I am from Seattle and I'm thinking about being an animator. I am currently a house painter with 2 years of community college involving almost no technical courses. I learned basic C++ game programming for fun and learned trigonometry again (from High School) also for fun. I am learning from scratch through Maya's tutorials and willing to purchase it if a career will pan out. I'm currently motivated from a desire to help with animation for The Dark Mod (thedarkmod.com), but i also would like a career change. 1. How much do animators earn? 2. Is animation enough or do i need another skill set such as art, modelling, texturing? 3. Is the field of animation a safe long term field or are new technologies replacing workers?

Quote: Original post by deEnumerator
1. How much do animators earn?

Checkout the Game Developer - 2008 Fall Career Guide.

Quote: 2. Is animation enough or do i need another skill set such as art, modelling, texturing?

Asking if something is enough never makes sense. Different companies have difference requirements. The best advice anyone can give is to simply make sure you know your stuff. Have you purchased a copy of the Animator's Survival Kit and/or Illusion of life and spent hours upon hours practicing everything covered in those books? On an additional note, if you have two equally qualified animators, but only one of them knows the ins and outs of rigging, which one are you going to hire?

Quote: 3. Is the field of animation a safe long term field or are new technologies replacing workers?

Animators are going to be needed for a long, long time. Right now there is a shift in the industry starting that leans towards physics and AI driven animation (so dynamically constructed animations), but someone with a strong understanding of animation is still needed to tweak the paramters used to get those results, etc. That being said, key frame and mo-cap are still the predominant ways animations are gotten into games.

It's also worth mentioning that even mocap generally requires a ton of animator fine-tuning to work well, so yeah I agree it's a very safe field. You can also transition very easily into film and TV production which is a nice safety net.

You should definitely be familiar with the other skill sets relating to creating 3D models. Obviously modeling knowledge is important since it determines how the rig will behave. Knowing how texturing works, not so much painting but how UV coords are mapped out, is also important since textures stretch as you animate and you need to take into account any seams.

In general if you have more skill sets you can make more informed decisions and find more potential job positions, especially at smaller studios where they need more generalist employees. If you go to a big place like EA, though, you'd likely be doing just animation and nothing else.

Thank you guys, that helps.