21 insider tips to enhance your career in 3D

Jan 14 2010

21 insider tips to enhance your career in 3D

Published by Chris Comeau at 8:30 am under Tips

What distinguishes a merely excellent 3D artist from a studio‘s key team member? To answer the question, we asked leading games, VFX and architectural facilities to nominate their most valuable players – then pressed the nominees for their tips for standing out from your peers within the industry

TIP #1 – FIGHT FOR MORE RESOURCES
Give your staff as many resources as you can. That means an ample production schedule, artwork and a creative vision they can follow, but also as much machine time as possible. The more iterations an artist can do on a job, the better the work will be. In our facility at ILM, we doubled our proc pool in order to do Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Transformers, Evan Almighty and the new Harry Potter movie, all of which had more or less parallel schedules. Even with those extra resources, it was pretty challenging – but without them, it would have been a nightmare.

TIP #2 – EMBRACE MAJOR CHANGES
Don‘t be afraid to make fundamental changes to your way of working. At ILM, we had a watershed year [in 2005] with War of the Worlds and The Island, when we went from NURBS to subdivision surfaces like the rest of the industry. It was a big transition, because it wasn‘t just our software that had changed: it was the modelling fundamentals. As a result, we also had re-learn our approaches to rendering, look development and texturing. But it wasn‘t as difficult as I feared it would be because the underlying concepts are the same: it‘s just a different approach.

TIP #3 – KEEP AN EYE ON COMPETITORS
When you‘re at the cutting edge of visual effects, you can never feel comfortable. Keep learning new skill sets. Keep an eye on the different software that is being developed. And continue watching the work that other facilities are doing. Even the biggest studios have to keep up with the industry.

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