Two questions: How long do you go between jobs and is my portfolio ok

jessnado

I've recently been displaced of my first ever game art job and I'm getting a little antsy. In the mean time, I've been trying to learn Maya, ZBrush, and Unity to round out my tool-set (previously all Blender and UE4) while doing random freelance.

How long on average do most people go without finding a new position?
What can I do to improve my portfolio? Art station | Website

Any guidance is helpful, even if it's just to tell me to have a little more patience.

garcellano

Hmmm... so, excluding freelance, my last time in between was about 16 months. I was laid off around early January last year, and got an in-house gig a few months ago. Similar to how you feel, I started diving in Substance Designer, UE4, and some Prop modeling, then slowly started getting some freelance. Seems like showing your progress would help, like in a blog, Sketchbook thread, or making a thread of a scene/character you have in mind, or even on Twitter, FB, Linkedin. 

The job I was doing before was mainly hard surface modeling and low-poly modeling. Going backwards, I was in between jobs for about 7-8  months during that time. I was working in a bunch of hard-surface modeling for my portfolio, while slowly picking up UE4, Substance Painter and Designer.

I think it's different for everybody, as far as gaps of breaks in between jobs. I would assume some would just take a bit of a break or vacation, and come back, or jump right back in on another position. Freelance is always good, taking something you can learn from.

Ashervisalis

Hey Jess! Here's some critiques on your portfolio;

- Don't include the brick material on your portfolio; It's not a good enough material to turn heads. The bricks are too shiny and they're weirdly bumpy (like bark or something). There are large portions of the graph that needs frames or comments so someone can tell what they're looking at.
- 27 images might be a bit too much to look at for someone recruiting. You could easily condense so many of the props from Hypatia down into a few images. The 'All the things boutique' folder has a lot of the items in there already.