Getting that first gig
polycounter lvl 18
Hi.
I was reading the "once you are in" thread started by Prs-Phil so thought I would take the opportunity to gain some further insight on actually getting into the industry.
I've been applying/interviewing with companies for the last several months but still haven't landed a gig yet. So I'm curious, how many interviews did you go through before landing that first job? Were you fairly selective in the process or did you grab the first thing that came along? As game development is far more specialized now, what are the chances of breaking in as a character artist? or do you recommend taking a world/environment artist position as an initial route to that goal?
My personal plight so to speak: I'm trying to break in as a character artist and feel I have the skill for it but the market for this seems very protected, and more reserved for senior artists with extensive game experience. I've been led on a couple times to think I was interviewing to be a character artist when in fact the company needed an environment artist and offered this as a means to a character position. While I have become more open to this route, I'm still indecisive as it could very well delay entry into my desired field.
I'll leave it there to start with. Just want to hear some opinions on the matter.
Thanks for any replies.
-Erik
I was reading the "once you are in" thread started by Prs-Phil so thought I would take the opportunity to gain some further insight on actually getting into the industry.
I've been applying/interviewing with companies for the last several months but still haven't landed a gig yet. So I'm curious, how many interviews did you go through before landing that first job? Were you fairly selective in the process or did you grab the first thing that came along? As game development is far more specialized now, what are the chances of breaking in as a character artist? or do you recommend taking a world/environment artist position as an initial route to that goal?
My personal plight so to speak: I'm trying to break in as a character artist and feel I have the skill for it but the market for this seems very protected, and more reserved for senior artists with extensive game experience. I've been led on a couple times to think I was interviewing to be a character artist when in fact the company needed an environment artist and offered this as a means to a character position. While I have become more open to this route, I'm still indecisive as it could very well delay entry into my desired field.
I'll leave it there to start with. Just want to hear some opinions on the matter.
Thanks for any replies.
-Erik
Replies
Here's my advice if your highest priority is to be a character artist, create nothing but characters, use normal maps, get your characters into a game engine, compare your characters with the best out there and make sure you can match or beat that quality. If you get good enough, and by good I mean unbelievably amazing, then you'll get snatched up based on skill alone, without the need for experience.
The first way is the most common, but it all comes down to your own personal priorities.
That's where your bottleneck is. You usually have to come in as an environment artist and wait for your opening, though, there are the rare occasions where you can plug directly into the character team without previous experience.
I went in as a character / environment artist at my first place. It was a tiny company, so it was easy for me to do characters. I got my experience there, they went out of business, then I came here, and have been doing main characters ever since.
Often times, those little companies that don't produce anything you've heard of are a good place to start.
oh, and to answer your question, I went through uncountable rejection letters before I got my first interview. They hired me immediately. After they went out of business, I went through another interview here. So in total, I've only ever been through 2 interviews.
You need to start thinking of something lower-scale, something entry level. Environmental art is a good aproach. Then once you are in, then you can start trying to migrate into doing characters.
Otherwise you might be waiting a VERY long time for an oppertunity.
It takes awhile for interviews to start turning into jobs, took me good 6 months, but that was mostly figuring out how to even pass interviews ehehehehe, my first one was the worst ofcourse, once you do enough of them you know how to get in and sell yourself. Its hard doing that without any experience though, so I recommend getting at least some experience as an artist in the industry, take what comes your way, but be realistic, don't take jobs that won't pay enough for you to survive
good luck.
The enviroment artist thing is wierd for me anyways .. I mean for characters it's simple you find a concept and you build the character to the best of your ability model,uv,texture,done...how do you go about building a level ?? How many levels do you need to build before you should send out a portfolio ... how do you show off a level/enviroment ? I mean I would imagine I could build a Half Life 2 level with cars,tree's,buildings..etc etc but is 1 level enough if it's pretty huge ??
Anyways demoncage after looking at your portfolio I think you just need more and better quality stuff to be honest . Finished models and a variety like maybe some normal mapped soldier models,some creatures,maybe a fantasy character...Look at what that guy S-S is doing the quality and how fast he models . It's not only tough to get a game job but then you have to keep it so you have to be good and you have to be fast . Also take a look at spacemonkeys fat baron that's a quality model ..or Glen Southerns or Pixolators models...do stuff at that quality and you'll get a job for sure !
Not to be arrogant, but I'm good at what I do, and with not much competition it was probably a easy choice for them anyway. So here I am, my 1st gig, leadcharacter artist.
Great opportunity for me to learn the ropes here. Great experience to take with me into the future.
shankzero, you make a valid point about character artists being a smaller circle and therefore more competitive. Its been pretty much my exact assumption when I see the lack of vacancies out there for character work.
FatAssasin, I think I'm leaning towards the latter of those two options. I think its possible to break into the field without going the environment route. I also tend to think it would be a faster route but its all so unpredictable. The only reason I say that is because you would have to make a somewhat long term commitment to environment art I'd assume before you tried to snake your way into a character seat. But this is just preconcieved, I have no experience so...
[ QUOTE ]
Not to be arrogant
[/ QUOTE ] Too late. Nah, just messin with you man. By the way do you have some work you could send me, I'd be interested to check it out.
And just remember also, even you land a job where you're creating exactly the kind of characters you like, the next project at that company may be something entirely different. Are you going to quit everytime a company changes projects and you don't find the new one all that interesting? If you're good enough I guess you could get away with that, but overall you're just going to have to learn to suck it up and find something interesting in whatever your given to do. Because when you're working for a living you can't always pick and choose what you want to work on.
Of course, there are companies that specialize in a certain kind of game, and ones that would be cool to work at no matter what they're doing. So I'd try and work my way into one of those for the long term, but for the short term take what you can get.
demoncage: I mean look, the way I described getting into the industry WORKS, you guys may think what you want thats your prerogative, but getting in as a character artist at a good company at the start is extremely difficult. It rarely has anything to do with how good you are, I thought I was good when I was looking for my first gig and didn't want anything to do with environment art, I won the best model award in the make something unreal contest beating out DH/Skullbox and Hyper and all those guys, and that still didn't do shit to get me a character job. Theres other factors there other than being good, and speaking of being good, once you get in, theres a whole new level of competition, and you have deadlines you can't just sit there and doodle on something till you're happy with it, you'll get like a day to do a next gen head model and texture and everything has to be final and ready to be put in the game. Experience is important as well, it helps. And seriously theres alot people don't know about the industry when they're not in it. If someone offers you a job, take it.
Style wise... well... for my first gig I'd take whatever as long as its not like a barbie game or unicorns and crap. Don't be too picky, cuz quite honestly you don't have much to bargain with, you have no prior experience and as much as you'd like to think that it doesn't matter, it does. Not everyone is going to get to build badass next gen space marines and monsters all day long. Take what you can, you won't be getting into id or epic for your first job, no one does. But I leave it up to you.
they quite liked my character art, called me in for an interview, i got along well with the interviewers, they offered me a position. (this is relic i'm talking about)
before that, however, i was also working as a character artist for liquid development a teeny bit.. which doesn't quite stand out in a resume as much as an in house position, so i took a cut in pay and a BIG reduction of fun heh and went from being a character artist to an environment artist hahah.
I will say, the first interview i had was with bioware, and i totaly botched it because i guess i was way to casual, and gave the impression taht i didn't really care, when i did. in the seccond interview, with relic, i was wayyy less casual, but it might not have mattered, because my co-worker got a job with a big "FUCK OFF" t-shirt on hahaha
anyway, i just figgured i'd share my personal story cuz you might be able to get something out of it.
i found that getting a job in this industry was much like any other. if your art is good enough, of course, you'll have an easier time, but it's still difficult when you have no work experience, and quite frankly, pretty frustrating. keep at it, keep building up your portfolio to match what people are looking for, and good luck, i guess!
The problem however is that 80% of the emails I get when posting a job take me 5 minutes to get to the actual artwork; huge zipped file, slow website, poor website design or too long of an email to even bother reading etc.
We get about 80 replies to each job posting. We're a pretty small and fairly unknown company. Imagine going through the mail for applications sent to Epic, Valve or some other popular destination for artists.
Sure they have people screening the submissions but at some point an artlead/director has to take some of their valuable time to look at it.
Also, I can't tell you how many artists start their portfolio with a shitty looking character when they have plenty of good environment art that might get them into the industry. If you've got weak artwork don't even put it on your site.
So to make a long story short. Make it really easy for the person recruiting to form an opinion without jumping through hoops.
http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/docrob/industry.html
I definitely gave up trying to keep it up to date at some point. It needs a new custodian to adopt it, cuddle it, and help it grow. For the good of the industry
Right now I work day and night on making my work stand out at that level and I never show it off cause I know im not there yet, but when I get there I'll start showing some people in private and when they agree im at that level you see in the top games like Gears of War,DOA 5 ..etc etc i'll bring it online ..I think a huge problem with people outside of the industry is that they are so eager to break in that they are not self aware and honest with themselves about there own skill level ..anyways great read Doc ROb and great advice from others !
I think there are still way too many companies who are looking for the wrong qualities in their artists.
I would n't say I am the best character 'modeller' out there, but my texturing skills have done me proud so far.
I do environments and characters, but now we are doing next gen stuff, I will be specialising in characters/heads for the time being.
And I'd be willing to bet that most studios feel the same, and most folk here in the industry do too.
However, personality isn't going to get you very far if you don't get the interview, which is why I think it's really important to have a good presentation. And by that I mean good and simple. Skip the flash page with 2 minutes of loading time.
Seriously folks, if you are reading, i just want to see your shit, i dont want to be forced to watch your representation of what you hope is the level of awe that your presentation will inspire in the viewer.
If I hear one more lord of the rings style build track while an average model rotates for 2mins i WILL kill someone!!!
r,
That's on the opposite end of the spectrum. I get many submissions like this too. Link to a web folder is almost worse than a slow website.
It sounds lazy but the reality is that if I'm busy, a page like this would get the x or alt-f4 after clicking on one image.
If that one image wasn't what I was looking for, on to the next submission.
And about having to start as a level artist and work your way up...I know a lot of people that have jumped right out of school into character/creature artist positions at major studios (mostly hi-poly guys) - so, yeah....it's possible.
cheers,
-Kol.
Then provide them with more choices using smaller thumbs, or a link to see more.
I think Pior has one of the best portfolio websites out there.
QA is like the plague. No one cares what happened to you before QA, once you've been QA'ed you can just kiss your hopes of being treated as part of the team goodbye (In all the cases I have seen)
Many QA guys I've known have been waiting for their opportunity to break-in, and have yet to make the transition.
It's totally 'possible' tho, as this isn't the first time I've seen a paturn and heard otherwise from my co-workers and their expierence. Only 10 mins ago my entire art team gave me funny looks when I mentioned that I've never worked in a pipeline where level designers didn't have the final say and responsibility concerning lighting and framrates associated with them...so....hey, each place is different.
-R
Furthermore, I wouldn't necessarily view being young and inexperienced as much of a disadvantage as you might think. Some companies are actively seeking young blood for obvious reasons.
p.s good to see you here Kolby
p.p.s did you just reply to the wrong thread or something PaK? ;-p
definately forget to tell the interviewer you know anything technical.
hey , it worked for me.
(im up for a possible promotion and already got a raise. so its not like QA is completely stupid career path)
So, after mulling it over pretty thouroughly, I think I see it like this. Like with everything, time is an issue. So, while taking on environment work could be a more surefire way to get my foot in the door and eventually take a character job, thats still time I could have been working on character art on my own and getting better, which is more important to me as an artist and would eventually lead to a job. And the former method of getting there is in no way more valid than the latter. I think why world art is even a consideration for me is wrought out of having to work shit jobs and seeing any entry into the industry as a relative paradise. I'm not trying to make any less of evironment art with that statement btw. It takes alot of dedication and skill but its just not my aim personally.
About the whole having to meet or exceed the best of the best in order to get a job as a charcter artist, I don't see that as being necessarily true. Obviously it would more or less assure someone a spot in the industry somewhere so its a good aim to have, but I don't think I should feel deterred from marketing myself right now. My skills are at a level now that I have been able to grab the attention of some companies, so why not keep going, and of course add artwork to the site and improve along the way.
Anyway, cool thread. Greatly appreciate you guys taking time out to respond.
-Erik
I won't argue that you can learn something from QA, I think it's fantastic exp infact. the problem I was describing wqas the unfair rap that QA gets from the rest of the developers in a studio-like environment, and how that lack of respect is in some cases (please read those italics Jerry, you missed my emphasis last time) even worse than no contacts at all.
And don't call me a tard, I'm co-ordinationally challeneged :P
-R
demoncage you do good stuff, make sure you finish things off and be certain to texture them too.
[/ QUOTE ]
I agree with Spacemonkey . Just from friends ive made in the industry and talking with people and reading things ive noticed that your 2D skills can sometimes be the biggest factor on weither you get a job or not over another person. Some guy might model as good or better then you but just have decent texturing and 2D skills ..being that most Art Directors ive talked to come from a 2D background i'd say they would go for the better person with 2D skills ..I know I would also what good is a model without a excellent texture ?