Is my portfolio enough to get into the industry? (Character Artist)

YYEEAAAHHH

For context, I graduated in 2017 with a game design degree that didn't teach me how to do anything past basic Maya modeling.  I built characters out of an interest and applied to so many places with the only common theme being rejection.  I moved to LA and underwent a mentorship and scrubbed my portfolio and made 3 pieces within that time. 

I know my work isn't exactly AAA, but would this be enough to get into the industry along with basically no work experience?  Or is there any big pieces standing out I should fix in order to stand out?  My biggest goal is to just get my foot in the door and get experience asap.

Portfolio

ThisisVictoriaZ

Hi! If you want to know if your work is "enough" its important to find other artists who are also at a junior level who have gotten their first industry jobs, and compare your portfolio to theirs. It can be hard sometimes to know if you're reaching the quality level you need to get your foot in the door, but this is the most common thing I've seen suggested to juniors, and have done myself. This thread on here is good but not super up to date  https://polycount.com/discussion/187512/recently-hired-in-aaa-show-us-your-portfolio but there's plenty of junior artists portfolios on art station as well. 
Overall I think your materials could use some work, your characters look like their made of plastic (with the exception of the top model which I think looks much better.) Also for the League of Legends one, why not do their hand painted texturing style? 

hwaminjung

I have seen junior artists portfolios that weren't as polished as yours getting a job, but just as many very talented 3d artists who couldn't find a job. I think for juniors, while quality is of course important, I think it matters more if you somehow show that you are exactly the right person for the job.
I think there are some fundamentals that can be improved on in your works (e.g anatomy, texture work), but I think your presentation/polish is good, as well as the complexity of the characters.

Alemja

Overall, you're on the right track and have a higher quality than most.

Unfortunately your portfolio is missing some key things that would cause concern for a hiring manager:

• You don't display triangle count and the wireframe density on your characters is very high, higher than I would expect for these characters. It feels more geared for something like film or advertising
  
• Your UV style seems more geared for film or advertising
• I don't know what texture sizes you use, and if they are 2048 or higher per texture sheet you aren't getting enough detail to warrant that.
• Material definition feels very flat and barebones.

Based on those points along it raises the alarm that you aren't trying to get into games, but something else. While some skills transfer, I've seen a lot of people who have higher budget characters like in your portfolio, really flounder once they have to face any sort of limitations or restrictions. That is something we're constantly working around in games, we're always trying to figure out how to do more with less.

For you, here are the things I would suggest:

• Find ripped models from your favorite games and look at the models/textures/UVs. What they manage to get away with may surprise you, the triangle counts and texture sheets might be smaller than you expect
• Try imposing some hard limits either on your next character or try to cut a current character down. Really try to challenge yourself with something like 10K triangles and a 2K sheet for everything. I usually think, the lower and smaller the budget, the better. It will really force you to learn what kind of things are important when you're making game assets.
• Try creating hair using planes, we aren't quite at the stage where hair strands are widely used.
• Show your work, more clearly show the wireframes and triangle counts. Show your texture maps on top of your UVs. Show you know how to pack maps by putting grayscale maps like metalness/roughness/AO into the RGB channels of a map, a common practice being done for almost every game out there, because it means we're calling fewer texture files.
  
• Find the portfolios of people who work at game studios you want to work at and look at the quality they are hitting. Use this as a quality target for your own work and try to hit that bar. Keep in mind to not follow the kinds of things that they post exactly because artists who have years of working history may not need to show all of their work. They may have a bunch of sculpts they do on their own time or can only legally show the final renders of their work and it doesn't matter because they have 5+ years of professional working history to back up that they can make games. As someone trying to break into the industry, you do have to show your work, you have to show you know all of the basic knowledge of what makes a good game asset.

I hope this helps you out and gives you a bit of direction, best of luck!