Thoughts on internships?
ngon master
I've heard both positive things and horror stories about internships, on one hand its good work experience and it gets your foot in the door, on the other, they are often unpaid and you just do crap jobs. What has been your experience with them? are they worth it even if its unpaid?
Replies
The a production environment is so diffrent then what you learn in school or what you fiddle with at home. Its all about deadlines that you have to hit, no "my dog ate my wacom pen" bs most people pull.
You will make some great contacts if your good, work hard, and are a friendly person.
I interned on EverQuest 1 last summer. The game is 10 years old and still kicking so the modeling pipeline for them was so different from what I had be doing in school with HP crap for every asset, not really using tiling textures like real production environment artists do and not having extremely demanding and strict budgets. It was a great experiance for how much I got to learn. Only really got to know one of the really cool Art Leads and Art Director on the team but since it was at SOE I meet tons of people on all there other projects.
The first few things I did were things other artists preferred not to do which was foliage and trees. With extremely low budgets, having to make 4 LOD's of every tree and making sure it looked interesting from every angle they were generally things that took longer then most other larger or smaller assets. I learned so much doing that and by working hard on them, showing I could follow the directions/critiques of the Art Director they eventually moved me on to architectural buildings and lighting.
Wonderful learning experience, learned a ton and made some great connections.
Also note one thing. As much as everyone thinks there "amazing" and above these "crap jobs" chances are you arnt. They will be your first real production assets so no matter what you are going to learn from them. And chances are there not going to be so hot and by the time your done with your internship and all you learned you will look back on your early assets and wish you could redo them due to how much you have learned and grown as an artist.
Good job america!
There's not many in the UK at least (less than 5 companies offering art internships would be a accurate guess).
I don't know what its like in other countries.
However schools that offer internship periods at the end of their education are more likely to see their students get internships since these students are more likely to contribute to the company. Since it's at the end of the education they can take a job offer right after the internship period ends and they graduate. So the student that the company took time and effort to "get into" their job role can be employed right after the internship period ends.
Also the length of the internship period is an important factor. If the period is too short the student will just barely get the hang of the job and then leave the company. You want it to be long enough for the student to get into the job and stick around long enough to make it worth it for the company.
That's my view on the subject.