Getting Your 3D Animation Degree - It Won't Be Easy, But It'll Be Worthwhile
Graduating from university or an animation school with a good 3D animation degree is not going to be easy. The courses cover many varied modules, which are designed to produce a well rounded professional animator. If you have spent your life using the computer to create your characters, your first hurdle will be to get to grips with drawing and art skills. All good degree courses should begin by teaching the basics of drawing - not just cartoons, but still life and fine art. You will then be taught how to capture movement and convey it to your audience.
Being a 3D animator requires many different skills. As an animator you are not just creating drawings that move. You will need to be able to produce believable characters who can act. This means you need to be able to act to some degree, and you need to transfer these acting skills to the screen through your animations. You will also be expected to be able to create a plot line, plan the camera angles and shoot the film. In fact you will need to be able to create the whole animation process from start to finish. Once you have mastered all of these, you will then have modules on different types and styles of animation. Many people don’t realize just how many different industries employ 3D animators. Almost every industry or service will have an animator employed somewhere in the organization. Usually this is in the design and planning stages, but even police forces and the FBI sometimes use animators to recreate incidents or investigate possible scenarios.
By the time you are half way through your degree, you should have a good idea of which areas you want to specialize in. At this point you should try to get an internship at a prospective employer, or even offer to work for free in order to gain experience. The more practical experience that you can get during your degree, the better chance you will have of getting a job on graduation. There are far more graduates than there are jobs available in the entertainment industry, which is the career of choice for many graduates.
While completing your degree, you should spend some time learning about the computer hardware and computer operating systems you may encounter in the future. This doesn’t just meant Windows or Mac OS, but also Linux based systems. 3D animation is changing with such speed that the required hardware and software is holding back development, and with each increase in computing power new and amazing features and functions become available. By having some in depth computer knowledge you will be able to stay ahead of many of your rivals for jobs.
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