find out exactly how much time the mentors spend on each student during the course.

Taylor Brown

Patiently waiting for my CGMA course on UE4 Modular Environments with Clinton Crumpler to begin this April. Everyone ive spoken to who has attended environment courses with CGMA has had positive experiences. Personally, I'm just incredibly excited to be learning under one of my art idols who has proven himself an effective teacher through numerous articles and seminars around the web. 

Barbarian

I've taken a few CGMA workshops (since they switched from CG Society). They will help you if you spend the requisite time doing the homework, submit the homework on time, implement the feedback and include the latest version along with your next week's homework. It also helps to attend the weekly live sessions and ask questions. Also, review every student's critique video (they are all uploaded every week).  I've noticed that fewer than half of the students tend to submit all the assignments and fewer than 25% tweak previous assignments based on critique and re-submit. Therein lies your value (return on investment). If you just want to watch the videos then you will learn little. Go into the course to learn no matter what experience level you are now.

Biomag

My suggestion - the more advanced you are the more personalized your training should be. If you have not even done the pipeline, its wasted money to go and get yourself a mentor.  If you are learning the basics chances are you will find everything for free on the internet. If you need structure to learn then you might need to find some cheap courses, but not go for an AAA-artist who is offering mentoring.

CGMA, GAi,... and this type of courses are for people getting close to the industry trashhold. You are paying for feedback not for people teaching you how to turn on and off programs. It also shouldn't be about 'how to bake' or stuff like that, but about learning how to reach the quality.

Personal mentoring is expensive compared to these courses. So it should be used to fine tune your skills if still necessary and once more its not smart to go there to learn basics. If you go and get an AAA-artist to spend 1h with 1-on-1, do your really want him to tell you where to find a button in Maya or help you review your work?

If you are struggling with basics chances are students or other beginners can help you out for free on sites like polycount.

Barbarian

I totally concur with Biomag and will share personal experience to back up what he said. I took a highly specialized course to learn how to use Substance Designer in the game art pipeline from a senior environment artist. The course already assumed a decent understanding of SD. The students that were relatively new to SD struggled a lot and did not get much return on investment.

Those with SD experience received hardcore feedback because their submitted assignments were already "good" but needed to be taken to a higher level. The instructor took one of my SD material graphs and simplified it by reducing the number of nodes by two and tweaked/fine-tuned various settings in a few other nodes to demonstrate how to get a better result for my material. In other words, per Biomag, "how to reach the quality." It was about the quality of the result and not the buttons to push.

You can't get to the higher quality threshold if you are not already quite good when you take the workshop.

DanDickheiser

I highly recommend both Clinton Crumpler's modular environment class and Christian Bull's anatomy for production class on CGMA.  Well, depending what you're aiming for. I've been working as a generalist for a few years out of school and have been struggling for ages on what discipline I wanted to take on primarily, the courses really helped with that.  Also highly recommend Kubisi's patreon for feedback if it opens up and you're trying to get better at anatomy and portraiture/likeness.  Christian also posts video's on his company's website that are free and worth checking out http://screenclayfx.com/index/

Zot

Thank you all for your feedback, I just wanted to enroll next generation character creation, but the prerequisites for the course is tight.

I have experience of working in industry as prop / environment artist, and wanted to upgrade my skills to character artist. Right now I study zbrush along with anatomy. I have strong knowledge of basics, good uv, texture painting skills. But I have lack of zbrush and anatomy skills...

Do you think it would be waste of time and money to try this course as if you were me?

Zi0

I heard different stories, a friend of mine is doing a cgma course and he is very happy with it, the lecturer will record a 20min feedback every week to help you. An other friend did a course from a different website where during the duration of the course everybody will get feedback only once which means that if you get feedback in week one your feedback will be kind of basic but the person who is feedbacked in week 8 will get a more in depth feedback session. There are great courses out there just do some research.

Biomag

@Zot:
Maybe it makes sense to show your work to see where you are at?

As an example if you look at my artstation: https://www.artstation.com/biomag

The two armors and sword at the lower end where done after doing a 1 year school for basics (school was everything from modelling basics, sculpting, animation, rigging, small insight into game design and programming, environment art,... just the fundamentals). Those were my first projects after school, roughly with 1,5-2 years of experience doing 3D (no other art education before that). 

The next piece would be the 'Modern Merc'. I did a Marvelous Designer course with CGMA to learn the program (that course was designed for beginners) and made a full character out of it. I started this with 2,5 years of experience.

Batou was a course with Adam Skutt I did a couple of months after the CGMA course.

Then I was working on my own for 6 months, before I took the GAi character art boot camp for a final polishing of my skills through courses and Ciri was the result.


As you see I went in those courses knowing pretty much all the software and the pipeline (except for the MD course). I was able to completely focus on the feedback others and I received. There was no question about 'how you do that'. This part was done in the first school I went to and learning on my own. I dare say I got more out of it then 90% of the students. Out of the roughly 50-60 people I've been in courses with (Skutt's and Boot Camp) only a handful are working now in the industry and half of those where already working. Looking at the courses before and after mine the number repeats itself. Roughly 10% of those doing this courses are really on the level to make it to a AAA-studio after such a course and those are pretty much those who already have a solid portfolio the day that they got there.

So this courses are excellent to get for the final push. I can only recommend the class with Adam Skutt. But they are pointless for people still learning the pipeline. Honestly with Adam's course and the boot camp I was answering most of the questions for my fellow students in between classes - not because I was that good, but because they were that inexperienced. 

Maybe a course focusing on anatomy and sculpting would be beneficial before doing a class like the one Skutt has been doing. Just to get a sense of the basic anatomy and ZBrush becomes familiar. You really don't want to waste time on basics in those 10min of feedback your get each week.

sacboi

Yeah Biomag, nails it right on the head and I also reiterate my response/s posted on your other threads. Learn anatomy whilst implementing your chosen toolset...well at least too an entry level standard otherwise the return on a $2.5k+ investment you're interested in spending will be next to negligible rather than 1/3 the tuition costs taught by one of the veritable founding fathers of the digital figurative sculpting medium:

http://www.scott-eaton.com/courses

Zot

@Biomag

The thing is: I had portfolio on artstation, there were two detailed props made for subdiv (hard-surface mostly). After I done those two things I got a job in 3d industry as a prop / environment artist. The job was meh - I was given the task to create levels and fill them with already existed props and create props myself, a lot of low-quality props. While I was working I gain a lot of experience, and at a time I finished another level I decided to try myself at something better. The job I had was low paid, and at the end I had all experience I can take from it. So I made some funds and decided to learn as character artist, since they're in great demand and well paid (I guess I am not wrong).

After I finished the job I overlooked at my portfolio - and I caught messed up lightning, non-optimal UV decisions, material could be better, so I decided to polish my old props, and deleted my obsolete portfolio from artstation. And at the time I decided to reinstall Windows to get rid of all the trash I had. I packed all essential files, like portfolio sources etc to .zip and transferred all the zips to my old laptop. After I reinstalled windows I've made a terrible mistake: the last archive with my portfolio sources was on flash-card, and didn't transfer files from it to my laptop, but I though I did. And I wrote a windows image to the flash-card, that destroyed all files that were there.

I asked artstation support if they can restore my portfolio, but they said that they can't. That's why I don't have a piece of portfolio, may be it is for the better.

Also, I don't have experience in character creation.

Sorry for my bad English...

Biomag

My advice would be to do a character on your own, post here on polycount and get an idea where you are. Don't rush to a course. Time it with your own progress and you will get far more out of it.

Alex_J

@Biomag's response is the main reason I have avoided courses like this so far. I've seen some demos and some similar courses and mostly what I see is an artist talking about really high level workflow stuff and most of the students asking "should I use dynamesh or zremesher?" So I figure I can go faster on my own. 

Most students are focused on their output right now -- not on investing in their future-- and thus they waste everybody else's time by asking questions which amount to the teacher doing their work for them.

But then you get to a point where it's like, okay, I know how to make anything I can imagine with 3d, I can read about and understand how to implement the current, common practices to fill in any holes, but how do I make it really appealing? And that's where having a seasoned pro take some quality sit down time with you really helps.