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 companyâs 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 donât 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 âPhotoshopâ work (not knowing it was really Blender work). I quickly became the âgo toâ 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 âApples iPhoneâ 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 âFREEâ 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 doesnât involve working at Pixar, Blizzard or ILM. I know making God of War or Transformers is âcoolâ 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.
Thatâs 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 âstoryâ of making Blender a career. Just to show the younger people there are many different paths.
BTW my âiPhoneâ product video looked nothing compared to the quality of Apples commercials but it was good enough to impress the CEO, and thatâs all that matters.