Carving out your custom Career
Finding your place in an industry that likes to put people in boxes.
Have you ever wanted to change roles and pursue a new direction in your career and life? Are there obstacles you’ve faced when trying to pick up new skills and experience? My goal with this newsletter is to share ideas and actions that I’ve used to overcome motivation and learning challenges in my life and career, that you can try yourself and see if they work for you.
So why should you listen to me? Good question. It’s only fair that as I share processes that I’ve found useful in my future newsletters, that you hear about my journey and why I needed those processes. So this article is a speed tour of My Journey.
Where I am in my Journey now
I’m lucky enough to have a pretty cool job. I realize that many people would love to do what I do. It is technically challenging, involves working with very smart and talented people, the challenges vary from week to week, month to month and many millions of people see and play the game that I work on so there is gratification on many fronts.
I am a Senior Technical Artist at Epic Games and I work on a game called Fortnite (that sounds like a confession doesn’t it?) I am writing this post to tell you how I got a job that I enjoy very much. I am doing this not because I’m bragging (which I’m aware that this post could come off as), but because I think it will help a lot of people who are trying to get into the industry or are already in it and are struggling with their own place and role.
This article is about how you don’t have to go down a predefined path and do only activities that fit squarely in your role description. (Disclaimer: Please don’t read that one line and think that you can now go and do what you want in your job. That will likely result in you getting disciplinary action or fired). This is more like a guide on how over time, you can bend the environment into making it fit you, rather than you having to fit the environment.
Getting your foot in the door
My career began at a company called The Mill, which at the time created visual effects for commercials and tv. The historical way that people got into the industry back then, at least in the U.K, was through a job called a ‘runner’. This job mostly involved making cups of tea for workers and clients and then collecting the mugs of said cups of tea from desks. There was also running around Soho in London dropping off physical media (magnetic tapes and hard disks) which is where I think the ‘running’ comes from.
Whilst in this job, you had the opportunity to get to know everyone at the company and use the computer after hours to practice 3d modeling/rendering/texturing etc. Other countries and adjacent industries might have slightly different ways of getting your foot in the door (graduate programs, internships etc) but I can only talk about my experience here.
At this point I met many people who didn’t know what they wanted to do in the industry. They expected that they would get to try a few roles out in the company and see if they liked one enough to pursue. That’s fine if that’s what you want to do, but be aware that your progress from entry level to a ‘proper job’ might be delayed if you aren’t as targeted in your intentions as I was.
I was using one of the spare workstations and 3d modeling an Audi R8 car for fun in Maya and one of the producers walked past and saw that I was modeling and they just happened to need a cheap junior modeler at the time. I was swiftly brought over into the 3d team.
Getting over that first hurdle is a big deal. I’d like to say that it was because I worked really hard. It’s not completely true. I had spent a lot of time learning 3d modeling in my spare time, but apart from that, there was nothing special about me. I was self taught and didn’t go to a CG School (my degree was in music technology). It was more that I had increased the odds of ‘something happening’ when an opportunity arose.
In the end, I’d been a runner for only 3 months. I knew others who were a runner for over a year because they were trying things out and weren’t as focused. Many of those people did eventually get jobs though after they had ‘found’ the one they liked, so you do what’s right for you.
Know what you want to be when getting your first role and be ready for when opportunity presents itself
Once you are in
Now I was ‘in’ so to speak. It was then that I realised how much I didn’t actually know. Being forced onto a project and working with other people will get you up to speed very quickly. You will make mistakes and you will learn from them. Use this time to learn as much of the subject as you can.
I became proficient in Modeling/Texturing/UV-ing/Rendering in Maya and Softimage XSI and those skills still serve me to this day. I think the industry has changed a little since I was a junior, but I’ve noticed that people are hired into more specialised roles earlier on these days. If you are in the gamedev/vfx world and do not know how to do some basic modeling/texturing/UV-ing, then I highly recommend getting some basic proficiency in those areas. Your producer/coordinator will love you if you can quickly bash out a solution to a problem in a few minutes without having to go through a whole different department that could delay hitting those targets by days.
Get the best foundation you can as it will serve you throughout your career
Setbacks
After about 2 years of this junior 3D artist role, the 2008 global financial crisis kicked in. To my utter shock I was laid off/made redundant. At the time if felt like my whole world came crashing down. I thought my first break was over and that I would have to start again. I was about £2000 in overdraft/debt. The future was very uncertain. Then two things happened.
In the UK, there is a redundancy compensation package that people get. It’s not massive (something like 1-2 months pay), but it essentially wiped out my bank overdraft and I was suddenly in the black again after not being there since before I was a student.
I had a few friends at the company who made some calls and the week after my final work, I was freelancing at a company down the road at a rate that was double my junior role salary.
So if/when you do encounter what seem like huge life changing events, go with them and try and let them flow over you like water. They are huge life changing events, but given time, you could end up down a path that will be a net positive even though it didn’t seem like it at the time.
You WILL encounter setbacks.
However, what can seem like failure or two steps back can be a blessing in disguise
Specialising
The projects I’d been working on previously required a broad set of skills. This is what is known as being a ‘Generalist’. I’d acquired a desire to work in the film industry and it was more common in film vfx to have a more focused set of skills and be better in one particular area.
I’d seen Lord of the Rings and been highly inspired by the Visual Effect Featurette on the making of DVD (now an ancient form of physical media that most young people have never heard of). On it, it showcased the fluid simulation fire effects of the balrog and I was fascinated. So I started to learn and teach myself those skills alongside the more generalist jobs. Eventually, I was able to get a role at a different company (Double Negative) as an FX Artist.
Specialising can be seen as a narrowing of your skillset and pigeonhole you into a set box. Many companies don’t encourage you to change roles within a company, but it can be done, and that is essentially what this article is about.
Specialising at particular times in your career can be beneficial to highly hone your skills in one particular area and show people that you can excel. You might feel like once you do it, you will be stuck in that role forever, however the short term career gains can be worth it.
Specialising can make your career progression go to the next level
Timing
After another couple of years doing FX/CreatureFX work at Double Negative, I came across an opportunity to work in New Zealand at Weta Digital. My girlfriend (now wife) is from New Zealand so was able to ask friends back home about what was happening locally there in the industry. She was actually looking for a job for herself but it turned out that they were after FX Artists for the upcoming Hobbit movie. I was able to get a dream job at a company that I’d looked up to for years.
I was also over London and its gruelling commute. Wellington seemed like a nice change. And it was. I’ve been there ever since.
Keep an eye on the industry through the news and your contacts and make changes at key moments to tie into your life goals
The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know
I thought I was pretty good at this CG/FX stuff. My reality was put firmly in check when I started work at Weta Digital. I’d been working for about 5 or so years by the time I started at Weta. That first year, I probably learnt as much again, if not more, in my skillset and approach to work.
The quality of the work and the talent of the people there was top notch. You have probably heard the quote “If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room”. It’s true. Surround yourself with people smarter that you and learn as much as you can from them. Get used to being humbled and embrace it.
At this point I was getting to know software engineers who wrote the software that performed all of the physics calculations that we used to simulate the effects in the shots we were making. I became very interested in c++ and making toy plugins for Maya and learning how fluid simulations worked under the hood.
I loved my job, but a seed had been planted, and I started to realise that I was growing and that I might not want to do that FX role forever.
Surround yourself with amazing people and you will be amazed at what you can achieve
Becoming a Teacher
The more you share, the more you will be recognised as a key person. I was asked to become a full time in-house trainer for new hires. I had always been told that I was very good at explaining complex concepts to people, so I now got the pleasure of teaching people how to use the in-house software when they joined to get them up to speed.
It was immensely enjoyable and also kept me away from the crazy deadlines. My wife and I just had a baby so I was not really in the mood for doing crazy hours so this role was perfect for me. It gave me the the time to continue learning c++ and Unreal Engine in my spare time.
Learning had become a bit of an addiction for me. If I was going to be addicted to something, then that’s not a bad one.
Show your work and your thinking, you will be appreciated and valued for it. Educating people empowers them and you providing that is valuable to them
Night-time hobbies
Because I like learning new things, I was happy when Unreal Engine 4 was released. It was a breath of fresh air due to it’s ability to enable visual programming through its blueprint event graph. You can use Nodes to describe the flow of logic in your game and it is very intuitive. I knew enough c++ to be dangerous, but the speed of prototyping that it enables is enough to overcome the friction that many people feel when confronted with writing text and all of the syntax that is involved. It also uses node graphs to describe material graphs that ultimately decide what colour each pixel on the screen is given. And it does it in realtime. I dove in and binged as many youtube tutorials as I could.
Because of my time as a trainer, I’d realised that when you teach something, because you are breaking down information and giving it back out to other people, you learn that material exceedingly well. One of the benefits of this is that it forces you to think about the information from another person’s point of view. In doing that, that you identify points that may be misunderstood or require clarification. There could be gaps, inconsistencies or god forbid… mistakes! By making it make sense, you understand it better yourself. You might have heard of this approach before as the Feynman Technique. Trust me, it works.
So my new hobby extended to creating and uploading Unreal Engine tutorials on youtube (to my channel formerly known as ‘Dokipen’). It’s been an amazing experience hearing from people who have seen my tutorials and appreciated the way that I explained something. It’s something I can be proud of. Due to the terms of my contract as an employee for a company, I’ve been unable to upload recently. But I have reached over 13k subscribers which is way more than I could have imagined.
People have often asked me why I spent so much time creating and uploading tutorials to youtube in my spare time. Well, I’m afraid it was me being selfish. I was doing it partly for myself as I’ve found it a very effective way for me to learn and retain information long term.
As well as teaching in person and on youtube, thanks to Epic, I have talked at 3 conferences now in Australia, United States and New Zealand (GCAP, GDC, NZGDC). This has allowed me to meet people in person I’d connected with on twitter, youtube and github, and has enriched my life.
Teach as a way to learn and meet like minded people who share the same passions as you
Pivoting
I’d tinkered with c++ over the years but it had always been a bit of a hobby. I’d made a deliberate decision to improve my c++ skills and that involved choosing real projects to work on that had clear defined boundaries and end goals. One was a fluid simulation program that implemented the Navier Stokes equations. I’d learnt how to implement them from resources like the free online book version of GPU Gems and Robert Bridson’s book ‘Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics’.
I was also lucky enough to know some of the experts at Weta Digital who gave me great tips and advice. It was essentially a toy project, but because it was self contained and actually did something, I was able to show people and they then knew that I could use c++ and actually create something.
Then my boss in the FX Dept had a need for someone to implement a convex decomposition (a way to break a complex mesh into simpler shapes) library in Houdini as a plugin. I didn’t know how to write Houdini plugins, but one of my friends did and he’d done a similar thing and was happy to show me the hooks to be able to extend his plugin with the new algorithm.
From there another opportunity arose. The inventor of the OpenVDB library had recently become head of the WetaFX Simulation R&D Dept, and they needed someone who could use Houdini as an artist for testing their software and also use c++ to debug and modify the software. After a couple of interviews where I got asked some computer sciency type questions (those years of watching cppcon videos paid off) I got the job and moved from FX into a ‘Software Engineering’ role.
So at this stage, I was learning a lot more about software engineers’ practices (code reviews, API design, debugging, agile workflows etc). I also became obsessed with learning about physically based simulation (which is a whole other rabbit hole to go down). I was very happy with this change in life and career. I had a great boost of confidence due to me being able to change direction and pick up new skills I didn’t think I would ever have. I got to work closely with people with PhDs and learnt SO MUCH from them which I will be eternally grateful for. In fact, physics and coding is now another side hobby away from gamedev :)
What you thought you knew you wanted to be can change
Deliberate Study
During my time in FX and Simulation R&D, I chose to take a couple of university module courses in Mathematics to add to my skillset. The Open University in the UK is an institution that has existed for over 50 years that enables people at any stage in life to study for a qualification such as a Bachelors Degree or Masters Degree. Doing these courses expanded my knowledge that was incredibly useful in my work that often involves maths (also looks ok on the CV).
I still have the option to continue this study towards a Mathematics and Physics Degree over the next few years. I’m currently on a break but I like that you can learn at a comfortable pace over many years. It makes it much more enjoyable with a lot less stress.
Invest in yourself
Take your time and enjoy learning
Be ready for the next pivot
So even during my work in FX and the Simulation R&D Depts I was still doing my youtube channel now and again. Unreal Engine became a very serious hobby, and I was interacting with people at Epic Games on the forums and on twitter. There was a cool sense of community that I’d not discovered or been a part of with the FX or Simulation world.
Over time, I realised that it might be possible to make another career change. I’d seen a job posting for Technical Artist at Epic, so I thought there was no harm in exploring that idea.
In my interview, a few people had seen my youtube channel and recognized my voice. It was like a keyboard shortcut in real life as they already knew ahead of time what my thought process for solving problems was like, and what my skillset encompassed.
My pivot into games has been an immensely exciting one. One of my first tasks in my new job was to make a material that reacted to Music/Audio. Well it just so happened, that my degree was in Music technology, so without intending it, my degree finally had a use!
I’ve since worked on Volumetric Clouds, Physics Based Tree animation that my experience at Weta in the Simulation Dept directly helped.
I’ve also picked up a lot of new skills in the gamedev process, but I’ve had the confidence to do that learning because I’ve got evidence that I’d done it before.
It’s possible that, like myself, you will eventually be known for being adaptable to many different types of roles and situations. And the types of tasks that may be thrown your way will be just as varied because the ability to adapt before has been proven. It’s the secret to never being bored. I think the idea of a generalist has evolved. The modern day Generalist is now a Technical Artist, and there are no limits as to what skills they may have.
If you can show that you can adapt to many situations AND provide a unique intersection of skills, then you will be known for being YOU
Takeaway
Hopefully this brain spew of the last 18 years of my career has shown you that you can change your life and career and influence it’s direction. You don’t have to go down one expected path. And in fact, even if you have desires, goals and plans now to do a particular thing, then they may very well change. And that’s a good thing!
Here are some key points that I have held to along my journey…
Freely share information and knowledge
As you learn and teach other people, don’t just explain the ‘what’, I explain the ‘why’. This empowers people to use that information to create their own unique work vs just repeating the one thing they would’ve otherwise been told.
You will change as a person and so will your desires about what you want to learn and what you think success is.
Slow down. Rushing to try and be the smartest and fastest will actually make you dumber and slower. This is going to sound so corny but here it goes…
Enjoy the Journey
