career stuff

Ruz

It been an odd few months. Work has been scarce as my games work tailed off to zero.
Started casually picking up some production work and now I am starting work on monday at a production company as a modeller texture artist.
The deadlines are pretty insane and you never have time to polish anything

Its good to get money coming in, but I seem to be getting further away from my goals really. I still love doing stuff for real time

There are not many jobs around TBH for character artists right now, unless I want to move to china or canada.

I suppose the good thing is that it may lead to work in films rather than just advertising.

MoP

Yeah in Europe with various companies going down in the past few months, any job openings are deluged with skilled, experienced people.

Film work could be interesting though. I don't think I'd ever really want to do that though, since the teams tend to be so big on most projects and you only get a very small portion of the work to do. I find that games let you do more stuff that has a wider-ranging impact on a single project.

Ruz

yeah there is a lot of specialism. The last advert I worked in I got a credit as a modeller and as a texture artist which was odd.:0

There again I did an suncream advert when I had to do the modelling/texturing animation and rendering.
I had to learn stuff on the fly, was a real buzz to solve problems for myself.

FAT_CAP

Hey congrats Mike!

Yeah character work in games is really thin on the ground in the UK at the minute. All of my freelance work is coming from television/ advertising stuff aswell and I definitely find myself in the same quandry as you.

As long as you still have time to work on some realtime stuff in your spare time -if you have any now - you could use this as a great opportunity to pick up skills that you wouldn't otherwise get the chance to learn, and then move back into games when the industry picks up a bit. Regular pay cheques are hard to beat aswell!

aesir

It sounds like your career is going well, since you're trying to transition into film.

Ruz

cheers FAT_CAP - yeah its ironic as my character work and my zbrush work in particular has improved a lot recently, but no one wants it in games:)

As you say its a great thing to pick up extra skills in your spare time. My animation is coming on well these days. In fact I just did my first 'proper' animation job which I blagged a bit, but you would be surprised how much harder you try when under pressure.

aesir , its more as though I am being forced in a certain direction.I still love games in that they are realtime objects. Always found that interesting

I will just go with the flow for now as i have a lot of responsibilities of late and need to keep on earning money.