Modelling a Car as Environment Artist

TirvasFreeze

Hi,

I would like to know if its good if i have a Car with an amazing Environment in my Portfolio for example i model a Apocalypse Car in an Apocalypse Environment would it be good for the Portfolio im asking that because i dont want that when recruiters look at my Portfolio that they think im an Hard Surface or Vehicle Artist...

many greetings,
Josh

NikhilR

Unless you're applying for a hard surface or vehicle artist position, which may/may not require several examples, a decent enough environment that shows that you have a good command of the pipeline should ideally be sufficient.
Hiring in the game industry is very market oriented, so its not entirely clear what is actually appealing to several people involved in hiring you.
Like a lot of whether you ought to be hired or not takes place after the fact, i.e they see the piece and then decide depending on whether what they wanted earlier is still what they want now.
I'd suggest balancing your portfolio work with networking at any local studios, game dev meetups.etc.

A lot of the advice here can be make that greatest most ultimate top tier portfolio that gets thousands of likes on artstation and then companies will be fighting over you, which may or may not be practical starting out, or really necessary to get a start somewhere.

Also HR looks at a portfolio very differently from art lead/director, so unless you get very specific feedback on a rejection, I wouldn't necessarily speculate.
Meaning, if you submitted an environment without a car and got rejected with the standard rejection I wouldn't put the reason on not having made a car.
Or that adding a car and reapplying will get you the job. 

But if you made a car from mad max fury road and posted that on a forum full of fans, you might get some freelance work and make new connections. So it really comes down to how you market yourself.

Ex-Ray

Yeah it's fine, I modelled a sci-fi tank for my environment, it was my hero prop that just served as a focal point. I also showed a breakdown of it to show supplementary skillset beyond the environmental stuff. The only negative is the increase in workload.

Regarding recruiters, where you can, you just have very clear messaging you're a environment artist and your portfolio contains a high percentage of environments. I did 80% Env and 20% props/high poly to demo secondary supplementary skills, which I showed last.

Ashervisalis

I'm an environment artist, and for the first 3 months at my job I basically just modeled vehicles. Modeling cars should show you have a good understanding of complex sub-D meshes.

sacboi

Agree with the general sentiment and keeping in mind there's many examples of enviro pieces with complex mechanical props created by senior industry artists posted on places like ArtStaion. So if you've envisioned a dystopia driven project with an additional inclusion of some type of vehicle then may I suggest you can also think about modeling a damaged/abandoned wreck, for example though worth pointing out probably dependent upon one's own artistic  interpretation of what constitutes an 'Apocalyptic' scenario.