The 3D Artist 2025 Year End Round-up
AI, A Crab, and More
As we close out 2025, I’m going to take a short pause in the fashion deep-dive series to do what I’ve done the past few years: a year-end roundup.
This is a chance to step back from week-to-week posts and look at the bigger picture at what actually changed this year, what didn’t, how the industry feels, and what’s been happening behind the scenes with the newsletter and the 3D Artist Community.
It also gives me a chance to pause from all the holiday/family shenanigans…like how my 2 kids ended up with a pet European Green Crab in their bedroom (it’s a long story…).
Meet Jason Mamoa Santa Shellington Tanzillo!
The Macro View: A New Baseline
From the film, gaming, and animation standpoint, 2025 didn’t feel dramatically different from 2024.
The best analogy I have is inflation. When inflation slows (hooray!), prices stop rising fast but they don’t go back down. If eggs went from $2 to $4, slowing inflation doesn’t magically bring them back to $2. That new price just becomes the baseline.
That’s where the 3D industry is right now.
The massive waves of layoffs and studio closures have slowed. We’re not seeing the constant bad news. But those jobs didn’t come roaring back either. I still know a lot of extraordinarily talented people who are out of work, and the lack of a real bounce-back is very real.
Things haven’t gotten worse…but they haven’t truly gotten better.
Growth Outside of Entertainment
What has continued to grow in 2025 is demand for 3D artists outside of traditional entertainment.
If you’ve been subscribed for a while, you know I send out a weekly list of 3D jobs outside film, games, and VFX. When I started doing that about a year and a half ago, finding three good roles a week was work.
That’s no longer the case.
Now the challenge is filtering. Jobs find me. I regularly include five, six, sometimes more roles simply because there’s no reason not to share them. Product visualization, fashion, footwear, automotive, architecture, marketing…the demand is steady and increasingly normalized.
Again, the trend we saw in 2024 didn’t slow down in 2025.
AI in 2025: Less Hype, More Reality
AI is still a massive topic, but the tone shifted this year.
In 2024, it was new, loud, and anxiety-inducing. In 2025, it stopped being interesting and started being tested.
One of my biggest takeaways from SIGGRAPH was how many companies asked their R&D, pipeline teams, and artists to genuinely test generative AI inside real workflows and how consistent the feedback was. These tools don’t do what they claim to do, at least not at the scale, reliability, or consistency professional production requires.
AI has proven useful on the margins: generative fill, extending clips, upscaling, cleanup work. Helpful, yes. Transformative, not really.
What has been meaningful is AI showing up in less flashy places like communication, file management, organization, language translation. For non-native English speakers especially, that’s a real step toward a more level playing field.
The other big shift is acceptance. I don’t see the same widespread artistic backlash anymore. Not because people love AI, but because there’s a growing understanding that we can’t unring that bell. The conversation has moved from “stop it” to “how do we responsibly control it and not get left behind.”
Even people who were strongly against AI early on are now at least testing it.
The 3D Artist Newsletter Round-Up
Let’s zoom in.
The 3D Artist Newsletter now sits at:
3,785 subscribers (up from 2,164 at the end of 2024 — +75% YoY)
291,529 total views (up from 182,787 — +59% YoY)
101 newsletters published (consistent weekly cadence across the year)
Everything continues to trend up and to the right. Apparently I haven’t offended enough people yet to make them unsubscribe.
The bigger change this year wasn’t just the numbers; it was the direction. Late in 2025, I shifted from loosely connected weekly thoughts to more structured, practical guides. That shift came from a simple challenge: make this useful.
The Product Visualization guide, the Fashion deep dive, and what’s coming next are all built around making career transitions feel less abstract and more actionable.
The Community: From Gathering to Infrastructure
The biggest evolution this year happened inside the 3D Artist Community.
The community now stands at:
102 total members (up from 76 in 2024 — +34% growth)
$1,130 in Monthly Recurring Revenue (Reminder: the money goes straight into supporting the community. No one is profiting financially from our group.) (up from $700 — +61% growth)
50+ total AMAs (more than double where we were this time last year)
More importantly, we launched the 3DAC Leadership Council.
What started as a group focused on shared learning is becoming something more durable. We now have dedicated groups for research and development, finance, marketing, member support, production, and corporate partnerships.
This is the shift from a community that talks to a community that builds. There’s not much to announce yet but 2026 is when this work starts to show up in the world.
Most Popular 3D Artist Newsletter Articles of the Year
Looking Ahead to 2026
If I had to summarize my outlook for 2026 in one sentence: AI will be asked to put up or shut up.
Professional-grade generative imaging still isn’t reliable, consistent, or most importantly, copyrightable. What I expect instead is deeper integration of AI into smaller, secondary tasks that speed up real workflows rather than pretending to replace them.
I also wouldn’t be surprised by a mild AI bubble deflating. Not a dramatic crash (and certainly nothing to cheer for as no one wins in these situations) but a quiet thinning of companies that raised big money claiming to solve problems they can’t quite solve.
On the entertainment side, I expect continued fragmentation: fewer massive tentpoles, more smaller productions, leaner VFX teams, and more small studios popping up.
Outside of entertainment, 3D adoption should continue to accelerate. Supply chain instability, tariffs, and the cost of moving physical goods all push companies toward designing digitally first. Digital twins and virtual prototyping are no longer trends…they’re becoming defaults.
For the newsletter, the goal is providing information that is actionable for any creative professional getting into a new 3D industry. For the community, the goal is artist-led infrastructure. We finally have momentum, structure, and a budget to build things that actually matter.
In Closing
When I started this newsletter, I never imagined it would turn into this. The number of people I’ve met through emails, conferences, and the community has been one of the most meaningful parts of my professional life.
Working remotely can be isolating. This hasn’t been.
I don’t actually know what comes next but I’m genuinely excited to keep figuring it out together.
Wishing you a safe, restful holiday season and a very happy New Year.
Ok…that was enough of a break for me. Back to my real world of teaching a crab how to defend our home while we are out!
The 3D Artist Community
3D Merch is here and we have a new hoodie!
3D Job Spreadsheet
Link to Google Doc With A TON of Jobs in Animation (not operated by me)
Hello! Michael Tanzillo here. I am the Head of Technical Artists with the Substance 3D team at Adobe. Previously, I was a Senior Artist on animated films at Blue Sky Studios/Disney with credits including three Ice Age movies, two Rios, Peanuts, Ferdinand, Spies in Disguise, and Epic.
In addition to his work as an artist, I am the Co-Author of the book Lighting for Animation: The Visual Art of Storytelling and the Co-Founder of The Academy of Animated Art, an online school that has helped hundreds of artists around the world begin careers in Animation, Visual Effects, and Digital Imaging. I also created The 3D Artist Community on Skool and this newsletter.
www.michaeltanzillo.com
Free 3D Tutorials on the Michael Tanzillo YouTube Channel
Thanks for reading The 3D Artist! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. All views and opinions are my own!