Hi Margaret, I have a BA in 3D modeling and looking to shift my knowledge ino the engineering field. I was wondering if you knew any job titles that would use more 3D design than 2d drafting?

Hi Ben,

Lots of engineering jobs use 3D design, actually! Drafting is (I think) fading out as 3D tools become easier to use and more versatile.  In my university department, students tend to use SolidWorks (though when I was an undergrad I used ProEngineer, now Creo Parametric).  Autodesk Fusion is free for students, and I think there are several other 3D design programs that are free to use.  Maya is a good one.

I work in academia, so I don't have a good sense of what a typical job would be or a job title.  But for most engineering design work, you're not only thinking about the appearance of the object, but also the physical forces on the part.  For example, you might design a pipe elbow that has to withstand a high-pressure fluid flowing through it.  If you have a design of that pipe elbow in SolidWorks, you can use an integrated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package to see how the flow is varying inside the pipe, and how that might generate forces on the pipe elbow.  I think that's the biggest difference between 3D design in engineering vs. game and movie design: we care about whether the physical forces are realistic, not just whether they look realistic.

I think the job titles you are looking for would actually be like "Modeler" or "Designer", which can be very general, so look at the job description.  For many of these jobs you may not need a degree in engineering.  Hope this helps!