Getting credit for work....

[hockley91]

I was hired as contract labor to work on the 3D modeling for an architectural illustrator in town. I only worked on the majority of 3D modeling for some projects. The employer worked on some additional modeling and performed the final lighting, shading and rendering for those projects.

 

My question is, can I use the images I did for him on my new webpage promoting my work? I am sure I must give the company credit that I did the work for, but does it work the other way?

 

Must the employer give me credit on his website for work he hired me to do?

 

Anyway, this came up when I was showing my site to people and also showed the other employers site....

 

Any help would be appreciated....

 

Thanks!

[Ernest Burden III]

You need to define whether you were an independent contractor, probably being paid on a form 1199 basis, or an employee under Federal guidelines which would make your work 'work for hire'. Also, did you sign over any specific rights?

 

Work-for-hire means you have no copyright and little if any absolute right to claim authorship of what you produced. Typically you could be called 'w-f-h' if the employer provided your materials and supplies (software, for example, discs) and if they set your hours. There's more to it than that, of course.

 

If you were 'independent contractor' you probably do retain the right to show what you did--but ONLY what you did.

 

What you seemed to have missed so far is the easiest and most obvious way to resolve the question--talk to the company you did the work for about it and tell them what you want to do and see what their position is.

 

I cannot think of anything short of a NDA (non-disclosure) that would prevent you from WRITING about what you did, like a resume. Let the reader look it up on their own.

[alexg]

I don't think you should put the finished image rendered by your employer in your website. Your employer as the renderer will have full copyright of the image, not the modeller.

The last thing you'd like to do is to be accused of misleading people of thinking that you did all the scope of work yourself.

 

However, if the employer / client agrees, you can put the plain (untextured) 3d model on your website to show your capabilities on handling complex modelling. Just show interesting angles and details of the model and I'm sure if the amount of detail is great people will appreciate them.

[hockley91]

I suppose the easiest thing to do is to ask him.

 

I was hired as an independent contractor. He gave me a 1099 form every year that I did work for him.

 

If I am not able to show the final rendered image, I'm not going to bother with it. I have enough work to show, but I'd rather have more work to choose from than have less.

 

Thanks Guys!