I would like to advise having a sour bite off reality first.
Very simplified and overly black and white dramatised into a nutshell: You´ll need enough funds to cover at least 4-6 months of your costs of living (including everything from rent to tax&healthcare). That is if you plan on taking on your own clients and working from at home, which means you have to kickstart yourself into a full-fledged, responsible businessperson, office manager, IT guy, producer and artist while making rounds for new contacts, finding the opportunity, getting the job, doing it, delivering it and waiting for it to get paid. I would like to advise you look into "just" freelancing, e.g. you get booked by a company, they bring you in, you work there on their equipment and you leave them with a smile when you´re done. That´s hard enough to get into but doesn´t give you the burden of having to invest into personal equipment on top of securing your cost of living for the first few months. Judging from your email adress, you may want to look into utopiapeople.com or vfxjobs.com "Remote" 3D jobs (e.g. working from home) are quite rare, it´s far more common to bring in freelancers (including the travel&accomodation expenses) as needed in my personal experience. Concept design or highly specialized tasks can be an exception. Even if you land "just" a junior position, you should expect/gain a reasonably good day rate and hopefully at decent work experience out of working at a new shop. Another thing to realize is that working freelance means you may have to embrace months of downtime as natural and don´t just expect to multiply your day rate by 180 days/year, which some fellow employees may tend to do when you´re judged on what you ask per day. That can lead to some tension and misbehaviour. Everybody seems to forget about all the taxes, too. Cheers, tim P.S: I don´t have an SSD here but would advise you make sure you have at least 16 or 24 GB of RAM. On 13.09.2013 21:01, Johan Forsgren wrote:
Hey all, I'm currently hold a permanent position i small studio, but I'm starting to wonder if freelancing isn't the way to go for me, This brings me to the question of hardware, and I'm wondering if any of you freelancers can't give your input on what the minimum spec for a workstation should be. I cant afford anything beyond basic, really the no 1 reason that I'm thinking about freelancing is the complete lack of zero's on my bank statement. But it also limits my options equipment-wise quite a bit. I'm thinking something-ish like this: intel i5-3350P 8 gig ram geforce 640 gtm no ssd :( So I guess my question here is if there's possible to do simpler 3d work on a personal workstation like this? I understand that its POSSIBLE but how badly will I want to chew my arm of after say 6 months of freelancing doing product viz and motion graphics? -- JOHAN FORSGREN CG ARTIST Phone + 46 31 752 20 00 [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Direct + 46 31 752 20 07 Follow Edithouse at at twitter.com/edithouse <http://www.twitter.com/edithouse> example's logo <http://www.edithouse.se/> Edit house Film Works www.edithouse.se <http://www.edithouse.se/> Lilla Bommen 4a, S-411 04 Göteborg, Sweden www.twitter.com/edithouse <http://www.twitter.com/edithouse>
