Presenting portfolio work (characters in this case) in an engine like Unity/Unreal4 question.

Stinkfoot

So far I've mainly used Marmoset or fancy photoshop tricks to render my work on my portfolio , but during the GDC lecture on portfiolio's   it was mentioned that companies would like to see stuff rendered in engine, which makes perfect sense. Now i'm familair with importing models into an engine, but i'm looking around for a good lighting and presentation setup guide for characters in (for example) the Unreal engine. Are there any good guides out there? I've been looking for some specific character lighting setup guides but with no succes,  I'm probably not looking in the right direction (which is usually the case, if so, my apologies ) But I was wondering if there were any out there. thanks in advance!

thomasp

now i don't exactly get paid for saying this but i fail to see how marmoset is not an acceptable solution for this case? if you use a game engine for presentation, chances are you will be cranking up those shadow resolutions, tweak AO, use a lot more lights, larger/uncompressed/unfiltered textures and more fine-tuned shaders than a game would realistically cope with, you'd select the best camera angle and most sensible post processing and output your screenshots as large images and scale them down afterwards for nice antialiasing and selective sharpness. how is that different from using marmoset?

only the export process is usually far more application-specific, time-consuming and error-prone with those engines, is that perhaps the magic criteria -  that only masochists may apply?

obviously this is not to say you should be ignorant of how to make your content work with engines. perhaps that's all they were on about?

joebount

That plus the fact that you are probably using PBR (that should give you in theory very close results from one engine to the other (in theory))

Fingus

The reason people want to see stuff done in-engine is because they want to know that you understand the pipeline. I've known very skilled artists who only knew how to present their stuff inside of Maya and landed in hot water on their first job because they had to spend a whole day learning Unreal's asset structure and materials system, and worst of all were distracting other artists with questions. Now mind you, questions aren't bad. But really basic ones are annoying. It's much better that you learn this stuff on your own time.

It's even more important when doing environment art.

Prime8

That part of the presentation left me a bit wondering.
Is that really the standard requirement?
You want to apply at 3 different studios using different engines and create one version for Unity, UE4 and Cryengine each?!
Besides that they said that the software packages you are working with are not so important because they can teach you anything within 2 month.

thomasp

well, plenty of studios use inhouse technology so that's not going to matter, really. at best all that matters is that you can demonstrate in one way or another that you know how to build stuff that works well in realtime tech.

Tobbo

Yeah I think a real-time solution is what they were really getting at. I would argue it could also be said along the same lines to use reasonable polygon counts, texture resolutions, etc. for real-time work.

Stinkfoot

Good points all, thanks! clears a few things up for me.

Prime8

Became much clearer now, thanks for the input.

Prime8

Got one more question regarding presentation within an engine.
Is it a good idea to use actual ingame screenshots or is that too distracting from the object you want to present? In some cases, for example, it might be good to see the weapon from first-person view, or is it recommended to always setup a dedicated scenario?

gsokol

Honestly, I would think its less important to throw characters into Unreal or Unity.  Much more of a factor for environment art, as you will be spending much more of your time in a world editor for a game engine.

Marmo is still realtime, and materials behave relatively the same as they do in any game engine.  I would argue your time is better spent improving your art and making badass characters than it is to learn multiple game engines just to do something that you can do in minutes with Marmoset.

Prime8

Thanks again.
There are obviously some different opinions, good to know in any case.

almighty_gir

Bearing in mind that Toolbag2 is designed to be a middleware app: that is to say, you use it to preview your art content right the way through from initial high poly and pre-vizing materials, to setting up textures on your low poly before moving into engine, i'd say it's a perfectly valid way to present your artwork. Especially considering that it has material presets for UE4, and that Unity's standard shader is designed to mimic Toolbag2's Blinn-phong gloss curve.

And with the advent of the viewer, it makes it much easier to demonstrate to employers your ability to create solid meshes, and not hide things behind post effects or static bullshots.