How I was able to get a career using Blender

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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I keep seeing questions about how to get into the 3D industry and I wanted to help some younger people think outside the box to possibly get a career using Blender.

A little background about myself. I am 30 yrs old I live in Orange County CA, and have been a freelance photographer/graphic designer for about 10 years. Due to health/insurance problems I was forced to get a job with benefits. I am pretty good at Photoshop/Illustrator so I decided to look at graphic design jobs.

After about 3 months of looking, I got a job in a medical company’s graphic design department. There were two other graphic designers who have been there for a number of years. My main job was to create product brochures to send out to hospitals. My starting salary was $52,000/yr.

I am the type of person that tends to get bored of things pretty easy, so I wanted to challenge myself. I decided that instead of warping perspectives of 2D images in PS I would learn how to model these products in 3D. I had a brief stint with Maya in the past but seemed too much to learn at the time so I stopped (and it was very expensive). I don’t remember how I heard about Blender (probably from one of the graphic design blogs I follow). I decided to download it and start tinkering around. I would get my work done as fast as possible and then with the remaining time I would open Blender and start trying things I learned from watching tutorials at home.

Well something weird started to happen, my manager started to become really impressed with my “Photoshop” work (not knowing it was really Blender work). I quickly became the “go to” guy for the real important projects. After about a year of this the CEO came in and I overheard him talking with my manager about doing a product video. He wanted something like “Apples iPhone” commercials. They wanted to hire a company to create it for them. I jumped in and said let me try to do it. I told them I already had the products modeled and I could do the video for them. I opened up Blender and showed them things I was working on. He asked how much does this program cost? and I said its “FREE” Needless to say they were very impressed. So they let me create the video for them. I finished the video and showed it to the CEO, he liked it so much that he gave me a $2,000 bonus on my next check (probably because I saved them many more thousands by not outsourcing it).

Of course that opened the flood gates and they wanted me to do a video for every single product they make, over 200!

To make things even better my year review was coming up and now I had extra bargaining chips. I was able to get a good raise $68,000/yr (This may sound like a lot to some of you, believe me this does not go very far in Orange County). So I still continue to freelance on the side (but now I can add 3D to my portfolio to show potential clients).

So now the only time I work in Photoshop is for my textures for Blender. lol

The point to this is not to brag, but to let you know there are ways to make a career in 3D that doesn’t involve working at Pixar, Blizzard or ILM. I know making God of War or Transformers is “cool” but you can always make a decent living and provide for your family and get to use Blender everyday. In fact I would rather work in the medical or science field doing animations because IMHO it benefits society more than making cool movies or games. PLUS you can always do the VFX/Games and whatnot on your own time, and you will be really good at it because you are using Blender all day everyday at work.

That’s just my two cents and hopefully it helps you think of other ways to make 3D a career.

It would be awesome if others here in the community can tell their “story” of making Blender a career. Just to show the younger people there are many different paths.

BTW my “iPhone” product video looked nothing compared to the quality of Apples commercials but it was good enough to impress the CEO, and that’s all that matters.

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Congratulations, good luck.

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Hey icyou520, what a great story thanks for sharing! I too believe that the film and game industries are saturated and there are many opportunities to bring CG into new markets. Don’t feel as though you are bragging, rather serving your success story as an inspiration to others here who may otherwise be discouraged by the state of affairs.

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Hey nice story and good initiative to speak about carrers. Indeed working on big project is nice but it can also be a bit frustrating, because you’re likely to do one thing only. Like doing rain FX on all the movie for several mouth .In smaller project you may end with doing more interesting and various things.

Personally , I always wanted to work in CG/movie field . I stopped studying early ( at 20 ) and was unable to get a job until I was 24. I studied blender on my own ( a bit after it was release as open source) and with help of some friends.

Finally I get a job in a small company doing corporate movies and animation . It was mainly editing (Final Cut) and After Effect stuff.
Even if I had a good technical knowledge I had to learn a lot of new things related to how we work in real case scenarios. So it was a kind of a new beginning for me.

Working on these projects was really fun, being in a small team (1/3 people ) give you much freedom over software you use and artistic direction over the final product. So I used blender every-time I can instead of AE, every project I tried some news things , I started to learn python too.

This is the showreel I had after working with them for a few years : http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xhccy8 it’s a mix of commercial and personal projects.

With me being able to do 3D we had more 3D oriented projects mainly in the space industry. The only downside of this job is that we had very few time to work and polish projects
 For instance this video : http://www.neoshield.eu/neoshield_kinetic_impactor_movie-2/ was done in about 4 days (and a few nights) with me doing almost everything (except some models that was already done ). That was an extreme case , generally we had more time and people
 But still it was hard to make projects as good as I wanted them to be.

In the end, I worked for this company for about 5 years.
One good thing about all these projects is that I meet a lot of people , learning from them and also they gave me opportunities to work with other people. Then I started to work more on the animation field , a bit of small vfx too 


This is one project I’ve be working on at that time, doing rigging and rendering/compositing :

Now I work as a generalist on teams of 5/15 people, these last 2 years mainly on animated series

This is the last project I was working on : http://www.catsuka.com/news/2017-03-16/oscar-et-hoo-serie-tv-creee-par-michael-dudok-de-wit-et-le-studio-normaal
(characters are done in blender) and I was doing mostly pipeline and technical stuff.

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Thanks for sharing your story. There are a lot of 3d jobs out there (also ‘hidden’ potential ones like yours) and often you hear people say “I want to work for Pixar” - but that is unrealistic (in most cases). Rather, there are many opportunities for this type of work in more ‘regular’ business environments.

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Nice, congrats! Care if I share mine too? A thread that contains “how I got into the industry” stories could be useful. I’ll delete this if you’d rather it just be yours.

I’m 32, and have been working professionally in the film world for about 8 years. My only “proper” training was a video production class in high school, where I also started dabbling with Blender (back in the 2.2x days!) When I graduated, I started making lots of short films, using Blender whenever I needed CGI effects. I shot and produced two feature length movies, using Blender to do a CG eyeball that was dangling from an eye socket (digital makeup effects) in the first movie.


circa 2008

in 2010, I shot my third feature, using it as an opportunity to learn After Effects. I used Blender in this film for a satellite orbiting the earth.

sat.jpg720×403 42.6 KB

sat2.jpg720×405 19.4 KB

circa 2010

After that movie, my AE experience got me a job at a small production company that needed a compositor. They were primarily a C4D house, but I found I was faster in Blender, so I’d model something and send the obj to a coworker who would texture in C4D and it worked really well.

My time with that company got me some experience and now I’m the visual effects supervisor at another production company as they had nobody that knew how to do that kind of work. Being the only one with a VFX background allowed me to create the workflow and choose what software we use. We use Blender for everything 3D and Natron for all the compositing. At first, they were a bit skeptical of using free software, so I had to prove it’s worth a little by sneaking in Blender elements into shots. By the time we got to completely CGI shots, everyone was on board with Blender.

I don’t consider myself a 3D artist by any means. I’m a filmmaker first, who learned VFX for his own films, then found a way to work in the industry as a generalist. I get to play and experiment with techniques and software at work, which I then use to refine my personal workflow for my projects.

Something for people to consider too is that you need to consider if you want to be a specialist or a generalist. A specialist does just one thing like model or roto, but they are hired at the big name VFX houses. A generalist will be doing many things, and is easier (I think) to get work, but you’re going to be working for smaller companies, sometimes even being the only guy doing this kind of work.

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@ özgĂŒr Thank You.

@XenWildman I agree with bringing CG into new markets, What I have come to realize is that older business owners are still under the impression that 3D animations cost thousands of dollars and need a team of people. I may not be able to have the quality of a Pixar but that is overkill for what they need anyway.

@sozap Love your story too, I agree with everything you said. I really like the way that animated story is stylized. Awesome work!

@Herbert123 I think there is going to be a huge opportunity for generalist in small business as technology advances and prices come down.

@ El Director it’s funny to me how you say you’re a director 1st. I feel the exact same, except I feel I am a photographer 1st (that hasn’t been doing much photography lately.) And I am glad you shared your story, I agree this thread could be very helpful and eyeopening to people new to 3D. I will see if I can change the title.

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@icyou520: I know the feeling. I’ve been so tied up with work and learning lots to expand what I can do that I haven’t done as much of my personal work lately. I’m hoping some others will share as well.

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some of you may have seen this already: https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/880011165497208832
that’s my story, as written by my (amazing, brilliant, superheroine) wife.
my career path has not been typical in anyway, but it just goes to show that there is a big world of opportunities outside of big budget movies and the games industry.

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“RENDER himself a new life and dreams!” I love that line!! Your wife seems like an amazing person. Thank you for sharing that.

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it is a realy nice story and lovely letter and shouldn`t be called tweed. This letter could maybe be much more
 maybe a base for a story for a nice short film done with blender.

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@icyou520 my wife is indeed amazing :yes:

@piet that is real! thank you for the kind words.