Where to go from here (Character artist career advice)
Hey everyone,
I just wanted to ask a few questions about the outlook of my career as I do feel pretty lost atm.
I graduated in December with a degree (Information Tech) and a diploma (applied art) from a reputable university with a program that taught me how to be a generalist. Learned a lot, but honestly, not much of it was relevant to 3D, and more specifically character art, which I started specializing in and learning starting about a year ago. Despite all the schooling, my 3D skillbase is almost completely self-taught ($40 000 later). I did however learn how to do a lot of programming over a wide range of languages, but its seriously not my interest. Might be useful down the road, though I guess.
After a series of tragedies in my immediate family, I moved back to my home city to spend time with my family, passively applying for jobs, with no interviews. I started freelancing, and although its going much better than I expected, I'm probably grossing less than a thousand canadian dollars a month, which is not sustainable (I want to be working in a studio anyway).
I'm looking out for advice from some of the more experienced individuals in here. My relative skill level can be seen here https://www.artstation.com/ryansylvester.
If you were me, what actions would you be taking to get that career started? I recognize that I might not be able to get a job as a character artist to start, but do hope to end up there at some point. I am wondering if I am anywhere near hireable at this stage or if I shouldn't be worrying about employment and instead focusing 100% of my energy on my portfolio/freelance/skill development for the time being.
If you took the time to read through this, I appreciate it. Any advice would really be helpful.
Thank you.
I just wanted to ask a few questions about the outlook of my career as I do feel pretty lost atm.
I graduated in December with a degree (Information Tech) and a diploma (applied art) from a reputable university with a program that taught me how to be a generalist. Learned a lot, but honestly, not much of it was relevant to 3D, and more specifically character art, which I started specializing in and learning starting about a year ago. Despite all the schooling, my 3D skillbase is almost completely self-taught ($40 000 later). I did however learn how to do a lot of programming over a wide range of languages, but its seriously not my interest. Might be useful down the road, though I guess.
After a series of tragedies in my immediate family, I moved back to my home city to spend time with my family, passively applying for jobs, with no interviews. I started freelancing, and although its going much better than I expected, I'm probably grossing less than a thousand canadian dollars a month, which is not sustainable (I want to be working in a studio anyway).
I'm looking out for advice from some of the more experienced individuals in here. My relative skill level can be seen here https://www.artstation.com/ryansylvester.
If you were me, what actions would you be taking to get that career started? I recognize that I might not be able to get a job as a character artist to start, but do hope to end up there at some point. I am wondering if I am anywhere near hireable at this stage or if I shouldn't be worrying about employment and instead focusing 100% of my energy on my portfolio/freelance/skill development for the time being.
If you took the time to read through this, I appreciate it. Any advice would really be helpful.
Thank you.
Replies
You still have a ways to go. There are some nice moments happening in your sculpting, but your material work is letting you down. Focus on your portfolio for now.
It's not as simple as that but taking a very close look at real game assets is a very good advice! Go mod some games! This will teach you the whole story and you can take a look at how game studios done the edge flow, the textures or the rigging and skinning.
So for a technical artist coding is pretty much a must. You need to be able to create the tools to expand the typically used softwares and bridge between them. Tech artists I've worked with made from custom shaders, to scenes that help me morph assets between body types, to tools that dealt with optimization or tools that help debug stuff either in Maya or the engine itself, but also finding technical solutions to how even do stuff in game or automize processes in the pipeline reducing the workload for specific tasks by huge amounts of time.
Like with most jobs, but especially with jobs that have blurred lines between disciplines it really pays off to check the companies job board that you are interested in. Technical artists or level artists or other things like that tend to be very different between studios and its hard to give a general advice what you needed for a specific job. Basically they are problem solvers that go far beyond what smart regular artists can do
Edit: By the way, they don't need to be the best 'artists'. Their technical skills are what matters. Artistic eye helps, but a strong art portfolio isn't necessary. Ironically one of our best character artists in the company is also doing a ton of our technical stuff and tools - which is intimidating to see, but luckly not the usually demanded skillset XD
Also the learning process takes forever. There are so many disciplines which fall under technical art you can easily keep learning your entire life and still haven't touched everything.
Imo you should be a good-enough artist and(!) good-enough programmer first.
So I would not call this a job to start with.
This is a fallacy. In a field like game art production there is no such things as "Junior" employees (in the sense of "low skilled"). You get hired if you can do the job, period. In other words you start as a "regular", not a junior. And if a company insists on labeling a new, perfectly skillful hire as a "junior" ... then that tells you a lot about the management style of the company.
I would say that the only two low-skilled point of entry are either internships (which then can naturally lead to employment if the person demonstrates that they actually do have great skills), or art implementation grunt (like being hired to do bakes, exports/imports, and so on) which can naturally lead to tech art. But again this hinges on the person *demonstrating* their skills as opposed to magically acquiring them on the job.
In other words : if one is wondering if they can be hired as a tech artist, then they probably don't have the skillset for the job at this time.
the samurai is the strongest piece in your portfolio but it's pre-rendered in arnold, using hair and methods that are not applicable to games. the presentation on this piece is the nicest of your work.
the goat look unfinished, its just the bust, no hair cards for fur, black blackground with flat lighting
the snake - looks like a sculpt with a basic material applied to it, not an actual texture pass with detail and variation etc. again black snake on black background, presentation is lacking
DBZ character - looks cool, but again no lowpoly fully finished, textured game mesh. looks cool as a 3d print but not demonstrating the skillset you need to show if you want a studio job.
the deer - again, looks unfinished, its a bust, not a fully finished character, no hair cards or fur shader etc, so it looks dated and not up to par with current gen work, and next gen is right around the corner
This is going to become more and more the quality standard as ps5 and the next consoles roll out. maybe not in terms of style, but in terms of material definition and levels of detail. this stuff is insanely high quality and a great target to aim for. I'm not saying that you have to get to this level of skill before you will get hired, but its a good benchmark to reverse engineer and learn from and the closer you do get over time, the more likely you will to have people reply to your job applications.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/v1OG6Y
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/L2LkYA
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6aWrgx
freelancing with a portfolio like yours is going to only really open you up to extremely tight budget, low paying people who cant affoard industry quality artists, hence making under 1k a month because you can probably only charge 10-15 bucks an hour (im guessing here)
I would suggest putting your creative energy into building as many fully finished character pieces as you can over the next couple years. if that sounds intimidating, you might want to re-consider this as a career path, it normally takes 3-5 years of solid hard work for people to get to industry quality work.
BUT get yourself a day job that pays as much as possible for as little hours as you can and devote a large chunk of your free time to investing in yourself and improving your work. this is what I did after high school, I worked in a baby store and a tech support call center job while grinding on my folio for a few years before i got hired. chasing freelance work for peanuts pay is a huge mistake for those starting out, it saps you of most of your energy for little return and then at the end of the day you definitley wont want to work on your personal projects.
good news is, you seem to already know the basics, how to use the software and all that, now it comes down to closing the quality gap and having more finished pieces that make you more attractive to employers.
hope this doesnt take the wind out of your sails, but rather provides some perspective, coming from another self taught artist
Anyhow, great thread with wonderful responses. A fucking gold mine, congrats OP!
But anyways - besides that, I sill consider that the term is condescending and has no place in such a field. Associate, sure, I can get on with that as it actually describe the task (basically being a great helping hand). But Junior is in my opinion a somewhat useless label.