Gnomon Tuition: Fill & Download for Free

CCA, the art school I attended now costs $42,000+/yr. Studying technology at just about any college would cost the same or less. Honestly, I wouldn’t have attended art school, if my tuition hadn’t been covered by the school.Art technique lessons are the same low cost as programming lessons at the following websites:——————————————————GumroadArt - Gumroad DiscoverIllustration - Gumroad DiscoverProgramming - Gumroad Discover——————————————————SchoolismSchoolism - Watch the Videos. Do the Assignments. Get Video Feedback on your Art. Education Evolved——————————————————UartsyThe Online Art School——————————————————UdemyUdemy: Online Courses Anytime, Anywhere——————————————————YoutubeFigure Drawing - Proko——————————————————LyndaLynda.com: Online Video Tutorials & Training——————————————————PluralsightUnlimited Online Developer, IT and Creative Training——————————————————The Kubert SchoolThe Kubert School——————————————————GnomonThe Gnomon Workshop——————————————————3DMotiveThe web's best game art and 3d modeling tutorials——————————————————fxphdWelcome——————————————————cmiVFXcmiVFX - High End Video Training for the Visual Effects Industry——————————————————Golden Gate Atelier - they’re going to start releasing videos soon…Golden Gate Atelier | Classical Training for the Realist Artist——————————————————Also, University’s, such as Stanford & UC Berkeley, release a lot of free online lectures, although mainly technical from what I’ve seen.

Ok, first of all, a bit of terminology. “Game design company” isn’t a thing. Game design is one particular field within the larger industry of game development. Blizzard and Atlus are game developers; only a small percentage of their employees are game designers.I say this not just to be pedantic, but because I’m not totally sure what your goal is. If you want to be a game designer, you shouldn’t be studying animation. Studying animation makes sense if you want to be an animator, it might make sense at some colleges for other game art positions (as modeling and texturing is sometimes lumped into the animation department), but it has very little in common with game design.Anyways, with that out of the way, no one cares where you went to college. We just barely care if you went to college at all. (Note that this is just for animation and game art positions—programming and design positions is entirely different). The two main things we care about are:Does your portfolio and/or demo reel demonstrate you can do the work we need you to?Do you seem like a pleasant person to work with?Now, obviously a good college is going to help you with one. And if you meet someone at college who can later be a connection who can vouch for you on point two, that’s a big plus. But no one is ever going to say “Ooh, he went to University X, we should hire him”.And that’s important, because the best animation schools are insanely fucking expensive (at least in the U.S.). Ringling College of Art and Design, for example, is the single most expensive college of any type in the country, once you factor in financial aid (and the lack there of). If you’ve got rich parents paying the bills, here are a few places to consider:Ringling College of Art and DesignGnomonSavannah College of Art and DesignCalArts (more oriented towards film/TV work, but they’ll definitely teach you animation well)But if you’re trying to pay for any of those schools with student loans, you’ll end up with an amount of debt that is absolutely unmanageable given the mediocre pay and poor job stability of the game industry. It’s really not a path I can endorse.I do think it’s valuable to get some sort of degree, if only because most people don’t stay in games their own careers. As such, what I’d recommend is find whatever school that’s affordable that’ll teach you as much as possible. That might be a state school; San Jose State University has a pretty decent animation program, for example, and Michigan State University has a game development program with an art/animation track that partners with Volition. Or it might mean finding an art school that will give you a hefty scholarship. That’s what I did; I attended California College of the Arts, which gave me a pretty good quality education for a reasonable price, though it wasn’t as tightly oriented with my career goals as I’d like. Then spend some of the absolutely gigantic amounts of money you’re saving on tuition and spend it on online workshops. The Computer Graphics Master Academy has some good ones, AnimSchool and Animation Mentor are out there, and some individual artists offer one-on-one mentorship through Gumroad or Patreon.If you do that, and work hard, you should be in a pretty good place. But don’t forget that it’s an extremely competitive industry, and the barrier to break in is very very high. It took me almost six years between when I graduated and when I got my first decently-paid game industry job, and I was working very hard that entire time. Part of that was my mistakes—if I’d started doing online classes earlier and focused my learning a bit more narrowly I’d have made it sooner. But well over half of people who aspire to be game artists or animators never make it, and end up giving up and doing something entirely unrelated with their lives. This isn’t a career you should pursue unless you’re confident you’re willing and able to put an exhausting amount of effort into it.

Brigham Young University! Myself and a huge chunk of my graduating class at BYU are now working at major feature film and game studios. The hire placement rate is fantastic, and it’s possible to graduate with little to no student debt because it’s a private subsidized school with a very affordable tuition.Here’s what you should know about it before you consider it, though: It is a religious school, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That doesn’t mean you have to be a member of the church to apply or attend, but you do have to adhere to their honor code, which includes things such as no drinking, not living with your boyfriend/girlfriend, and things of the like.It is also a liberal arts university, and the Animation program is one of the available majors. This means that you still need to take math, English, and other GE courses to graduate, unlike art-specific schools like CalArts. You also would need to get into BYU, and then get into the Animation Program separately— something that’s kind of hard to do, but one of the reasons it’s such a successful program. When I attended, only 25 students were let in a year, out of 100–300 applicants (depending on the year).However! If none of that has deterred you from looking into it, I highly recommend it. There’s a reason why the program consistently turns out so many professional animators at Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Sony, and BlueSky. The program doesn’t care about your grades at all; it’s really aimed at getting you a job and building your portfolio. The attitude is very different in that way. They also have a yearly senior capstone project where the students pitch, develop, and finish their own short film, which year after year continues to earn Student Emmy awards, sometimes BAFTAs and Annecy awards as well.The program also has a great relationship with the recruiters at many major studios, and the recruiters often go specifically to BYU to gather their first picks for an internship or job opening.It’s definitely worth looking into! However, if BYU doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, I would also look into Texas A&M, as they have a pretty good (and I’m guessing more affordable than most art schools?) animation program.The typical “top picks” for the CG feature film industry, regardless of price tag, would probably be CalArts, Gnomon, and Ringling, in case you were curious.