Hello, at the moment I am a high schooler and my goal was to become a film animator but to also work on film technology, whether that be scripting, developing software, or even physical engineering for cameras/optics, and while the clearest path into the industry is production animation in terms of degrees I was told to focus more on computer science. However, I am beginning to doubt my plan as most searches for ‘graphics programmer’ or ‘technical artist’ in Google or LinkedIn show game development, and most entertainment specializations for computer science focus on game development, something I didn't think about preferring to learn one at a time, but seeing the numbers I wonder whether it would be better to try and focus on becoming a graphics programmer and technical artist for games and set my film technical art to the side. One thing I worry about however is struggling compared to passionate game developers who knew they wanted to make games, not a mixture of interest and back up planning, but I'm just not sure what other positions to consider where it may be even more competitive and even farther from my interests/motivations. What should I do?
Switching from technical art for film to technical art for games?
Orange3 said:
I'm just not sure what other positions to consider where it may be even more competitive and even farther from my interests/motivations. What should I do?
Go for your interests/motivations. No question. You'll find the most rewarding work doing something that motivates you just in the doing. Plenty of time to figure out the other details, and besides - if you are awesome at what you do, the jobs will find you.
@Orange3 The basics of being able to look at someting in the world (or on a concept sketch,) and “make something that looks like that, except AWESOME” are the same across movie / video / games – and even traditional media, to some extent. No matter what path you take, as long as you improve your art sense and basic skills, that's a good thing.
The specifics of how that art gets used, varies between the media. For movies, the camera is highly constrained, and you can cheat like there's no tomorrow with things that aren't clearly in view. For games, the player can go anywhere, and look at your things from any direction. Also, in movies, the total render cost of objects isn't super critical (still important, to hit deadlines with given render resources, but using textures that are too big won't kill the project.) In games, the poor computers are really struggling to render everything in real time, so detailed skills like “how to reduce amount of transparencey overdraw” and “re-using texture space efficiently” are much more important for games.
And, in the end, the ability to see something in your mind (ideally, something that matches your art director's vision!) and then making the same thing show up on the screen, with good style and within reasonable time, is the basic skill that pretty much all art positions require. As long as you keep iterating on that, you can always try new things.
