Pros: How did you get to where you are?

[Dekard]

for me, I've always been interested in art. Always doodling and saying I'd love to do something with my art. Went to the air force for college money for art school. Pissed away a few years and went back to get my BFA in Computer Animation. At 35 I thought I'd be too old to start doing this stuff.

I learned the 'basics' of modeling, in classes at school. I feel I would have been better off saving money and getting a cheaper more respected state university degree rather then going the technical school way. I have $50k in debt now and I feel I learned most of the stuff I know from others online at places like this, polycount.com, and CG Society. I also hang out in irc over at polycount and they help with any noob questions I had.. by the end of my degree I was telling the school what they should be teaching and was showing other students how to make normal maps, etc..

It all comes down to discipline, I didn't have much at first, I was comfortable working in IT with a decent salary but kinda hated my job.. so quitting work and finishing school forced me to do something with my artwork. I learned max from 3d tutorials on the web and a couple gnomon videos.

It takes dedication and continuing to work towards a goal. Only time success comes before work is in the dictionary. I'm by no means a great artist yet, but I'm continuously working on it in my spare time learning new tricks and refining my old ones. Stephen Silver said regarding to drawing "A (sketchbook) page a day keeps the competition away! You can take that to the 3d realm and just say "A modelled scene a week keeps the competition away" you need to immerse yourself in the program of choice.

You need to enjoy working in 3d/2d if you don't you won't want to come home and work on more 3d. TV and games like WoW are nice but you also need to budget time for those and timers work great I only allow myself a few hours of TV a week and I DVR most of it so I can FFW through commercials. I also time my gaming.

Hope this helps some if any. I just recently got hired to do 3d full time and am having a blast, but still want to do cool stuff for the portfolio.


Rick Stirling has some awesome articles about this subject as well;
rsart - Rick Stirling, games artist » Content Portal