Task 23: Life Changing or Career Building?

This blog post I’m going to be talking about the teaching issues, different views from games companies and how this affects the students themselves.

I think that teaching technical skills and developing learning attributes should be both priorities. You need to develop peoples key attributes so that they have a concrete basis to then have technical skills. The thing with learning technical skills is that in our industry we get new software every year. This means certain techniques could be removed in the newer version and you would then have to learn other ways to do the specific task.

Also the thing with learning technical skills is that you could be really amazing on a piece of software i.e. 3Ds Max but you could get an interview for a position at a games company and they say to you have you got experience in Maya. This means you would have to re learn technical skills as the software is different, this can be difficult if you are set in your ways or you have been using the software for a long time. That’s why I think you need the basics or fundamentals so that you can easily learn new techniques and be easily moulded into what the studio/ Games Company needs you to be.

I think our course is very well thought out, in the first year you are eased into learning the basic skills needed to perform low entry models. This is key because once you have the basics down you can easily learn other areas of the software. You learn techniques in traditional art which helps you improve your standards, execution and creativity which can then be transferred into your 3D modelling. Then in second year you are let loose a little bit which means you can dabble in other programmes new technical techniques. This means that I believe the graduates leaving this course with high grades are perfect for games companies.

“Some game companies want highly trained graduate artists and programmers. Some claim they really prefer creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts background.” For me when a games company says the want a highly trained graduate I think the company needs somebody that doesn’t need a lot of help and will be self-efficient this doesn’t mean that the company doesn’t care about the graduate though. When I hear “creative individuals with a good Liberal Arts background” it means that they can give a bit of tuition or guidance to the graduate and further them in a more hands on approach.

I think education can meet these opposing views and I think our course is doing just that I believe that the biggest selling point to our course is that we teach traditional art skills alongside your 3D modelling. Having the traditional art means that the models we create are in proportion they have the right anatomy and they are the best around. Other course’s rely heavily on the 3D side and don’t really carry on the traditional art. I have seen a lot of character models being created with rock hard uniform abs. This is not the case in humans muscles bulge in different ways and to learn this you need to study anatomy which cements my belief in basic art fundamentals are key.