Mobile Game Portfolios - what to put in them?

Port-Seven

Looking for a job in mobile games seems like a decent way to build your resume and portfolio for recent graduates and artists with little to no professional experience. My college game art program was geared almost entirely towards AAA style art so I don't have many pieces that I feel would work to my advantage if I was to apply to a mobile game studio. I've taken a look around and I haven't been able to find too many portfolios that specifically showcase this kind of low poly art.

I want to know what would be ideal to include in a portfolio that was being sent to a mobile game company. I know hand painted textures and tiling textures are important but what kind of models would show these off nicely? Buildings? Vehicles? Even better, if you were looking to hire a mobile game artist how would you judge their portfolio and what specific things would you be looking for?

fmnoor

It depends on the type of studio you're looking at - a lot of mobile studios use 2D art for their games, not necessarily sprite but vector/illustrator stuff for buildings and tiles. Higher end games tend to be closer to console / handheld levels of art.

You will probably want to show that you can pull off nice looking diffuse-only textures without relying heavily too much on shaders.

Other than that, you don't have to focus too heavily on super low-res textures and super lower triangle counts, the iPad 2 can handle multiple 2048 textures easily and you can dump in some pretty dense environments / characters. The only thing you need to be careful about is shader complexity but even then, normals/specs aren't really out of the question.

You just need to be more efficient in using textures and shaders - is all I can think of.

Giles_P

Working at a mobile games studio I can safely say that the art really isnt that much different. For example we do use low polly models but I recently worked on E.T The green Planet for IOS, which being a freemium game alot of models are simply a 3D render so polly limits/textures.etc don't matter as long as the final render thats used in game looks good. I would agree though that generally working in mobile especially smaller teams they generally like you to be able to do some 2D work also. For example we use After Effects and illustrator alot as well as the usual Maya/Max/Photoshop. Having said that the I Pad 2/3/4 and latest I-Phone are really pushing current gen console specs so can handle a hell of alot. Its a tricky one but for me I would show both high polly and low polly as the way mobile is going its catching consoles extremely fast. The new Infinity Blade dungeons looks stunning.

Yozora

Just have a portfolio with good looking game art, that's all you really need. But a willingness to learn and/or do other art stuff like GUI, FX, Concepting, Animation and even making marketing shots will be a big plus for smaller studios.

I'm pretty much the only artist at our studio and I do all those things. I probably spend less than 10% of my time modelling stuff.

But I like it. I'm more of a generalist and prefer switching between different things... sometimes I dabble in coding too (if copy/pasting/editing existing code counts )
Lately, I have started to think of myself as more of a game designer rather than a 3d artist.

Ged

yeah make beautiful game art, preferably low poly or 2d game art, and if the studio is small be versatile, often the studios are not very big and need you to help make some special effects or ui or make a logo design. Im not saying you have to have some giant crazy portfolio full of bits and bobs but just mention in your cv or job application that you can do these extra things - if you feel you have the skills for actually doing those extras.