How to become a successful 3d artist in 6 months

I know that most of you don’t like to read and that you’re all visual learners. Well….deal with it and get through this long text since it might help you.

After teaching artists for a few years now I’ve realized that I need to actually have a talk with the rest of you who are not around when I stream and hear me ranting on these subjects over and over. I see more and more of you are focusing on the wrong things when building your portfolio. We had this discussion about quality and finished assets/characters some time ago and a lot of you went nuts from calling me a gatekeeper to threats and so on. The truth is…. a lot of you will not make it in the industry...and let me explain you why.
First of all, no matter how good you think you are…I can bet you that there are at least 5 people with better skills than you that want the same job. Also, your skills are way lower that you believe. It’s called Dunning-Kruger effect…. the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Been there, done that. In 2008 when I got my first job in the game industry, after working 4 years in the vfx, I went to the contract negotiations like I was a rock star. I was so confident that I know everything about modeling that now, when I look back, I’m still feeling ashamed of how stupid I was. I think understanding your level is probably one of the most important things you need to learn. Based on it you will learn how to move forward and what to focus on. If you’re gonna get stuck with the idea that you’re some kind of 3d god when in reality you’re absolutely useless then you will have a really hard time evolving and getting the jobs you want.

The second point is that you need to understand that getting good at modelling takes a tremendous amount of time. This is definitely not a short road. I see people expecting to make a break into the industry after taking some online courses on one of this 3d schools out there that sell you this noob to pro in 6 months bullshit. Trust me, you won’t…or if you will, it will only be because you were fortunate enough to know the right person and has nothing to do with your actual skills. The 3d schools, 3d tutorial makers, 3d mentors…they’re all there to take your money with the smallest effort that they can put into it. Some take this to extremes…. you will see prerecorded videos from 5 years ago rebranded as a new workshops and sold for hundreds if not thousands of dollars. In reality…the only way to get good is to work your ass of. Now let me explain you what working your ass of means since a lot of you think that it means 2h of 3d every other day for like 2-3 months…. this is not it! In my opinion to get to a medium level as a prop artist you need like 3 years of at least 8h/day of work and as a character artist close to 5 years. Now you can make some cool characters or props during the whole learning process but that will be not, by any means, enough for you to sustain production time and quality. You need to work hard and long hours to build up that knowledge base that you will need to have to be able to approach any asset/character and find the fastest workflow possible to meet the requirements. I have students that can deliver really good quality but they’re slow for now and I constantly tell them that they need to build up speed before venturing on the production world. I have more than 20 years since I’ve started on this road and I’m learning new things every single day. For example, you can check my facial anatomy skills 2-3 years ago and compare it with my current facial anatomy knowledge... it's such a big difference that it makes me cringe when I look at my old works... and I still have so much more to learn. It takes time and a lot of practice. Give yourself time and understand that you can’t grow over night.

One of the most common questions I get during the streams is how do I motivate myself to work these long hours every day. It is simple. To be a successful 3d artist you need to be really passionate about it. If you get into this just for the money, you will never pass the mediocrity level, not even after 20 years in the industry. For me it’s simple…. I love 3d….my life revolves around the 3d world and I know that the only way for me to improve is to put in the hours. The feeling of finishing a project is great, especially if it’s a well-known title and you get to see your work appreciated by so many people around the world…. it’s a feeling that you will not get it from too many jobs. But as an advice, if you can’t push yourself easily to do the work, just wake up in the morning, go to the pc, open up the last scene you were working on and the just leave it there in the background while you browse the social media or playing some games…you will eventually feel bad for ignoring it and will start working on it. Very often I don’t feel like I’m in the mood to work but after 10-15 min of doing some actual 3d then I get sucked into it and then I can’t recall when the whole day passed. We have a saying here in Romania “Pofta vine mancand” which translates basically like “Your appetite will come while eating” and it’s one of the things that I really find to be true. If you start investing some time into the work, you will get lost into the work and you will end up doing a lot of progress without realizing when time flew by. Even if your skills are low and you feel like all you did is a waste of time, it is not. Every single vertex moved is going to make you a better artist. What you need to understand is that you need to move it all the time and you need to be patient. That knowledge base doesn't get build up by itself.

The next point is about focusing on the wrong things. I’ve seen so many examples of young artists getting fooled by timelapses and useless tutorials and thinking that you should just do some fast sculpting exercises or stylized stuff…because it’s easy. If you see a timelapse of someone sculpting a likeness in a few minutes or you watched me doing those Face Guide streams when I was making a likeness every stream and you think that you should do the same…don’t. A timelapse will never show you the undos and not really reflect the amount of time the artist put into that work. As for my daily likeness let’s take Rosario’s example. I’ve made a 7 hours stream while sculpting her and then spend 30-40 more hours refining the sculpt and finishing her up. And I’ve been doing this for so many years. Take your time and build up those skills, make 20-30 heads, then test yourself to see if you can get it done fast... and by fast I mean 20-30 hours. Also don’t stop when a head is looking similar to the reference. There is always room for improvement. You want to push it as far as possible and that comes only in time. This applies to every single 3d object. Keep your references close, ignore all those that tell you it’s cool to design stuff from your ass because that makes you an artist. Stop believing that you know how things look like… you don’t. Every single thing you make in 3d needs to have a nice pack of references to guide you. Even when designing stuff, you need to have images with similar objects to get an idea about what you want to achieve and to be able to extrapolate some of the details.

When I was at the beginning of my 3d road there was poor internet access and limited resources…. now you have tutorials everywhere, now you have 3d schools and mentors and forums and so on… and this builds up into another problem. How do you separate the good stuff from the bullshit, because trust me… there’s so much bullshit that even I have a really hard time trying to find a specific answer on the internet. I think this is the most difficult part… to figure out what to learn and how to learn it. To be honest this is why it’s good to have a mentor… you will have someone out there that can point you in the right direction… the problem is that the mentors also are split into good ones and mediocre artists that were in the industry for years just for the money and now are trying to make an easy living by “guiding” the young artists for crazy amounts of money. 3 minutes feedbacks and prerecorded videos are not what you’re looking for. I strongly suggest you to do your research when it comes to buying a tutorial, joining a workshop or a 3d school or getting a mentor. When I say research, I mean it…take your time to see what that artist can do, talk with people who learned from him/her, don’t just throw money at random people on the internet just because they’re famous. There are good artists to learn from and good marketing people out there… try and make the distinction. For example, I’m yet to find an artist that can honestly say that they learned anything useful from the plethora of 3d schools out there. I have had at least 25 students that went on one or another 3d school before joining my mentorship and turned out to me because they were as clueless as they were the day before joining them. Don’t rush into things just because they have a lot of marketing… you should know by now that this is not how things work. Don’t be lazy and do your research.

Then there is the discussion about quality. As a beginner you will think that it’s good to fill up your folio with stuff and that you actually need a lot of assets/characters to get the jobs. You don’t. I have students that got really good job offers by having a single character in their folio. It’s all about quality. If you have 20 characters that are mediocre the recruiters will just pass over you just like anyone else. Your folio needs to be as good as possible. Even if it takes you a year to make a good prop or a character, take your time. Make sure everything is crazy good and preferably unique. Try to avoid making the same characters/props that others did. Try to avoid having another AK47 or military radio in your folio. The people who will decide if you get the job or not don’t even click on those anymore. Keep in mind that quality comes first in the eyes of the recruiters. They need to see good models before caring about how fast you are. You can finish 3 characters per month…. if you can’t meet the quality they’re looking for…they will not care about you. I’m always telling my students that they need to make incredible artworks and that the speed will come in time. The more you work on your stuff, the more you will learn and next time when you will have to do something similar you will have all the knowledge required to make it faster. Once you made stuff a few times you will be production ready, but if you instead make bad models a few times just because it takes too long to make good ones, all you do is to never reach that final 10-20% of quality work and it will just remain a mystery for you… one that it will take years to correct and improve. Remember that when a recruiter is looking at your folio, he’s comparing your work with what it’s already made by their production artists, so in general you need to show that you can do better. Also, you will compete for the jobs with artists that took their time to make high quality work. If it will be to choose in between you (with 10 mediocre characters) and one of my students with 2-3 good ones…who do you think they will choose? In the end, when all the good jobs will be taken by the artists who actually put some effort in making good quality stuff, you will end up with the crappy jobs… the poor paid ones or the big studio jobs where they will not give you anything else to do but retopo, uvs and LODs.

As I was saying in the beginning… not everyone will make it into the industry, and to be fair, there is a requirement for poorly paid mediocre artists also, but I’m sure none of you dream to become one. So take your time and learn. Make some sacrifices and put as much time you can in your 3d work. Create high quality stuff and do your research for any 3d object you create and also for any tutorial, school, artists that you want to learn from. Only hard work and time will make you a great artist. And since you got to the end of this long wall of text, here’s a code to use on my gumroad for a 30% discount. Use “Iliketoread” on any purchase for it. But before going blindly and buy my stuff make sure you checked what I can do and if my tutorials are worth the money. Don’t be stupid

For those who got here by mistake I have a few links for you:

https://www.artstation.com/nimlot

https://www.twitch.tv/nimlot26

https://www.patreon.com/nimlot

https://gumroad.com/nimlot26