Write yourself a ticket to a new career. Courtesy of iStockPhoto.com.

When I entered school to get into the CG industry, there was a tremendous call for artists; it seemed that everyone was clambering to get their hands on people who could create CG for films, television and games. SIGGRAPH was abuzz with studios looking for talent, schools were losing students to jobs, and almost anyone with a mouse hand could get an interview. But soon after that, perhaps within the following two to three years, there began a slowly bursting bubble; hiring slowed to a crawl and projects were tougher and tougher to get on. Interviews were more difficult to get, and unless you were already well experienced, jobs were tougher to get.

Now, almost 10 years later, there is again a wide push to hire 3D artists, and, this time, as much in games as in film and TV. Add to this a migration of some high level CG people from film to games, and you have a very exciting hiring field again, at least for now.

It seems fair to say that there is a current upsurge in the hiring market for CG artists all around, but how long could this last? It comes down to the basic tenant of business: supply and demand. Studios will turn out CG features as long as there is a healthy audience for them. But to this you can add a scale factor. Within the last 10 years, creating CG has become easier and cheaper, if not a little faster, and the pool of artists trained in the language has become larger and stronger. These, in turn, push production costs lower than in the early days of CG, making it more likely for a CG heavy film to recoup its costs faster.

As Pamela Kleibrink Thompson, AWN’s Career Coach, puts it: “A few years ago when Lion King made more than $300 million at the box office, suddenly everyone wanted to get a piece of that action and lots of companies built up their traditional, classical 2D animation divisions and put out some movies… Since there were failures, they turned to 3D for the answer, as there has been enormous success with some 3D films (e.g. The Incredibles, Shrek and Shrek 2). So there is a boom in the market for people who know computer animation and hiring is not great for traditional animators… right now it seems that money is being invested mostly in 3D projects.”

The same hiring buzz can be said of the gaming market. The top gaming console makers are poised to release their next bigger and better platforms, promising much higher game play reality, creating a demand for better in-game and cinematic CG and at higher resolutions. Even though game consoles are about to hit HD, PC games have always had the higher resolutions, so that may not exactly be the impetus driving the market so much as it is the growing processing power. Game engines are becoming extremely vivid and have more rendering abilities than before, especially with normal mapping becoming the new buzz term. These engines are able to output a far greater range of detail that needs to be created by artists.

In a market that hits the mid $20 billion dollar mark in worldwide revenues and is forecast to break $30 billion by 2007, there is serious attention being paid here for top quality content.

Helping fill that need, there has been a migration of talent spanning top names such as Habib Zargarpour (now with EA Canada and formerly with ILM) to entry level production artists from the film industry toward games, a flip from the general sentiment about six to eight years ago when CG artists avoided game jobs to try to stay in the film market.