Hey all, I’ve been working in Unity for about 3 years now and that’s the only engine I’ve been using in the companies I’ve worked at.
My current situation is that I only have a small freelance assignment currently and am currently looking for work in Los Angeles, but it feels as if no one is looking for Unity artists at the moment. A lot of job postings I’ve seen for the past couple months have been looking for UE4 artists.
So I just wanted to hear some opinions and maybe even some experiences. Did you specialize in one engine or spread yourself out a little into another? I can see myself learning UE4, but not fast enough to get hired for it.
I’ve worked at various companies across the years and have never been fortunate enough to work with either Unreal or Unity on a production level, I have self taught myself Unreal over the years in my spare time and personally feel that if you know how to do it in one engine then you have some knowledge of where to begin looking for information on how to do it in another engine.
Each engine has there Pro’s and Con’s and its up to you which one you feel more comfortable within but it doesn’t hurt just scratching the surface of the other engine
That’s true, I guess my expectations were a little too high, it really wouldn’t hurt to pick at a different engine every so often just to familiarize yourself with some of its pieces.
In my experience, it’s far more important that your fx look good than what engine you’re using. In a recent job interview, the fact that I had 5+ years of Unity experience and no Unreal experience whatsoever (except in doing a single art test) was a non-issue (edit: even though the studio works in Unreal). The studio was happy to have me anyway, confident that the skills would transfer easily.
And, I think, if you’re talking about Unreal<->Unity, it really is the case. I don’t think it hurts to learn new toolsets – one of the great advantages, for example, is that doing one art test in Unreal showed me a bunch of things that I was missing in Unity, which allowed me to try to code some workarounds to add those features to my Unity projects. Similarly, many of the things I learnt in Unity carried across fairly easily into Unreal.
I feel like the only time not knowing a specific game engine might hurt you is if the studio that’s hiring is in a super stressful situation, where they need to deliver something really soon and therefore need you to hit the ground running. I think most studios who have experience see the software as a fairly interchangeable tool, and that it’s your knowledge, your eyes, your art, that really matter. Learning new software’s pretty pain-free, especially if you’ve got co-workers who’re already familiar with it that you can ping now and then when you get badly stuck.
I’d recommend that you just continue making the best-looking, best-feeling fx that you can, whatever the toolset or engine. Learn your timing, colours and form, give your fx life and personality, etc. Having a great fx portfolio in the wrong engine, could still get you a job. Knowing the engine but not demonstrating an understanding of artistic principles means you’re very unlikely to find work, imo. Learning Unreal won’t hurt, and you should do it if you like, but I really don’t think that that’s something to focus on unless you’re already happy with your artistic growth.
The short answer is - the tool doesn’t matter, only results does. If you create great FX work in Unity, you’ll be fine.
Use the tools that are available to create best possible product you can deliver - trust me, tools doesn’t matter.
Yeaa… some things are way easier in some other packages, but in realtime FX we’re still kind of working with sprites, handpainted textures, simple shaders etc.
As an example (don’t want to sound cocky or like braging - just real life experience):
I am working as a freelance with a company that has some really weird engine. They are using flash (sic!) and the particle editor is written by a chinese guy. There are no updates, no support, no tutorials. The editor is simple but has many quirks. Still - it has the essentials. Position, rotation, scale, animated sprites, velocity etc. Just the simple stuff. I don’t want to brag or anything but they are amazed how I’ve achieved some things, and they are very happy about my work. I’ve learned this tool in no time - the pricipals are the same as any other game engine FX editor.
Hope this motivates you to try to apply for a job somewhere you never thought of because you are ‘only Unity artist’
