Professional portfolio review

AdrianZaplata

Hey!
My name is Adrian and I'm moving to London in 1 week. I was pretty sure that after my last few months I'll be able to get my first job in the game industry in London. I've spend almost a year on a professional game creation course lead by experts from the industry like CD PROJECT RED (The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077) or 11bit studios (Frostpunk, This War of Mine) creating 3 games and learning about everything. After sending many personalized applications to London game studios that I wanted to work in, I hit the ground getting no response and I started to have doubts... I wanted to find a job as generalist, but maybe the problem is that you need to specify even at this stage? Go deep into characters or environment? 

Another thing is software. I'm using Blender/Substance Painter/Zbrush and learning Maya (seems UK/London companies are using this one as the main software). Maybe "learning" stage is not enough for it...

I'd appreciate if you guys would give me an honest and harsh opinion on what you think about it and my portfolio. Is it enough to work as professional yet or still needs a lot of work? What would you change? What piece should I remove/improve? Were you in the same place? How did you overcome it?

http://www.artstation.com/adrianzaplata


Thank you a lot for your time and I'm looking forward to help you too!

Cheers,
Adrian Zapłata

Ashervisalis

Hey Adrian. I'm not sure if any of your pieces are quite at professional quality yet. You should probably just focus on characters, environments, or hard surface and try to become amazing at whichever one you specifically choose. You should find some professional artist's portfolios and aim for that quality, and also figure out what studios you want to work for in London and start replicating their styles.

AdrianZaplata

Thanks you for your answer Ashervisalis! Yea... that's a good advice there with aiming and following a studio where I wanna work. 

Rnz

Definitely start learning about high poly models and how to bake a normal map. This will help you a lot.

NikhilR

What was the course you took?

Zi0

What Rnz said + choose a direction like characters or props etc and work on becoming very good at producing quality content because that is what a studio wants to see. Currently you only have very simple assets like a phone booth and a bookshelve, you need assets with more challenging shapes. I would recommend choosing a specialization and arming yourself with good tutorials etc because currently I dont think this is sufficient to get a job. There is a good quote from Flipped Normals "Your portfolio should show marketable skills – Work which can be used directly in a production." Also take a look at this thread https://polycount.com/discussion/187512/recently-hired-in-aaa-show-us-your-portfolio

Last thing, never give up!

AdrianZaplata

Thanks a lot guys for your answers! I was moving to London lately and did not had time to look at forum, but finally I am living in London

@Rnz
I was already studying both for a quite a while, but I was using it mainly for characters, never tried it on hard-surface. Do you mean I should use it on cars? They would look probably a lot better with normal maps from high poly models...

@NikhilR
It was a "Creating video games" course at Game Dev School in Warsaw. We have lectures every 2 weeks (with some breaks through the year) with some experts from CGI. We're creating 4 games through the whole year. I am working right now on my 4th project with my collegues and we have like 2 months left. 

@Zi0
Thanks! I am right now little bit confused, becouse I wanted to become a character artist in the future, but from what I know it's very hard to get into it professional (not much possitions for 3D character artists), so I though I'd try with environment or props to have more chances. What do you think? 
I've seen almost all videos from Flipped Normals and I remember this quote! I've also saw this thread you sent, it's very helpfull.


Thanks again! I'll probably start a new big personal project after I'm done with our last game I'm making right now. Still not sure if I should stick with characters or go for props/enviro...

Zi0

Well, if your passion lies with characters I would go for that https://gumroad.com/grassettiart#hDtpb from what I heard these tutorials are great for learning anatomy. There are a lot of great character artists on this forum that might have tips on how to become one. Here in Cracow we have m4g seminars and they have a anatomy class https://m4gseminars.pl/sculpting-anatomy/  and again a handy link from flipped normals https://hub.flippednormals.com/becoming-a-character-artist-ultimate-guide/

Sunray

Hey man if your passion is to create 3d characters don't waste your time on enviroment while it's true it's harder to get a job in character art oppsed to prop artist. Both are still hard might as well invest your time into what you are passionate about! Since you wanted harsh honest feedback. Everything onyour portfolio is going to scare proffesional studios away, no one wants a generalized 3d artsist that's below avergage in all 3d aspects. Compared to the proffesionals they currently have working for them. You can't study to be a "3d generalist" you become one after many years of professional experience.

All your portfolio is showing right now is that you are lacking knowledge. For now I would also not bother with full on characters just make busts they take less time and you can apply all the stuff you learned from your previous bust in your new one. My portfolio is a prettty outdated haha, I did an intersnhip for a year at elite3d and going to return there next month to work full time. I still have a lot to learn as well. If you'd like we can chat a bit over at discord I could try to guide you a bit towards the good direction