3D Career Change: The How
01 August 2014 - CommentsHaving decided to try and make the jump into the world of 3D previously, the next question to answer was the how.
Stating the obvious, but these are the 3 key challenges to address:
- Acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills.
- Honing the new skills.
- Getting work.
To address these challenges, I need to achieve the following:
- Educate myself.
- Practice new skills - and get feedback.
- Create a showreel - 3D is all about the showreel rather than the CV.
- Acquire work/internship.
The Timeline
I've given myself about 12 months to succeed, or die trying, which is broken down into 3 phases:
- Training
- Personal projects for self-development and initial showreel material
- Internship/first work
The Training
The key to effective learning is to understand what works for you. Everyone is different. I've always thrived with self-directed learning. So for me it made sense to leverage the following resources:
- Paid online training/tutorials
- Youtube/blogs
- Books
3D Online Training
I'll probably blog about the books I'm reading another time. For now I just want to talk about the online training I'm doing.
The online training industry is booming at the moment, and in the next decade will undoubtebly change the face of education as we know it today. The CG industry seems to be ahead of the curve in this space. So there are a number of providers of high quality training materials available.
This means that you can acquire a lot of skills from as little as £40-50/month, as opposed to £10k/year for a university course. In addition, you are self-paced, so can progress at the maximum possible speed and flex the learning to the most relevant topics for your situation. However, although not insurmountable, there are obvious drawbacks to online training: lack of networking, lack of feedback and lack of group projects.
There are two main categories of online training available:
- Pure self directed - essentially a set of videos that you view at your own pace.
- Virtual class-room - tutor led, with additional benefits of networking and tutor feedback.
Generally, the virtual class-room type training is significantly more expensive, and consistitutes a half-way house.
I chose the first option, self-directed training, and went with Digital Tutors as it seemed to have a broad range of material with good coverage of the main software packages I needed. In addition, having a pay monthly subscription option meant that I could change if it turned out that it wasn't quite what I'd hoped.
Digital Tutors is awesome!
So it’s been about 6 months now and Digital Tutors has been great.
Pros
- I think the cost/value is amazing.
- The quality is generally very consistent and most of the training is up-to-date with the latest software versions.
- Project-based courses make it interesting and engaging.
Cons
- Courses are not equivalent to university courses. They do have 'learning paths'. However, these are courses pulled together into a learning track that were not necessarily originally designed to sit within a larger whole. Consequently, some of the content can be repetitive.
- Project-based courses can lead to a lot of repetition that you would avoid if the training was technique focused.
- Limited art/graphic design focus - the training material is geared towards software tools and techniques rather than trying to round you as an artist; you're not going to learn any art history here!
- Like any education environment, some of the teachers are better than others.
That said, most of my listed cons are really comparing apples with pears, as the cost of uni courses is hugely different. I'm really positive about my experience of Digital Tutors so far, and I think any limitations with online learning can be relatively easily addressed as long as you take them into consideration.
Wow, that was longer than planned. Maybe next time I'll talk about the experience so far and what's next.
Tags: Journal
comments powered by Disqus