Blender 3D Career - From Pet Company to Tech Giant in 3 Years

i went from working at a pet company to a tech giant with blender in just three years so first things first i want you to post your dream job in the comments below and tell me if it involves blender and i get a lot of questions from beginners things like do i need to know how to draw to do 3d is it too late for me to get started how long does it take to learn and i want to answer those questions in this video if you're looking for a list of educational resources this isn't that video i already made that video and the link's in the description below in this video we're going to be going through my blender career path and hopefully encourage you and help you to reach your career goals quicker by learning from my mistakes also just a couple years ago i was really bad at blender so if you're just getting started don't be discouraged i'm gonna focus mostly on the last three years because that's really when i got serious about blender and my career changed but let's start from the beginning for a little bit of backstory so as a kid i was always drawing and i was okay at it but never amazing and i wanted to be an animator but i wanted to do more short form content i didn't really want to work on the same movie for three years and i just didn't think i could make a living doing that so i still wanted to tell stories and i decided to kind of start doing little short films with my friends in high school in 2004. oh gosh i'm getting old um anyways i started learning after effects in about 2005 because i wanted to add special effects to our little short films which were also not great i wanted to learn 3d but the software was too expensive so i downloaded blender and this was 2.4 and i was bad at it and it was really hard to use so i closed it and i would open it on and off again but i never made any progress with it i just couldn't figure it out in 2008 i went to college to study film and it was a state college art colleges were just too expensive and the state college had a good film program so i went there to study videography work because they didn't really have a full animation program around 2010 while still in college i had an internship with an ad agency which led to some freelance work for kind of motion graphics with some pretty large companies on their social media sites i thought this was a lot more fun than the videography work i was doing and i kind of thought well maybe i can make a living doing this i mean it was just simple text animations but you know it was still animation which is what i wanted to do so for the next seven years that's pretty much what i did i wanted to tell more stories and more characters and i just wasn't finding that in my work so i started doing more personal projects in 2014 however i was really bad at personal projects i just could never seem to complete anything i would never commit to anything and sometimes i just got so frustrated wasn't turning out how i'd like i would just delete the whole project so i don't even have them anymore and uh don't do that because you'll regret it they're great to look back on and all along this time though even though i wasn't doing full animations i was still doing a lot of 2d drawings and getting a little bit better but i was never really amazing at rendering 2d drawings it had okay sketches but not the best renderings in 2016 i still had not completed a personal project so what i did is i joined an online collaboration where they were making a collection of videos that had a deadline and i knew that would force me to get it done so i had to show the fear of growing old in 10 seconds and i used blender as a 3d reference for my 2d animation which you can see here [Music] i was really happy with the result of this animation and it was the first successful personal project i had which motivated me to work on another one so i actually did the same thing and created a more complex 3d camera moving scene in blender and then i went ahead and traced over that in after effects and flash to create this animation as i gained more confidence i thought maybe i could do a full 3d scene in blender so i went ahead and took one of my old scuba drawings and made that into a character and kind of created this 3d animation of them falling down it was really simple if you look at the project files it's a mess but i was happy with the results at the time i was really starting to enjoy working on these personal projects and was getting better at it and actually enjoying the results and wanted to do it more but i was working too much and just didn't have enough time to devote so in 2017 i accepted a nine to five job at a pet company as a videographer position that would allow me to have a lot more time after hours since i wouldn't be working 12-hour days and everybody at that company was really nice and supportive of my artwork on the side in the same year i discovered animators a podcast from a nearby animation studio that highlighted animators and studios in the motion design industry and it wasn't until then that i realized that people could make a living doing this these short form animations with a lot of character focus and i got so excited i binge watched the entire podcast series and then i took notes on all the animators in the studios and then i began researching and studying all their past and their present work through all this research i discovered that nobody would hire me unless if i had a portfolio that proved i could do the job so i set out to create an animation portfolio exclusively of the type of animation that i wanted to get hired to do i wasn't getting hired to do this type of work so i knew it had to be personal projects and that i wouldn't complete them without a plan so i went ahead and wrote myself an educational curriculum and then i wrote myself a plan for when and how i would do personal projects in the beginning of 2018 i decided to start using my instagram as kind of a portfolio and to start focusing on producing much more content and at the time i was doing mostly 2d work so i started uploading a lot of 2d work and honestly for the first year it kind of sucked my 2d renderings weren't the best and people just weren't interested in them at the end of 2018 i was getting a little bit better at blender and i decided to force myself to do some 3d animations by setting myself a goal of creating seven halloween animations in the week leading up to halloween and then i released all those project files for free and when i uploaded those animations to my instagram they did way better than my 2d drawings it seemed like people liked my 3d work more for the rest of 2018 through the beginning 2019 i went all in on blender and was doing a lot more character animations and getting a lot better at it i still tried a couple 2d animations and 2d drawings but they just didn't do very well i think it's important to play to your strengths and i realized that even though i wanted to be better at 2d i was better at 3d so i decided to pursue that more right at the end of 2018 i applied to some other jobs and i got a job at an advertising agency right before 2019 started and here i got to do a little bit more animation at work so i could improve my skills at work and then i also had colleagues to kind of bounce my ideas off of which was really helpful and around this time on the side i was still doing freelance and my freelance career was taking off and i was getting larger companies including larger car brands and larger tech companies i was starting to get more work in line of what i wanted to do but still not exactly what i wanted to do i finally had an instagram piece do well when i remade my little goober character which i showed at the beginning of the video and i kind of remade them in this claymation style kind of inspired by the fact that i always did a lot of crafts growing up with my family people started asking me how i was doing certain things in blender and even asking me to do tutorials and maybe to do a youtube so i decided to try and start a youtube and i met up with ducky 3d to get some advice on how to start my channel and he even shared it for me too and it grew way quicker than i could have imagined thank you you beautiful man you at this point my instagram and my youtube were growing far quicker than i could have imagined and skillshare reached out to me about doing a course on their platform i decided to go ahead and try and create a course and at the time i felt like i wasn't good enough at blender to teach an entire course so i did a course in after effects and it did okay but when i released my first blender course on your first character it really took off and they inducted me into the top teachers program so it was around this time i wanted to do some more advanced courses and maybe sell my own courses and i thought about starting my own business or my own platform but i knew there were plenty of existing platforms out there so i reached out to a couple to see if any were interested and michael from mograph mentor responded thinking it was a great idea you're a beautiful man too thank you the course went really well and now i release all of my advanced courses and products on mograph mentor and they even asked me to be a creative director for some future projects as well at this point i quit freelancing i wanted to do my side work more and while i was doing that i was also building up my personal portfolio for the type of work i wanted to get hired to do by the end of 2019 i had built up my portfolio and i wasn't really enjoying the work i was doing at the ad agency i was mostly doing basic text animations and a lot of editing and visual effects and occasionally i got to do the types of animation i wanted but i started looking for a new job at the beginning of 2020. at this point i had enough personal work that i could build almost an entire demo reel out of it so i went ahead and created a website and a full demo reel and that's what i used when i was applying to jobs to share the work that i had done i ended up landing an interview with a tech giant in silicon valley and at the end of the interview i asked why wouldn't you hire me and they told me that i had great 3d work but that i didn't have much 2d work so i mean the irony right i've been trying to avoid 2d at this point and suddenly now it's wondered again so after our interview on friday i offered to do a test animation to prove that i could do it however they weren't allowed to ask interview candidates to do test animations so completely on my own accord over the weekend i took some of the illustrations that they had presented to me within the interview and i made some of my own 2d animations with their illustrations then i made my own illustration in their style and then i did a 3d rendering of one of their illustrations i ended up pulling an all-nighter and working 30 hours over the weekend so that monday i could email them and surprise them with these kind of test animations that i had done in surprise i got the job if you somehow missed the intro and this is a surprise to you but hopefully you knew that was coming but the point being that companies will hire you from the portfolio work that you do so make sure you put the work in your portfolio that you want to get hired for and i think that's a big part of why in just three years of setting my goal i was able to get my dream job but i want this video to be helpful for you so let's talk about some things i learned that i'd like to share with you and then also look at some of the things i wish i had done differently so hopefully this helps you in your path i can't promise that these will help everybody but hopefully you can learn something from them now first things first i thought it was too late for me to kind of change like my career and of course it wasn't like a full-blown pivot it was more just like a course correction but it was still a pretty big change and i've been doing what i was doing for seven nine years and i just didn't think it was possible that i could make that change that late into my career but i was wrong don't let age stop you it is true that a lot of tech companies and design companies are very young but i was 27 when i started learning blender and i was 30 when i got my dream job and i know people far older than me that have also had successful stories like this as well another thing and i get this from beginners a lot is you don't have to be an amazing artist to start it's true some people come to it a bit easier but art is something that can be learned through experience so keep practicing and you'll get there let's talk about what i wish i had done differently i really feel like i made a lot of mistakes and i could have had this job a lot sooner i should have started sooner don't let self-doubt slow you down i let self-doubt slow me down and over time i just kept putting it off and putting it off and never getting started the hardest part is getting started and don't let self-doubt be the reason you don't start do more personal work this is something i really should have started earlier now i know that other people may be in a similar boat to me where they didn't have much time and some may even have less time i'm just saying that personal work should be a priority when you're trying to build your portfolio another thing is i wish i had studied business more people like ducky 3d and michael are already good at that stuff when they began and then they just got better for me i didn't understand the importance of it and thought i could get by with just good art and if i had practiced a little bit more business up front i think i could have sped up the process i really hope this video helped and i want to hear where you're at in your journey too so why don't you comment in the comments below where you're at in your journey what you're doing to achieve your goals or if you've achieved your goals maybe you can share some tips for the other people i'd love to see everybody talking about what they're doing in the comments below i've been very blessed from my wife and my parents my grandparents and my faith and i've had a lot of support in my career and support's very important so if you're looking for community support maybe check out the blender subreddit blender artist blender nation and there's others as well i found a lot of these communities to be extremely helpful where people would answer a lot of my noob questions when i get started if you're interested in learning more blender check out my patreon i give away project files and materials and i release full recordings of my process on there and it's really helpful for people that are trying to get better at blender

Channel: SouthernShotty

Views: 261,375

Rating: 4.9437962 out of 5

Keywords: how many years to learn blender, is blender easy to learn, why is blender so hard to learn, 10 tips to learn blender faster, how to learn blender 3d, is blender hard to learn, why is blender hard to learn, how to learn blender, how long does it take to learn blender, blender (software), blender, learn blender 3d, learn blender, learn blender fast, blender beginner tutorial, blender tutorial, blender career, blender job

Id: xqG9mjlTi4s

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021