Looking for Game Industry Professionals Advice

Odins3d

I'm trying to get into the video game industry and have had no luck yet. What do I need to add or change in my portfolio www.odins3d.com to get a better shot of breaking in. Critic anything you want layout of my website/models/textures/lighting I'm willing to change anything.

Add3r

What is your goal/objective for a career in games? The objective on your resume does not tell me what your specialty is or what you want to do. I see a very generalist skill set, all of which are at a moderate level of skill. I think the major thing is, you have a bunch of okay work, nothing that blows my mind (the book of life work is great! but then the eclipse gun is a stark contrast in quality). Going to say what everyone does in a port critic, you are only as strong as your weakest piece. Think you should step back from your work and pick out your weakest and pull them off the site and keep the strongest.

Do not be afraid of a smaller quantity of work on the site. I know people that have posted a single piece of work and have gotten hired purely on that and their personality.

Find a specialty that you are very passionate about (env modeling, env texturing, env props, hard surface modeling which I guess falls under props, etc) and really dig into a piece based around that. It is okay to be a generalist, which actually is a perk to most companies if you can fill one role primarily.

Not sure if any of that made sense, it is early, but your work is far from bad. Definitely strong enough to warrant an art test for a spot at a studio, especially with one really killer polished piece.

Gannon

Hey Odin, Long time no see! I love your work on the book of life.

Your game scenes are a little low res if you're looking to get into AAA studios imo. Push those polys and silhouettes a bit more like your book of life work sans the holding edges.

Outside of that the only thing that I can see hurting you is your texture/material work look flat and a little low res. Try pushing the contrast a bit more to really make those materials pop.

Odins3d

Hey James,
So what is the poly count I should be aiming for?Yea I know I'm weak at texturing been working on getting better learning the PBR work flow and all that

Brian "Panda" Choi

Hey Odin! Its good to hear from you again! Hope things have been going decent since we met at USC a couple years back for Core.

I am confused why no one's picked you up for game work yet.

I guess to play as that guys who says "You're missing this" a couple things that may help for portfolio range:

- Shader Work (Node based material generation in Substance Designer or UE4, etc.)
- a scene where you're really dramatically lighting it

The rest of it seems fine to me. I think as a secondary, maybe you could revisit some of the more cleaner vehicle models and do a damage pass on them. A before and after.

But, iono man, looks good to me. It just goes up from here.

Gannon

There's really no solid number. My rule of thumb is get rid of anything that has obvious faceting from where you'd expect the player to view it from. For example some of your vines are a little low.

If you're still using maya, Hit 7 with no lights in the scene and view the object as if it was just a black silhouette.