Improving as a 3d Artist by Yourself VS Working in a VFX House

Growing as an artist is difficult, it is not directly associated with experience. There are different aspects to being a 3d artist like creativity, time management, being a team player, technical aspects and many more. And to improve, like every profession you need to work on that and practice a lot. However, for an artist do you get better working by yourself or working with a team in a VFX studio?

Yourself

Trying to get better at what you do is not an easy task, you need to have discipline and know where and how to learn/practice your shortcomings which can be softwares, coding, cinematography, color etc…

The key here is if you are doing what you love, you improve fast. When people work on what they love doing then they automatically work hard which will lead to improvement. To improve by yourself, one can watch tutorials, get education, read blogs, articles, documentations, books about the profession they chose in 3d but the most important one in my opinion is to do R&D. R&D is difficult, tiresome and time consuming also you might even usually fail to get results. However, it is a great source to develop yourself in this field.

The advantage of getting better on your own is that it positively affects your technical skills like problem solving, software knowledge and scene optimization. I can’t say the same for the time management part. I know that it is a bit relevant to how much discipline the artist has, but most of the time even if you try to put deadlines or give yourself limited time to finish your work, time management and sticking to deadlines won’t grow as much as working for someone or in a VFX studio.

The disadvantage of growing by yourself is the works you put out may have some missing parts. Maybe your render has a logical mistake, a lighting problem, a technical shortcoming or a physics mistake. You, as an artist might not realize it after working on your own scene for so long even if you knew you shouldn’t do those mistakes. Sometimes you realize your mistakes but get used to them so much that you keep doing them again and again. When one tries to do their own renders all alone, he/she may miss some key points and when there is not a boss/lead/supervisor/mentor that can correct those shortcoming the artist won’t see much progress. To overcome it making the same render again by putting a significant amount of time between the new and the old and comparing is very useful. In addition using different references and publishing what you created to social media to get feedback will also help a lot.

In addition to these, what you create by yourself is a lot more impressive because it shows what you are capable of all by yourself. I realized this in interviews I did with big VFX houses, where the interviewers were a lot more interested in my personal works instead of the renders I had from in house experiences in my showreels. I know that no one in a VFX studio will ask you to create a full scene and render and composite it to a final sequence. But showing people what you are capable of without a mentor is a great way to make them understand how much you know about your field. I have even heard of interviews/clients who only watch personal works in showreels instead of big scenes that the artists worked on with a team.

In a VFX House

What I mean by working in a VFX house or studio is having a mentor. Call them whatever you want but the person that supervises the shot you are working on will make that shot look great. Even if the artist does the mistakes or shortcomings I mentioned in the previous title, that supervisor will make him fix them. The supervisor who is more experienced than you will see those issues and make you or someone correct them. But he won’t tell or teach you why that is needed. Therefore the artist creates an amazing render which is perfect in every way, however, because the mentor guided the artist, he most of the time do not improve as much as doing a personal R&D.

The good thing is by getting the guidance from your supervisors multiple times, in the long run you get the idea to how to make those renders better which means you improve. But that takes a lot of time.

The advantage here is, contrary to working by yourself, artists get to be much faster because of tight deadlines in the industry, so they become a lot better at managing their times. In addition, your renders will always be perfect and look jaw dropping. Everything will look brilliant even if you worked just on the cloth simulation of the blurry little flag that is waving at the back which nobody looks at. But as I said they won’t show your true skill level like your personal renders. Technical skills grow but not as fast as doing personal R&Ds or trying different ideas/workflows, again because of time constraints in the sector. However, if you are lucky and there is a team working environment, education and people sharing/learning from each other, then you might be surprised how fast your technical skills grow but that is not very common.

The biggest disadvantage of this title is you develop at a slower rate and sometimes make no headway because you are a little cog in a big machine. If you do not like what you do and in this profession just to earn money and not passionate about 3d then you can just do what you are told to, don’t try new things, don’t learn new things. What I observed is, this most of the time occurs on the technical side. On the creative side it is a lot harder to improve because you are following what the client wants and do not really have room for creative decisions. For instance, the brief you got will be precise, it won’t say something like “make a dream like abstract, weird world”. When you say that brief to me I imagine pink fish floating in a green sky but you can’t put that on a movie in a VFX studio unless the brief particularly states that. Therefore the creative side does not grow compared to working on your own shot.

Conclusion

The answer to the big question is -like in most scenarios- the hardest choice which is BOTH! You have to have a mentor/supervisor that fixes your mistakes and shortcomings while at the same time you need to do your R&D, watch tutorials/podcasts/webinars, work on your personal scenes. Just like in the Gnomon webinar 4 years ago where Wayne Hollingsworth said “practicing, doing R&D, it is important that you challenge yourself and try to develop a library of R&D shots”.