Harsh Truths About Working in the 3D Industry

As one of the ways of finding out how it works in the industry I listened to Henning Sanden and Morten Jaeger, the founders of Flipped Normals and CG artists with long and successful professional experience, talking about things about the industry many people don't know.

One of the first things they were talking about is getting feedback because they can see a lot of overly confident beginner artists who get 200 likes on social media and think it makes them good, not realising that likes do not give them any real feedback.

"...there are even professionals who do not have the heart to tell you that you are not good enough yet and they will advise you to apply for jobs in the big studios." (FlippedNormals, 2018)

"You need a person who you can trust for professional level feedback and it should be someone who is currently in the industry because they know current industry requirements." (FlippedNormals, 2018)

They advise finding someone from the industry who is willing to give honest feedback without sugarcoating. As they said, there is a lot of professional artists who do not have the heart, to tell the truth to a beginner artist who thinks about applying for big studios thinking he can succeed.

Henning and Morten mentioned that it is a very competitive field. It is something that our lecturers at the university said too. Whoever is better, gets the job. I think it works like that everywhere but in the art industry, they can easily see if you are good enough just by looking into your portfolio, so it is even more difficult to get in.

Their main point was to keep hobbies outside of it. Yes, there is that quote "Choose a job you enjoy doing and you will never have to work a day in your life." but without other hobbies, your only hobby will become a job with overtimes, working weekends and it will not always be fun and creative. As they said "you might be fixing mesh for a month" and that doesn't sound like fun to me either. That is why I am glad I can use my creativity is such a broad range and on the top of that, I enjoy doing many other things from hiking, spending time with friends, watching films or just simply reading a book. 

"It is not creating monsters for yourself and that is hard to accept that, even if you are a concept artist, which is one of the most creative things in this field, you are still working for somebody else, you still don't have full creative say to what you are doing." (FlippedNormals, 2018)

"It becomes a job, you've got to accept that. It is like 5 stages of grief like if you are not accepting it, you are in the first step which is denial. It is a job, that is a fact." (FlippedNormals, 2018)

Additional advice I found in comments of the youtube video with this talk was by Casper Wermuth who is the Senior Lead Environment Artist in Ubisoft:

"Junior or internship positions don't require experience, but skill. Show you are badass and can do the same level of quality as your target company intermediates. That you can hit the ground running." (Casper Wermuth, 2018)

That means that people in the industry do not expect us, graduates, to have previous experience in the industry. They just need to see that we can do the job are applying for and we are willing to learn and work hard to get to the professional level.

Source:

FlippedNormals. (2018). Harsh Truths About Working in the 3D Industry. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2H0MfW7LbE.