What's next? (seeking help as a 3D artist)
Hello, my name is Bryant and I recently graduated from one of the Art Institute schools. I always had a love for characters, and I have always drawn them my whole life. I wanted to be a character designer for video games (who doesn’t). Once I got to college that dream was quickly destroyed with talk of an oversaturated character artists field. I then switched and adapted to 3D after deciding that concept art in any form was not the way to go. With that change I was not steered in the right direction. I was taught 3D but not in the correct fashion, my school advertised “teachers who worked in industry” but all of my teachers were fresh college grads. They pushed me to be an “environment artist” but didn’t teach me the steps to get there, so I am here asking anyone who is an environment artist and or 3D prop artists what would be the proper steps to get to an industry ready level. My school taught me how to watch YouTube videos and follow them to a T, and now my confidence is lack luster and I get discouraged every time I watch a video to help or learn something because I feel like I get so sucked into the video and never experiment on my own or learn things that stick so I am open to any advice and critiques and I can link my portfolio as well and you can give me feedback or idea on how to branch out from being stuck watching videos and going by those? Thank you so much for any replies, I am really trying to better myself as a 3D artists and I love environments and would love to make them for film or games (mainly games) but I just have no idea where to start and all of the steps needed and how to build that confidence to be able to model from concepts, references, and or imagination.
My portfolio - https://bryanthenderson.artstation.com/
Replies
2-Review and Inspect folios of other Evn./Char Artist of your levels as wells as established experts to define personal goals and set a certain standard for your work
3-Take a few weeks off and focus on working on a project (scene/asset/char modeling)
and come on Polycount to get comments and critiques ( be very patient, civil and humble)
4-Refine and Polish your work, then update your folio.
Right now, your folio is lacking. It's 2019, your work feels a bit sluggish/ lackluster imo, even for a recent graduate. I'd suggest you remove most of your schools and academic work (theyre never on par with industry standard anyway)...
As for overall direction, discipline and confidence over your work and career path; this is a difficult moment for every recent graduate but remember youre an adult now. these are the kind of decisions you ultimately have to take yourselves even after advices.
How money tight are you? Are you paying rent or live at home? If you live at home, then the obvious choice would be talk/deal with your parents about your next steps and expectation.
Find a job part/full time so you can save a little and use your free time to pimp that folio out.
That's what I did every summer, even during school, I'd try to get a new piece for my folio outside of school work (this landed me various short term contracts even before graduation).
But yeh, boyo, school's over and that was the easy part; the real grind starts now.
Stay strong and disciplined about this and youll make it.
Plenty of jobs out there.
@Blond 's advice is basically right.
Studios employ for specific roles - knowing other stuff is nice but if you can't do at least one thing really well you're basically useless.
Blond's advice is solid, I'd suggest you follow it
Juniors who are mediocre at a lot of different things are not prioritized over juniors who are decent at one thing.
I don't think understanding the pipe is opposed to creating assets at one specific place, but I'd imagine there'd be hella issues with someone trying to make assets at multiple places on the pipe.
What others are saying, is that it 's beneficial to showcase a portfolio that is structured, refined and focused to a particular field that meets the needs of job posts, in order to get a foot in the industry. Once in and having a few years under your belt you could go in either direction, highly specialised or more general. But getting into the industry is the initial main goal.
To the OP, since you have mentioned confidence twice, I would address that first. Start small project that are easy to get into, take plenty of screenshots of your WIP's so after a while you can see your progress and improvements, regain the fun, passion and enjoyment that you once had. Hopefully that will build your confidence in a healthier way.