Folks, I’m considering a couple of short-term training courses and wanted to see if anybody had thoughts on what I’m hoping to accomplish with that.
I’ve been working in professional software development for 20 years or so. My primary work has been in writing testing and build automation systems and tools. Almost all of that has been in a C++ context, but my “tool” of choice for this kind of development is Python. All of this work has had to be cross-platform, and Python has been an ideal way to deliver robust tools that just work whether on Windows, OSX, or unixes.
I got bitten by the CG bug about 10 years ago, and have been a Maya user for about 6 years. Unfortunately, this is on my own time as it isn’t relevant to my day job work. I have a pretty strong understanding of how Maya works, have studied the first Gould book at length, am comfortable writing MEL, and am now learning the PyMEL way of automating Maya (wonderful stuff!).
There are two courses that I am looking carefully at, thinking that one or both might provide a credential that might help me make the jump between full time non-CG-context tools developer/part-time CG’er to full-time CG pipeline work:
RiggingDojo program
C++ Maya plugin development course with Karl Stievater
Of course, I do understand that the objectives of these two are quite different. Just so my inquiry isn’t so general as to be almost impossible to answer given this vague description of my skills and objectives, what I’m hoping to get feedback on is:
Is there sufficient demand for qualified people in the “Tech Artist” category that completion of such training is likely to make a difference to the folks who make hiring decisions? I’m a very seasoned, experienced developer, but having some tangible credentials seems critical to me at this point. I know on the content creation/artist side, the schools are flooding the market with folks, so I’m just hunting for limited scope training that might have a real impact in a hiring situation.
Sorry for the long-ish post. Any thoughts welcomed.
-Tom
I would definitely give you a more serious look if i saw this on your resume. I would say research any program like this you’re interested in, find out who the instructors are, and get a good sense not just for their experience but what their peers think of them. Taking a course that’s proctored by people with solid industry reputations gives you not just the potential for good education, but hopefully will give you an incentive to make sure you present high quality work coming out of the course. RiggingDojo is actually a great illustrator of this because if I saw you had RiggingDojo on your resume but your reel was poor, it would reflect worse on you (in my eyes at least) than on the program or the instructors. That doesn’t hold true for ALL tech art related industry training, but yeah, do your homework for sure. There are quite a few folks in the forum that have either been through tech art courses/education or proctor them (Brad from the dojo posts here all the time), so definitely don’t hesitate to post questions about specific coursework here.
Hi Tom, I am happy to talk with you if you want to contact me directly we can talk more but here is a little bit of information for you. If you can do both you will learn from both of them and it looks like the CGWorkshops have changed their format a bit, looking at the outline, so that is good. I think the api class looks good, the Instructor has done some great work and the price is cheaper and maybe the time is better for you.
Let me just make a quick point to help highlight the difference between the two though.
Reading their outline, there is a 2 week “project” time to work on a plugin during the workshop at the end after doing api basics vs. 6 of project time and feedback and discussion with a Mentor that does pipeline work at a studio with us.
@Hiring-
As for jobs, schools pumping out students and work… I will not say it is easy, that if you take training x or go to school y that you will get a job, because the industry doesn’t work that way. There are lots of students coming out, but not many that are ready to do the work and even fewer that have done a TD pipeline track. As has been discussed here on the forums it is hard to even imagine that it would be any better if there were dedicated TD education tracks.
If you have a few hours:) give this thread a read- http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=389 Finding/testing/Traning technical artists. It is a great insight in to the view of the this forum on the path to becoming a tech artist.
Then watch the inspiring video interviews with Jason Parks and many other TD/TA people here
We would love to train with you at Rigging Dojo but what ever path you choose you will find a great group of people here on TAO to start networking with, that can answer questions critique your work. Take advantage of the great community here.
When you have time and energy to be pushed and grow as if you were in production then Rigging Dojo will be there and and will do our best to help you be production ready.
[QUOTE=djTomServo;11660]I would definitely give you a more serious look if i saw this on your resume. I would say research any program like this you’re interested in, find out who the instructors are, and get a good sense not just for their experience but what their peers think of them. Taking a course that’s proctored by people with solid industry reputations gives you not just the potential for good education, but hopefully will give you an incentive to make sure you present high quality work coming out of the course. RiggingDojo is actually a great illustrator of this because if I saw you had RiggingDojo on your resume but your reel was poor, it would reflect worse on you (in my eyes at least) than on the program or the instructors. That doesn’t hold true for ALL tech art related industry training, but yeah, do your homework for sure. There are quite a few folks in the forum that have either been through tech art courses/education or proctor them (Brad from the dojo posts here all the time), so definitely don’t hesitate to post questions about specific coursework here.[/QUOTE]
Seth, thank you for taking the time for a thoughtful response. That was the kind of feedback I was looking for. RiggingDojo got my attention because it is driven by people who do the work, not just teach it, and because it seems purposefully to be focused on concrete, practical objectives.
[QUOTE=bclark;11675]
They start you with hello world, Rigging Dojo expects you to have done that on your own
[/QUOTE]
Well, yeah. You only have to spend an evening with Maya’s API Guide to get that far
I’ve been though David Gould’s old book. But of course, the luxury of having an experienced developer to bounce ideas around with is the big deal to me.
[QUOTE=bclark;11675]
Then watch the inspiring video interviews with Jason Parks and many other TD/TA people here
[/QUOTE]
Will have to check that particular one out tomorrow evening, but it was in Google’ing to start to get sorted on PyMel that I came across Jason’s PyMel talk – probably the link on RiggingDojo as a matter of fact… Anyway, I learned of this forum from that.
Thank’s for your comments, Brad and I will be in contact with you (and I will follow those links you cited).
Its great to see that you are willing to impart of your knowledge to others.I am hopeful that theses courses are worthy of job despite the current recession in the job market.
@Thomas, one would hope that they had spent an evening with the API guide and more but there are some that haven’t thought to start there thinking that there is a one click magic matrix like download button that they get and suddenly they know everything they ever needed to know. It is clear you don’t fit in to that group.
Agreed Barrett and that is why we started Rigging Dojo to begin with, to help train and get artists to a hire-able level because the 3 of us repeatedly found it harder and harder to find qualified TDs. There was/ is a large disconnect happening for artists between the existing training material and production needs.
So far, we have had a large mix of production artists that had jobs come to us to improve and jr. artists that have been getting hired because of their hard work and Rigging Dojo helping them present their best work to the right people. This has worked well and ended up in jobs for people. We will never promise to get some one hired though because everyone knows there is no way to guarantee that, regardless of the state of the economy and the job market. It takes a mix of timing, the right person, the right project and the ability to act.
Rigging Dojo has also started working directly with larger schools and programs to help develop and improve curriculum related to technical art. Hopefully even if you are not our student you will be able to benifit from our experience as we try and help fill in gaps in their graduates education.
