Degree Vs Self Taught
polycounter lvl 5
Sorry to bring this up but I'm really wondering about the whole degree vs self taught thing. I'm getting closer to college and I have always been taught college is a very important thing and I here on polycount alot that it is overpriced and they only teach you the basics. Though I have also heard from some people that it will help you learn things like a deadline and working with peers like in a job. Now I face a dilmenmma of whether to trust people on the internet on something that could effect my whole life. Now I'm wondering do recruiters at all look if you have a degree, and how could not having a degree effect you? I'm sorry to bring this up agian.
Replies
Usually the advice is:
- Go do some art classes at a community college that are cheap and learn the technical stuff on polycount.
- Game oriented schools are expensive, do you really want to send yourself into all that of debt.
- If you lack focus/structure game schools might help you... but it is still expensive and might not get at the root of lacking focus/structure.
- The only instance where almost universally people agree school is good, is if you want to work in differen countries. Having a degree in the field makes it universally easier to get work visas for different countries.
There are probably a bunch of other typical answers, but this is what I remember :PI had a lot of money saved when I first started so I had a simple job (3-4 hours a week), and then focused the rest of my time teaching myself what I needed to know to land a job. Took me about a year.
I'd say that unless it's a really great and focused gamedev/gameart education it's not worth all that time and money spent on it. One good thing about education is that it can help you network, with other students, teachers and hopefully people in the industry and getting intern-jobs later on.
But you need to make sure it's a damn good school.
^ This is all the information you need.
This. You are here since January, you have seen this thread weekly. Guys, seriously.
And I don't buy that people 'don't see those threads'. They just think their situation is completely unique so they have to ask for themselves. It's not guys.
This thread pops up weekly. That's not even an exaggeration.
So, one more time.
If you think you want to travel the world during your career, get a degree. Only real benefit, apart from the college lifestyle and the growing up you will do during that. In college you should be referencing the same online material self-taught artists use. Your lecturer might or might not be industry material in terms of talent. If you are from America, and quite like living there thank you very much, and don't fancy financially crippling loans that keep you awake at night for the next decade, then think twice.
Good luck.
Self taught wins
School is good mostly for its structure. If you feel you are not the most motivated person, it can help push you. The reality is though, you can learn everything you need to know through DVD tutorials like Eat3D, ect and prob better than what you would learn in school.
These game art schools are massively expensive and time consuming. Just think of all the student loans you will be paying back for years out of your paycheck. Alot of times the assignments they have you do will be counter productive to your specialization, such as character art when your a env. Artist.
I got lucky on my schooling in that it was dirt cheap (community college) and taught by the current lead environment artist of BioWare in his free time. He was teaching very basic stuff and after I graduated his class I continued going back to game art 1 instead of game art 2 which I felt the teacher wasn't as knowledgable. So I would work on art at home and go to his class for the sole purpose of getting 10 mins of 1 on 1 time after class.
So in my strong opinion for game art, school is completely unessary and worst, it can be counter productive. Iemployers always look at your work quality first, and your resume second. Ya it can't hurt to have school on there, but it's probably equally impressive if you taught yourself the skills as it demonstrates your sheer passion , drive, and self motivation.
As far as training goes, the DVD tutorials out there these days will probably teach you more in 1 week than an entire semester of school.
Something that also school has is networking. It's helpful to know people that work already. They can get your portfolio in the right hands right away.
Degrees mean nothing.
maybe a starting salary of $33k? that's too low man! $40 - $50k starting, especially if you have a huge student loan to pay off. $100k is stupidly high anyway you cut it though.
When someone is deciding to hire you 99.9999999% of the time your portfolio will be the only thing that matters. In the infinitesimally small chance that you're pitted against someone with an equal quality portfolio, same work experience, performed exactly the same on the art test, whos going to cost the same amount to relocate, then your education might be the tiebreaker...
Normally degrees are good for getting a work VISA. Otherwise, at best, it might help you get through HR departments that purge applicants without degrees/experience in the first wave of filtering. This probably doesn't happen very often...
School can be useful as a social experience and for motivation.
If you want a degree don't get one in game art/design. Study entertainment design or illustration or some other subject that is going to drill art foundations for years instead of teaching you how to use software and make demo reels that no one will watch.
A for profit school (full sail, art institute, etc.) will cost you 5x as much as attending a community college and won't look any better on your resume.
Quote: How would you get connections without college?
Maybe try Polycount?
You could also join promising indie/mod projects that have teams with a lot of talent. I mean it's not like school where you're basically forced together on team projects but if you show a little social intiative it's not hard to find people with similar goals on the internet.
Yes you may or may not make connections through some sort of school. Always be wary of what the school itself says because they will pump these numbers to alleviate concerns.
How long will you be in school for? If it is a 4 year program you really want to tell me that you won't be able to do more on polycount by yourself?
Like many have said the most important thing is the skills you demonstrate in your portfolio. If you are active on polycount posting work for a period of time, your skills will improve far quicker than with any school program. Plus by showing your work ethic and progress on these forums you will naturally make connections with polycounters who have infected studios everywhere :P
Now there are very few good schools, but the ones that are actually worth a shit, will be selective about who is admitted. So continue working on your skills here so you could get a job or into a good school if you so choose.
Another thing to note, is because some game schools admit candidates once they are able to come up with the cash, you get alot of people who are either total shit or don't give a shit. You want to be around people that are as good or better than you, if you aren't, depending on your personality you could develop a tendancy of phoning in your work, and this will impede your development in the long run.
(not saying you specifically , but speaking in general, had to add that)
College courses are for the most part a huge waist of time and money. Having a part time job while working off your own back will teach you more about time management than a college can.
Maybe for your first job ever, maybe, kinda... probably not, but maybe. Then anything after that will go purely on your experience level/shipped titles, etc.
DO A TRADITIONAL ART/DESIGN DEGREE
fine art, architecture, graphic design, product design, (fuck it) tapestry they will all stand you in much better stead in the long run, as everyone says learn the technicalities here and learn how to baffle people with indepth knowledge of rococo church interior murals there...
ALSO THIS IS GOOD TO FALL BACK ON WHEN SKYNET/ZOMBIES/ALIEN INVASION HAPPENS
I really doubt it.
School is a great experience, but that's all it is.
It's not a job, but the effort to do well is job-like.
Your work in school builds upon itself, so by the time you are done you have a whole lot of knowledge and student level work to.....
...build on for a professional portfolio.
Yep, school is a time for learning, not training.
What's the difference?
Here's an example: A student goes to drawing 1 in their first year for 16 weeks. They sketch from nature, they sketch nudes, they sketch from skill lifes.
At the end of their semester (60 hours later) they have a body of work which shows progression in skill and understanding of tool use, maybe even a better understanding as to which tool brands are better to use.
Same student, four years later, goes through advanced figure drawing or maybe even Painting 4. Again at the end of the semester they have a body of work, high grade student work, but still 'just' student work. When compared to their first year, that magic happens. That's where they see their progression as a whole.
It's a great feeling true.
But if I refer to actual time spent 'making art', you are looking at roughly 2 years of art core out of four years total (State university here). That translates into about 1200 hrs of class time making art.
That's not much. In fact that is only 30 weeks straight or 7 months (working a 40 hour a week job).
When the summer and other breaks come, students 'might' continue to make art, it's also possible they might work a tiring job trying to make some money before school starts up again.
That's the way of it.
School is great for the rest of what you learn there. It is a place to expand your knowledge beyond art.
Specializing in 3D for example and being good at it, is about personal perseverance and sacrifice. Learning that it takes 200 hours to produce a high quality 10k tris piece (yes people do it faster).
A traditional art program at the BA level is great for a beginning, but to be an employable canidate, school is a checkbox, nothing more.
I went to the next level so I could teach on a university level should that need arise. Without the advanced degree that wouldnt be possible. When I researched the University postings, i learned that the schools were more likely to hire someone with current industry experience than someone with an advanced degree.
Why?
Because it's cheaper for the school and the level of practical knowledge is better for the students. It's better for the schools self promotion campaign.
Here's where it get's interesting though. A teacher can not go beyond adjunct without a terminal degree. That is to say, you can't get a full professorship (there will be some exceptions to this) without having completed an MFA or a PHd. That means no tenure.
That means no job security.
Which is great for the school, but sucks for you.
So in conclusion, (Sorry for the long wind) decide where school fits into the grand scheme of things. If it's a means to an end, if it's a path that must be traveled, than do it.
Either way, you and I may be flipping burgers together while we work toward our dreams in any case.
I don't think schools are that great though. Because you can read all this theory stuff online. There is no professor on earth who can hold a candle to the knowledge held within cyberspace.
The art majors I knew in college spent most of their time locked up in a studio not at their desks reading books or listening to professors. Practice!
If you choose school be prepared to be a self learner. I had plenty of classmates who just did the assignments they were told to do. I didn't make many friends during my studies, because most people wanted to play video games or said that they were just going to be the "designers" of videos games. The few friends I did make, worked hard and practiced together after hours.
Overall school changed me a lot. When I got out of high school I was just naive kid who had delusions of grandeur. I never followed through with anything in life and even though I didn't think so at the time, I took things for granted and was not as serious as I should have been. It made me dig deep and ask myself what I wanted out of life. I knew that it wasn't going to be handed to me so I worked at it. A few years ago I would of never thought I would be working 8-10 hour days at my job then coming home and working another 8 hours on my portfolio. So in the end it was a good experience for me. It gave me a good work ethic and allowed me to show myself what I am capable of.
That's just my two cents. I hope it helps as I am sure everyone situation is a little different. Either way you are going to have to put the work into if you want to see results. I wish you luck in whatever you decide.
One things is for certain though. Polycount is the best resource out there in my opinion and you should definitely utilize the experience on these boards as they will help you grow as an artist.
Be motivated and you will go places.
With that said I believe the single most thing I see lacking of 3D artists is actual understanding of the basic principles of art. At the very least get into drawing, digital or not, and do some courses with life drawing, still lifes, color studies, illustration, etc. Understanding how shapes and forms affect everything around you is an essential ability to become the best possible 3D artist.
Either way, going through school or not, its the people with the drive to self teach that typically land jobs. They do really well in and out of school. School won't do the work for you and in an industry where its about what you can do, not how many days you warmed a chair, the portfolio is king. Whatever path you take you need that rocking portfolio at the end.
With school they often set the bar so low (to keep that seat warm and money flowing), if you just do the projects you won't be ready for the industry by the time they say you are and shove you out the door. It's the student that does projects outside of class that lands the job, its the person that really digs in and eats sleeps and breaths this stuff for 2-3 years that will get the job.
Very rarely will anyone be awesome at something the first time around. Think about how many master artists where in your kindergarten finger painting classes? Probably zero. What seperated the kids that went on to become artists and those that left it? Practice. Music is the same way, practice. If you want to get there just showing your first effort isn't going to do it. You need to keep it up, persist and keep improving.
Success doesn't land on every attempt and the pros have failed enough times to know what landmines to avoid. So if you're scared to fail, you aren't going to get very far, because it is through failure that you learn to avoid it.
If you can structure your own learning and you don't need someone breathing down your neck to get things done then you already have some of the more sought after skills. No one wants to micro manage and baby sit the new guy, trying to inspire him to do something today, anything. They want to give you a task, a deadline and hear "I'm done, whats next?" 2 days early.
Typically people who just coast through school doing the bare minimum (and getting a rubber stamped A+) don't develop that self management skill. However you get to a rockin portfolio is up to you. Personally unless you need a degree to look for work outside of your country or you want to have a back up plan (who knows what the industry will look like over the 40+ years you will be working), you can get by just fine learning on your own, set deadlines and act like you are part of a team and practice, practice, practice.
Show you can do the job and you will end up doing it.
If you do not know what to specialize in, learn the fundamentals, figure out what you would like doing, work like a boss! within 1-2 years you should land a decent gig instead of 4-5 years +.
Curious to know where you got this information, or are you just talking about art/entertainment degrees specifically?
But here is the answer I gave:
It makes little sense to me to spend seriously large amounts of money on a set of skills that you can very easily learn on your own. The wealth of information out there on games development is almost unparalleled.
I think it would be much wiser, if you really want to go to school, to go to school for ANOTHER subject that you could BRING to games development. Fantastic stuff happens when you bring skills from another discipline in, you put yourself in a position to innovate. Do fine art, do science, do mathematics, do whatever you can do that you cannot easily do on your own (a course that provides facilities further than a wacom and a computer screen, or professionals that are generally not open to talking to people online, this industry is unique in that most of the very best are actually quite contactable, whereas you aren't really going to chat on skype with a leading scientist very easily).
People will talk about how school offers structure, but frankly if you aren't able to structure yourself, you will fail school anyway. It won't work either way if you're not able to manage yourself.
Get on with making stuff, start small and compare the QUALITY (rather than quantity or scope) of your work to AAA as you go.
If it's an environment artist you want to be, start making with props, when you've achieved 20 AAA-quality props (which will likely be 50 props down the line), move up to something larger, a small section of a level, when you've produced 20 small sections that are AAA quality (again, probably 50 attempts down the line) move onto a full level.
Manage your time properly - set yourself 30 hours spread over one week to do your prop and split the time up into r&d, planning, prototyping, making, testing, refining, critiquing, polishing.
BE BRUTAL with yourself, always compare to AAA. Don't use the excuse 'oh I'm only a beginner' or whatever. So long as your scope is small, you have no excuse for not reaching the quality bar, so if you aren't, identify why and apply it to attempt number 2.
All in all self-learning like this applies whether you're at school or not at school - its the toolset that makes you great.
But yeah, ultimately you can go to school and be XXX thousand dollars in debt when you come out, desperate to get a job and get sucked into an intern position and spat out the other side none the better, or you can save your money and use the resources that polycount and others provide to do it yourself.
I see no benefit at all to school - you have all the professional contacts you'd ever need knocking about these forums, if you are willing to bring your work up to standard, they will most likely be willing to offer you advice, critique and connections.
Write too - talk about challenges faced and how they're overcome. How you learned that overdraw is a problem that you had to get around, or how the stock unreal shaders were too slow for mobile when doing what you wanted to do, so you got around it by spending two months learning shader language and reverse engineering theirs to be leaner but faster. Or whatever. It demonstrates a certain kind of attitude that is very hireable.
I'd hire somebody who has basically done a huge amount of research and development on their skills and their work, and produced a fantastic body of work as a result over any new graduate really.
The 2D and 3D stuff taught in here, is completely useless. It's not either previous or current generation. It's something totally else. No studies for how to model HP and LP models with a proper pipeline, no materials, no different texture types (except diffuse and normal which is usually generated from Crazybump, lol), no nothing.
Only 3ds Max, unwrap and Photoshop. WOW.
And for the animation: bones -> skin modifer -> animate.
So, basically I haven't learn anything in here related to 3D. Everything is self-taught by myself, and I'm fully aware of the current correct modeling pipeline, alone. We have 13 students in our class, and we have only two very good concept artists, and one of them is somewhat decent in 3D as well.
The tech dude is quite cool guy from Italy. He knows his stuff in the scripting field, but I haven't paid much attention to scripting since 3D art is my main focus. But luckily, this guy has some knowledge about shading/shaders too. Helps me just a little bit.
Once there was two notable moments I had with this 3D & 2D guy in here:
I told him that I'm aiming for realism in 3D characters (trying to become a character artist, but I'm ALONE with the anatomy studies and character modeling pipeline, again!), and his reply was that, "Wouldn't it just be easier to take a camera and take a photo of a person?" referring to achieve realism. At that moment, I was out of words. O.o
Second moment was when he was baking normals inside Max from a high poly football, to a low poly football. He had a geosphere as the low poly. I suggested to create a box, give it a turbosmooth with 1-2 iterations, add a spherify modifier to round it up, and then split UV's from the center of the sphere to have a good UV's for presentation... but NO, he just used automatic UV's for the geosphere. *facepalm*
Okay, he showed the normal map baking pretty much right, even with the projection mesh modifier, but I had to help him to use it though, lol. But my point was to show how to have a better topology and UV's at the same time even though this was just an example of baking normals insder Max. I felt bad, that now the others are learning wrong.
And, I just happen to be the one that teaches teachers... not fun at all :P
These are just little things I picked up from this school... Well, studies and food are free. And the only benefit for me is the teamwork. That's it.
So, thanks to internet tutorials, lessons, lectures, Polycount, ZBrushcentral and many other places to learn from. This stuff has kept my feet on the ground and up to date.
Fun fact, we have a vocational skills demonstration test, and we have FOUR DAYS to model a character, UV unwrap, rig and animate it to have a walking cycle. Considering the quality requirements, I can pass it with a shitty model, still having good grades... So, that moment is apparently not for AAA character work I guess, lol, since it's usually taking a month to even MODEL it first!. Oh, and we don't learn sculpting here either. Only box modeling!!!
What the hell am I wasting my time here, lol... well, teamwork and somewhat good overall networks between game studios and developers.