I was chatting with some friends about career moves and professional development. A few of them have said that Unity would be a good thing to learn because there is lots of work out there. I have been looking through the job postings on sites like Creative Heads and Gamasutra among others and to be honest I don’t see a lot of postings for Unity users, either as Artist or Prototypes. Am I looking in the wrong places?
So I would like to hear from people that may have transitioned into learning Unity either as Artist or Prototypers/Programers. Has it helped your career are there plenty of gigs out there for people that know how to use Unity? If so then where are the gigs?
I have been working in Film & TV as a 3D Artist for many years and the jobs have become harder to get, more specialized and short term gigs (It’s tough when you have a family to move around all the time). So I am wanting to plot a career path that can give me more job opportunities and stability. So for the past two months I thought I would dive into Unity and build an FX reel with it. Also I am not a programmer so learning Unity from that perspective has been a bit of a challenge, but I am up for the challenge
I would really like to hear other peoples opinions on the state of the job market for Unity users.
Well there is a Jobs forum, you might can check there and find if there is anything worth being hired for.
(I don’t think it’s outright called “Jobs”. But it’s there).
That might be where your buddies were telling you to go. Aside from that you can check out Freelancer websites, I’m sure there are jobs out there.
In general I would say that putting up “Unity” on your resume will attract recruiters looking to fill Unity specific game dev jobs quite a lot (in my own experience from not being interested in finding a new job, but being spammed by recruiters through linkedin/xing).
That said, personally, when looking to hire engineers, I would not look too much after knowledge of specific technologies (a good programmer can pick those up quickly) and rather look after a proven track record of achieving results in whatever technologies they would have been using.
We currently use Unity as our primary development platform and we have (across all studios/divisions) several hundred game devs working in Unity. But we don’t hire “Unity” developers. We hire designers, engineers and artists. If they know Unity, awesome. If they don’t, but are at the level we recruit at, they can pick it up very quickly. (BTW, it is fun to watch a seasoned engineer who hasn’t used Unity before start to work with it… they usually get pretty excited pretty quickly). Unity is designed is such a way that someone who has never built a game can pick it fairly quickly. Imagine how quickly a seasoned sr engineer with decades of experience can pick unity up. By the same token, we don’t don’t hire Photoshop Users, or Maya Users. We hire Artists.
Heh… just a couple of weeks ago, we interviewed two applicants for two Sr FX Artist/Designer roles for first party Star Wars and Marvel games. Neither had practically any experience directly with Unity. In fact one, when I asked how much experience he had with Unity, he said he had opened it once, and concluded with “Meh… I’m sure I’ll figure it out.” We hired both. They both kick crazy amounts of ass.
Just look for game development jobs, see if Unity is in the reqs. Unity is a pretty wide spread and heavily used tool, like Photoshop/Maya/etc… it is already starting to just become an expected or learnable skill set. There are tons of jobs out there where you will be using Unity, though few that have it in the job title.
So if I wanted to create a FX reel for games I would have to learn Unity or Unreal first right? I have been doing some Digital Tutors lessons in Unity and they are very programming intensive.
I know Maya very well, should I create some cool effects in Maya using fluids and nParticles, would the games industry be interested in Film effects artist do they translate to games. Because I would think doing effects for Film and doing effects for games are two different mindsets and ways of working.
I thought a good way to present my FX games work would be to create an Unity environment that you can walk through to see and interact with all my FX examples. Or should I just do a few explosions, magical effects, water effects and record them to vimeo.
I think that Unity is a game engine used almost for indie developers and small companies (you can see many collaboration help solicitudes) then the profesional jobs offer for Unity developers is not very high.
By the same token, we don’t don’t hire Photoshop Users, or Maya Users. We hire Artists.