How would you land your first 3D job TODAY?
You wake up with no experience or portfolio. Your objective is to find a 3D job fast. What do you do?
What would you specialize in and why?
How would you build an interesting portfolio?
What jobs are you applying for?
What kind of companies are you looking for?
I'm asking for a friend :D
ps. please answer
Replies
I will turn the other way and go back sleep , are you kidding that half of my life
Specialize in what every you like cars robots characters flowers what ever because if you dont you will burn and give up working 8-14 hours to get good on something boring and uninspiring will make you miserable If you like fast result made man made mechanical stuff is the easy way long way is organic stuff
What sell is flashy colorful and stupid build you first portfolio around that can add cartoon to the list
You apply to any and every job beggars cant be choosers , use your best judgement if you do cars applying for character position wont do much for you
I suggest reading the Sticky, and digging into the links therein.
Tbh.
Make avatars for pay for VChat and VTubers
with my portfolio from back then, i wouldnt stand a chance.
heck being on the other end of the hiring table now, i wouldnt give myself a chance. the competition is just too far ahead in comparison.
Neox im sure it would take only some month and you would back up to speed. We are just a bit rusty.
@Neox you're making me curious! Got a link to your stuff?
i really mean this in a sense of 19 years old me (which is 21 years ago!) applying to todays market... and no i dont think i have 21 years old content flying around :D
Hahah ok fair enough. I love looking at my earlier stuff and cringing.
there is 14 years old content tho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJXq2OYA6ZY
For a few minutes while watching that video I thought you meant you were 14 years old while creating that lol, was making me contemplate what I was doing at 14.
Everyone can do 3d nowadays as a soft skill. Your friend should focus on something more practical
3D is a soft skill?
I mean, if you want to make bad 3D art sure.
Though how are you defining "Soft skill" in this instance? I thought soft skill was more "Good at leading teams," etc.
What I've seen and what I mean by that is, people in different fields know enough 3d to make do, without hiring 3d artists (at least in europe?) e.g. programmers, architects, tech artists etc. Game companies hire senior 3d artists to establish pipelines and art styles, then they outsource art. Outsourcers are all about cost and efficiency.
So for a junior, just knowing 3d is not going to take you far nowadays imho, you need to know about other stuff as well, like rigging or blueprints.
doing almost exclusively 3d art as an outsource partner for many many clients, i can not attest to that.
we barely have the need for any allrounders doing everything but not anything particularily well. while rigging would help broaden our business, its not needed at all. same for blueprints. in fact, if we needed those we would likely hire someone specialized in those fields.
annd all the competition we have in our field handles it pretty much the same. there is not a crazy high need for generalists, but certainly one for specialists. I mean it looks like the trend is even going for much more specialized topics, like in VFX. Just look at studios and freelancers specialized at hair only. Not character artists also doing hair, dedicated groomers are a thing now. Texturing / Shading is getting its own task with its own specialists nowadays and so on.
i mean it depends on the clients for sure, if you work with smaller companies, indies etc, then yes being able to deliver on all fronts can be really helpful.
try to learn all this before you actually need read from book, most artist are generalist until they become specialist
Specialization is one of the problems I have with the job market. I learned 3d animation to so I could do a bit of everything. Modeling, texturing, and animation. This allows me to make a finished product like a short film or a game by myself. Even if its not perfect in every way.
With the job market being soo competitive, only specialist have a real chance of landing a job. It makes sense though as companies just want to hire the person who will do the particular job the best. They don't need someone with a lot of agency.
I see it like chien. It's imho how you start, as a generalist. As a beginner you dive into everything a little bit. And doesn't it still build on top of each other? To become a good animator you need to know about topology ...
As a graduate you've barely had time to get good enough to be employable in a chosen specialisation when you hit the job market - spreading yourself across everything means you're unemployable in basically all disciplines because you simply haven't been alive long enough to go deep enough into them all to be useful
Even tech artists are hired for specialisms and that's as close as it got to a viable generalist role over the last decade.
Extra skills are great, but they're useless if you can't do they job they're hiring for well enough.
Sure. But a mesh is a mesh is a mesh. And before you can do animation you need to know topology. You need a foundation. That's where you grow from.
These are all terrible answers. Disregard them all except mine. The perfect answer, OP, is as follows:
Where's the fun when you start with profit already? :D
Honestly, I'd do the exact same as I did 4/5 years ago. Technology evolved and the skillsets overall improved, but if you learn the skillsets and get competent, someone will hire you. And no, you absolutely do not have to work with random crypto bros.
If you're not quite there yet with your portfolio or having difficulty getting hired as a 3D artist, I recommend looking for other ways to enter the industry that give you the opportunity to network and gain valuable work experience such as quality assurance or compositing in film.
In my experience I've found a portfolio to never be ready or complete enough to be sufficient to get the job starting out, a lot of hiring really does come down to what the budget is for hiring and where in the numbered list you fall into.
As far as your skills go, I think people skills, accountability and dependability go much further than knowing all the right workflows, much of the work that you might find yourself doing in AAA relys on saving time and its because of this that you may not always be building things from scratch.
It always will be cheaper to outsource asset production and have internal artists refine and set up outsourced assets.
In this light finding work in outsourcing is also a possibility.
I somehow wanna know what do they expect as a junior cause I see many with 1/3 years of experience as a 3D Artist. I would expect the 1 year experience cause you dont want a newbie to be lost into it but 3 years?
There's a few reasons for this sort of thing
1: Anywhere you get a surplus of people wanting to do a job you find the barrier to entry rising.
2: Hiring lots of inexperienced people doesn't get work done. For every 3-5 fresh grads you need someone with a few years experience to steer them in the right direction
3: Fresh grads lack useful secondary skills because the courses they attend are largely shit (as in not designed to produce useful staff). Training someone costs more than paying a bit more salary after another studio has absorbed the training cost.
I'm not offering a solution because there isn't one (except to 3, but that's not fixing itself unless universities stop using fresh grads to teach the courses).
I do not agree with the second point, if you applied and they accepted you as their entry/junior it means that you have the skills to at least do the basic stuff they ask you to do.
Also most companies have 1 month of training to show how do they do their stuff so that can help
And then people complain there's not enough talent 😂. It all comes down to companies not wanting to invest in wildcards (that being people with no previous experience in the field). That's why government programs for internships are the best way to get your foot in the industry. IF your country has any...
You are disagreeing with something I didn't say
Also 1 month training? Sure you're not confusing that with probation ?
Anyway
I'll try again because I wasn't very clear
Hiring fresh, new staff costs you in the short term. You lose experienced worker's time training the inexperienced workers and that has the potential to cause actual harm to your bottom line (eg. Missed deadlines, poor quality etc)
Thus..If you have the option to hire people who don't need training for a trivial extra cost it makes no sense to hire people who do and as such your application with no experience will not be accepted.
That's not an opinion, it's what happens .
Do I think this is a good idea?
From the perspective of someone who runs a department and has to service game projects with effective staff - I see no downside to this.
From a personal perspective I'm somewhat sad that I can't justify the hiring of fresh grads or take on interns as often as I would like. I believe you end up with a better, more stable team in the long run if they all grow together.
@Larry
Talent is not how good at making art you are. It's how good at making art for somebody else, in a production environment you are.
This is not taught at 99% of universities and the contents of someone's artstation is a very poor indicator of how useful they are in practice.