Please bear with me, I am not a native English speaker.

Some background:



I have completed my animation course 2 years ago and I got job offers right away, but most companies were only hiring either as interns or as rotoscope artists or were paying too little (like 80$-100$ a month). The animation course alone cost me 2000$ a year for 3 years.

So, taking 80$ a month made no sense, I was the second best and got second rank in my class which had 500 students (Each class only had 50 students at max) in total. The one who came first was a girl who had done a 5 year art school before joining the animation course. So I was pretty happy with my performance.

I decided to go the freelancing route, I got a few clients within a year, I was being paid 400$ a project, which was great, they saw the quality of my work and praised me for it, they wanted me to be faster but were ok due to the detailed models I made. It was a Multi National Company and they made me sign an NDA, I am legally not allowed to take credit for my work or show it to others, they didn’t wanted their competitors to know they had a freelancer doing the work, they thought it made their company look bad. I didn’t mind as I was happy with the pay.

I worked on a few 3D indie games too but none of the projects finished, some times the people left sometimes the lead/director left.

Whats got me worried?:



Slowly the projects became rare and I have made only 1000$ in the last 2 years. With no project at all for the last 6 months.

I want to be a character artist and I have been practicing and working in the 3D field for over 5 years.

I practice every day on sculpting 2 hrs and than work on either a freelance project or learn something new, like jewelry design, product viz, Game development using Unity and C#. I ended up developing 2 small 3D games too, one is just a clone.

But after all this the work seems to be getting less and less, and even when I do find something its never regarding a Character modeling or Character development, its either Graphic designs or Arch Viz and the payment sucks.

Recently I contacted the Clothing Brand company and asked them if they have any work and if they knew someone who would need anything done. They told me, I was too expensive and they and their competitors and sister companies have all started using software’s to auto generate clothing, I was worried by his tone, he once gave me 400 Pounds and was surprised that I was only asking for 400 $'s, and now suddenly this rude response?! He had felt cheated.

I told him I never used any such auto generating software and was making the models in blender and ZBrush he said, he didn’t care, he could get good quality models from Make Human and good quality clothes from another app he said and he just hung up, rudely.

I searched for such apps and found out about Make Human, now this isn’t even a paid software and its quality is quite nice considering the ease, time and price. Then I came across other such apps.

Now I am worried if I need to change fields and or find work in other sectors as I only have 6 months of savings left.

The Questions:

Do anyone else worry about such issues?!

Have you guys noticed any decline in projects in 3d Modeling field?

Do you guys use such softwares?

If the movie industry has started using 3D scanners and such softwares are coming out aren’t you worried about the future?

What do you thing the future of 3d Modeling and 3D Modelers will be like?

Am I at fault, am I doing something wrong?!

Thankyou for taking the time and helping me out, I genuinely appreciate it.