Has anyone ever heard of any written tests that look good to future employers for modeling or animation positions?
Just some background, I am a high school 3d modeling/animation teacher who works in a technical school in Virginia. I just use Blender in my classroom. My principal is concerned about all the students having some sort of written test done for certification. I informed him that the demo reel is the best thing that the student can have but he wanted to me to ask.
Last year, I had to do something called the NOCTI test which turned out to be graphic design. That was fun…
So has anyone heard of any such certification tests?
I am getting a college degree in CG, and our exams are neither written or spoken conversations - we have an exam week where we go through a project - environment modeling/character modeling/texturing/rigging/compositing either separately or combined, showing that we can do what we need to in action.
Our teachers value our technical/professional/artistic rating in a weekly evaluation to our coordinator, but it does not actually amount to us getting a certification or anything, we get our school certificate no matter what after our bachelor projects…
I don’t know if any of this applies to high school students - but one thing is certain - employers do not care the least about certificates, they only want to see your showreel, no matter if you work VFX or stylized or whatever,