[dagmx]

So one caveat I would mention is that you will likely earn more outside of the animation industry with those skills than within it.

With that out of the way, I think there are several avenues to get involved. Picking up a graphics engineering book, or learning OpenGL/Metal/DirectX will make you valuable as a realtime engineer.

But otherwise I would recommend finding an open source project and contributing to it as a way to build up the repertoire that you can use to apply for jobs with. Blender is an excellent place to start, but so are any of the projects under the academy software foundation at https://www.aswf.io

Getting more into the character animation side, you can look into Rigging, which is the process of setting up the armatures that move the characters. There are also things like simulation for cloth/hair etc...

Blender is a good place for a lot of them.

[truckerbill]

What might be a better paying area with that background?

Interesting that you say that technical art roles don’t need a reel always assumed otherwise.

[dagmx]

Anything in tech would pay significantly better with the same skills. Graphics engineers are in high demand at many major tech companies like Meta, Apple, Google.

But film/games will still pay well. Just not as well.

As for needing a role, well it depends. Tech art is a very wide role with very little definition. But also those skills apply to engineering instead of tech art as well.

Engineers don’t need reels. Tech artists would if they’re more on the art side (shaders, characters) but less so on the tools side.