My visit with Erwin

So today I talked to a member of the Creative Services team, his name is Erwin. He is the only person who uses 3dsMax, which is the tool that I am currently learning for school. This will most likely be my main tool, but as my instructor has mentioned, there are many programs out there and each one should be a tool in my tool box.

Erwin and I talked for about an hour about different things, different programs that he has used, and it turns out that 3dsMax is not used that much at all. State Farm is pretty much in the practice of hiring outside help to do their 3d animations. He mentioned that they have currently hired a company to make so many seconds of 3d animation and is paying them $150,000 to do it. Professor Clever had mentioned that freelancing can be a good way to go, but the downtime between jobs is what can pull you down. Erwin also mentioned that State Farm bounces back and forth between whether they want people for 3d work or not, and that maybe my skills would be better for Learning and Development instead of Creative Services. I do have skills with other programs that they use, such as Illustrator and Flash, and so I could try to get on there with those programs and continue to develop my 3d skills on my own after I am done with school. Maybe freelance a bit while I do that, but who knows?

Erwin told me that he had mentored someone before for a short period because she got in to Creative Services not long after he started mentoring her, so there was little left for him to mentor her on. He did give me a name of someone to talk to about mentoring, and I will follow up on that.

He did show me some of the things that he had worked on, such as a tornado simulation and at-fault simulators of vehicles. Those were pretty cool to look at. He said that the models were provided for him and he did the camera work. Still pretty cool stuff.

Over all, it was a very well spent hour. It has given me some leads to work on and made a friend. He said he will keep in touch with me and that I should start working on my portfolio, which is really great advice.

So, I gotta run ... gonna take care of some schoolwork.