Alternatives to Games Industry
Hi,
Just wondering if anyone here has experience of leaving the games industry as an Artist and moving onto pasture new which have made them happier/more fulfilled etc. Leaving the ART to being a hobby again
We lots of posts from people dreaming to get it (and good on them) and I'm not trying to be negative, just wondering what the alternatives might be for people with our skills.
I personally am getting disillusioned with it (without going into personal reasons and company reasons) and am not sure what avenues to pursue and/or look at.
Cheers
Just wondering if anyone here has experience of leaving the games industry as an Artist and moving onto pasture new which have made them happier/more fulfilled etc. Leaving the ART to being a hobby again
We lots of posts from people dreaming to get it (and good on them) and I'm not trying to be negative, just wondering what the alternatives might be for people with our skills.
I personally am getting disillusioned with it (without going into personal reasons and company reasons) and am not sure what avenues to pursue and/or look at.
Cheers
Replies
not really, just not games - for those with this skillset.
Anywhere you go, you will see stressful deadlines, and pretty much the same wages. The only difference is that crunch is shorter, you get more of them though. But isn't that stuff is in every kind of job? Maybe except for working buttons at a factory.
I guess it comes down to finding something you can find some joy and pride in, while someone pays you for your ability. I'd personally rather make pretty pictures than filling out spreadsheets.
I keep seeing these threads with people feeling obliged to make art in their spare time, even though they cannot summon the energy for it after work. But I honestly cannot see the problem in accepting that, and spending that time on something else you enjoy if you are not THAT into it. As long as you still have a skillset that is satisfactory to your employer, and you enjoy the position you are in then there shouldn't be any shame to doing nothing but playing tether-ball and scouting for UFO's in your spare time until that autistic art drive hits you again. Plus, I really think that feeling obliged to do it, breeds stress and thereby fuels the procrastination.
The most likely option is to go to an animation studio so i'm brushing up my rigging and animation stuff for a new demo reel. Another option I'm considering is freelancing. I have some freelance work lined up but I'm not sure i'm ready to go fully freelance yet. I'd prefer a full time job atm.
hmmm, food for thought indeed.
they do tend to move around like nomads though.
We always can find work in animation studios, arquitecture (3d), graphic design and publicity. being good, we are welcome everywhere.
As freelancer i've been working in various projects for publicity and the work was very good, and very very well paid, better than in games. I also had tight timelines but not as much as in games, and i never needed to work on sundays or saturdays.
The work in games has become harder. The pay is almost the same, and they expect us to do more and more, offering more quality in the same time.
Another good thing is that we don't work with nasty normal maps and its low-polys. But Being a modeller, we need to do production models, we need to take into consideration things we don't do as Game artists. A friend moved to a publicity/animation studio and he said me "he needed to change the chip and learn too many new things".
If you want to change job, better if you are a 3d generalist.
There's also recreating accidents for courtrooms, and architectural 3d. I have a few friends that do that, good pay.
We'll pay for it tho. Nothing but crap games within 3-5 years and Guitar Hero 8. Sigh.
Now I manage a team of developers at a startup that develops games for women, and while fashion games aren't going to win me any cool points with my other game developer friends (or on this board), I find that the work is much more rewarding.
Small teams offer a huge level of control over the final product, and digital distribution means no publisher-developer back and forth. You wouldn't find any pickup D&D groups at my company, but there is a great social scene and my coworkers (aside from the team working on the game) are all 20-something female bloggers which again makes for a very refreshing and fun workplace.
I have a hard time relating to the "Games industry is a sad place" posts, though I suppose we could debate whether facebook games are in the same 'games industry' as Xbox 360 titles.
So if you do love games but are disillusioned with console development you may want to look to casual games for a fresh alternative.
Very true, the company that I work for is almost done switching over completely to making casual games and it certainly is nice working with 3 month dev cycles. Getting my flash skills up has been a challenge but definitely worth it. we are making games for girls and tween and still rock the D&D.
both dudes claimed to have been working massive OT non stop for about 8-9 months, like 12-15 hr days, each at a different fx house, and said it is like that for each project. In comparison I worked maybe a 2 weeks of 10-11 hr days during crunch here, the rest of the time its been 10am-6pm.
these are two things.. earning money and doing what you are loving to do.. if you can connect both it's great but imo it is not necessarily a must as long as you can do both
The biggest problem is just how hard the industry has been hit by the recession and I don't foresee it improving for a long time, even as the recession eases.
I literally went from having stacks and stacks of work, to nothing. And I mean nothing, the company I worked for cut ALL staff (Architects / QS / Engineers / Artists) to 2-3 day weeks. Admittedly the company specialised in car dealerships and not only were people not building, they weren't buying cars either so it was like a double hit. But I know some other guys who've really struggled.
As the situation improves, unfortunately Arch-Viz is gonna remain less of a priority at least for a while, clients will want to simply get a building designed and built, and pretty 3D images are unlikely to be considered unless it's really necessary from a design point of view. Oftentimes, especially with domestic buildings, 3D Viz is done just as much for a nice little brochure of attractive images as it is for being useful in the design stages.
Another problem is the sheer competition which seems to have increased massively even in the short time I've been involved. Back when I started out, clients were like 'whaaaa 3D! Yes please!' and it was almost a luxury reserved for high end projects, now it seems so commonplace and every Architect studio has someone in house who just knocks out some half-assed 3D and calls it done. Having said that, if you're at the top of your game, you'll always win clients I guess.
an architural 3d guy cant do games or a film effects guy cant make game-ready model but a game-artist can do all i think,why not
Similar skill sets , I mean eventually you get A hard one in the ass from deadlines in the game industry, so im sure that will transfer over easily as a skill set in porn
I did some graphic design for an industrial society who work on pipeline. They needed "sexy drawing of pipe and machinery" for the marketing departement.
Right now, im still searching a job in the game industry, but I should work with a software publisher who need 3D assets for thier project.
those jobs pay pretty much well, are not too stressfull, but tbh, a bit boring in a long term.
and finnaly, thoses jobs are mostly in telecommuting/teleworking. So yeah, if working alone is ok for you, that should work fine. But if you like to work in team as i do, it is a bit more complicated.
I'd say that no
It's not the most complicated branch of 3d for now. The work for a game character can be done in days/weeks compared to some models for cinematics. You can't compare, the workflows are totally different. A 3d generalist has more knowledge than a simple game artist, like the one focused in doing props for a game or doing cleaning/optimizations.
Rigs in games are not so complex as the ones for a cinematic production.
But wait, in the future, game studios will be like studios doing cinematic productions and they will ask more skill/level for their workers.
A model needed for production (Film or animation) is pretty different of what we do for games. You can have your sculpture very well done in Zbrush, but now translate that pretty model to a complex and detailed subdiv model that works, with polygons, can you?. Or better said, can you make the same without Zbrush? An old 3d generalist can, and they use Zbrush for the fine detail they can't add without polygons. The people that comes from games, and that are customed to work in a bad way (good for games), tend to use retopos and it's something counterproductive (if at least were a 3d scanned model...).
Zbrush and mudbox are very nice, the save us a lot of work, but when polygons are needed you need to be more technic, and to have more knowledge.
The majority of the people i know that moved from games to cinematics, needed to learn a lot because they weren't enough qualified.
-1
You are understimating them and being a little egocentric, why they can't? and why did you come with that? that's a terrible assumption.
An architectural guy could be the best level designer and a film effect guy could be a good "character modeller", if you learned it, why not?. I have found architecs working as level designers (err, architecs, people with university studies of more than 5 years, that's serious), and they did the work better than a guy without knowledge of architecture (making nonsense levels/environments with ugly lighting).
And I personally know someone who worked in film, doing VFXs (for spiderman), and now works in SEGA japan. how ironic, isn't it?
If you are good, you are good everywhere you go, that's the talent.
I'm sure you would not like to be understimated, with people thinking you are unable to work in an area because you come from game art, and saying in a bad way: "that guy only can do game art".
Thats exceptionally arrogant. Compositing and Simulation are massive subjects that involve a hell of a lot of knowledge. Even Arch Vis requires a lot of know how.
Go learn Nuke and Boujoo, or realflow and see how you feel.
He indeed, did most of the work in a 3D app and added fine detail in ZB for some of the reasons you ve mentioned.
I don't say that that is the way to go necessarily, but it is just curious to me now that u mention it.
archviz guy fails uving,sculpting,and some complex sub-d modeling,and cinematic guy fails game-ready models maybe...just i want to mention game-artists are more versatile then other branches...(maybe i am failing again bad englis sry)
and yeah we are humans we can learn everything thats not a big deal...
I can't add something to what has been said already, but i'll drop my obvious 2 cents about it- just do what you like to, don't look how hard or complicated is that- learn and grow over yourself. if you enjoy the process, all problems will be solved with time.
He then made the transition to the film industry and big budget movies and he told me that in the VFX industry you can more or less kiss your life goodbye the amount of hours you have to put in are insane. Those were his words.
Wow, that is a bit arrogant and short sighted. Arch-Viz has gone quite far and it has changed a lot in past years. Yeah, there are still some freelancers doing this kind of stuff: http://features.cgsociety.org/newgallerycrits/g26/128626/128626_1196193872_large.jpg
But hi end studios and pros are doing some exceptional artwork. And yes, most of the people know how to UV Unwrap complex shapes, they do know how to model complex stuff. For example this is one of my models that I've done in my spare time:
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Also in past years a lot of studios have created animations with cinematics, camera work, compositing close to the level of big VFX houses.
I do love creating game stuff on my spare time, but I don't agree on your points about who can do what better or at all.
3d has some broad choice of job!
That job though got me some experience on my resume which got me my first game job in casual games(which lead to console dev at a small place, which in turn brought me to my current job which is my dream job). Getting paid to do any sort of art is much better than not and there are a lot of industries that use 3D art. I saw a lot of listings via my local Craigslist.
The main differences to game asset creation include:
- noone gives a chicken about your models (as long as the rendering looks good)
- you need a pretty good knowledge of mental ray, V-Ray or finalRender or something similar and how to speed them up
- you need to learn where you're able to cut corners or be downright sloppy
- you need to learn to cope with scenes that are often more than 300MB compressed
- you need to be able to create convincing materials from just seeing them in a photograph (I know this sounds silly and easy, but I've seen people fail on this during the last years again and again)
- you need to know how to cope with linear workflow (and how it might or might not warp your colors), IES lights and matte channels
- you need to know how cameras and lights work (in your renderer as well as in reality)
If you are (like me) working together with architects only then you might also have to do a lot of compositing (both stills and anims), grading/CC, creating post FX, cutting, rotoscoping and traditional design work.
@igi: While it is true that you need a lot less UV-ing in archviz it is still a thing that needs to be done. You might find a lot of people that are not capable of doing it, but I'd say there are just as many that can create proper UVs.