Portfolio curation and content discussion

NikhilR

Hi!

   I thought to make this thread to discuss what to include in a portfolio presentation and how much is needed to start applying to job opportunities.
 
   I've noticed a lot of variation in portfolio content and presentation and have collected a few examples of artist portfolios at various levels.
  

  To start here is my portfolio.
https://nikhilr.artstation.com/
This is the link I provide in my resume and it has got me interviews.
I am applying for intermediate - senior 3D character artist positions

I provide this link
https://www.artstation.com/nikhilr/albums/10349652
if I'm applying to realistic character art positions

https://www.artstation.com/nikhilr/albums/1521998
If I'm applying to stylized character art positions 

For the moment I want to focus on realistic characters since its my most recent work and I am still updating my stylized characters

I haven't personally experienced anyone rejecting my 2024 characters because my portfolio contains older characters, atleast no one in hiring has mentioned this explicitly in rejection emails.
Usually if they are interested they simply ask for more information.

Reference portfolios

1. https://www.artstation.com/alexisouedraogo-bonin -
recent hire at ubisoft montreal (only one breakdown in the most recent character)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexis-ouedraogo-bonin/

2. https://www.artstation.com/jakobhill4 -
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacoballenhill/
I found this portfolio arrangement to be the most balanced and mostly used its layout

3. https://www.artstation.com/slipgatecentral -
https://www.linkedin.com/in/slipgatecentral/
 A recent find. The latest character has really good details about the process. It doesn't follow a standardised layout like the one above, but certainly teaches a lot.
I've been wondering if I should pivot to this approach.

The above are examples I used to curate my own portfolio.

There is more advice on portfolios here,
https://magazine.artstation.com/2019/03/games-portfolio-top-10/
My confusion is mostly with point 8 and point 5

"8) Make sure you are looking at the right bar.

With the amount of work from games readily available on the internet, you have access to abundant references of what the industry standard is. A common misconception is that if you’re the best in your class, you’re automatically hireable and that’s not  always true.

Instead of comparing your work to the others around you, look at artists who are currently working in the industry and use their work as the bar for where you’d like to get to."

Since if I apply it to the above, does it mean that I should aim for portfolio 3 for a principal character artist position or portfolio 1 that doesn't follow all the advice but still managed to get hired?
Or is portfolio 2 the safest bet? 

It really is confusing.

It is challenging to assume that the portfolio was all it took to get the job.

I can't relate to this,

"5) Your portfolio is more important than your resume.

“The first thing I look at is the portfolio. The second thing I look at is the portfolio. If I decide to email you, then I’ll look at your name.” – Greg Foertsch

A strong portfolio speaks for itself. Having previous work experience might give you a few extra points if it’s relevant to the job but a portfolio that catches the recruiter’s eye will be more likely to get you the job than a list of credits."

I find that a lot of portfolio advice ends up contradicting itself depending on who you ask.

I am actively improving as a 3D character artist, and all the same want to build a portfolio suitable for a job, so hoping a discussion here might be a great way to get some perspective.

Alex_J

This other peoples characters look like a degree or two of quality above yours. I'm not too great at explaining exactly why but maybe a professional character artist has the right vocabulary to explain it. The others are more convincingly realistic, both in form and surfacing. So if i have to choose one or the other I'd go with the other based on quality of the characters.

Besides that if seeking a job I would rely less on trying to follow generalized internet advices and focus on building connections with people in that world, especially where I want to work. 

Alemja

I've been involved in the hiring loop a couple of times and know some recruiters, so I can give my perspective on some of the areas you might be confused about. This is some advice I've given to students or people struggling with their resume or portfolio

NikhilR said:

"8) Make sure you are looking at the right bar.

With the amount of work from games readily available on the internet, you have access to abundant references of what the industry standard is. A common misconception is that if you’re the best in your class, you’re automatically hireable and that’s not  always true.

Instead of comparing your work to the others around you, look at artists who are currently working in the industry and use their work as the bar for where you’d like to get to."

Since if I apply it to the above, does it mean that I should aim for portfolio 3 for a principal character artist position or portfolio 1 that doesn't follow all the advice but still managed to get hired?
Or is portfolio 2 the safest bet? 

It really is confusing.

It is challenging to assume that the portfolio was all it took to get the job.

I can't relate to this,

For this one, I think what they are trying to say is: Look at people who work where you want to work, look at the quality they are putting out and try to match it. However there is a bit of a catch to this, and I don't think its often pointed out and I think they allude to it, but don't properly convey it. The catch is that while you have to try and match some of their work quality wise, you shouldn't always match it content wise, an artist with 10+ years of experience and several shipped titles doesn't need to show as much of the process as you might. What I mean by this is you have some artists like Raf Grassettii or Slipgate (Vadim B. ) and you might be like "oh they have a lot of sculpts! I just need to match their sculpt level!" And a lot of people do get caught up in that, however what people newer in the industry forget is that Raf made Kratos from God of War and Slipgate as a huge backlog of work that is rock solid spanning over a decade, plus working at Blizzard and Riot. They don't have to prove anything to anybody, they can make whatever they want on their free time and be totally ok because they have the experience, examples and quality to back it up. They can get away with just making high poly models, where almost everyone else (especially early career people) can't. You still have to show your process, you still have to show your wires, your textures, how your high and low compare to each other, you have to prove that you know those things front and back and are good at them.

NikhilR said:

"5) Your portfolio is more important than your resume.

“The first thing I look at is the portfolio. The second thing I look at is the portfolio. If I decide to email you, then I’ll look at your name.” – Greg Foertsch

A strong portfolio speaks for itself. Having previous work experience might give you a few extra points if it’s relevant to the job but a portfolio that catches the recruiter’s eye will be more likely to get you the job than a list of credits."

I find that a lot of portfolio advice ends up contradicting itself depending on who you ask.

I am actively improving as a 3D character artist, and all the same want to build a portfolio suitable for a job, so hoping a discussion here might be a great way to get some perspective.

So yes, portfolio is king and ultimately the thing that gets you hired, but you still have to care about your resume. It's a bit of red tape that you have to put a little bit of effort into to make sure that your resume gets processed by software, hits a good portion of the job descriptors so recruiters know to not rule you out. I had a bit of a rant on this on twitter a couple of years ago that I've thought about transferring here because twitter is unusable now, but artists sometimes slack in this area and do things that will wind up actively hurting you because they think that the portfolio is all that matters. Like they will put icons for software instead of the names (software won't pick this up, recruiters might not know what's what based on icon) or they don't put enough bullet points for each job. Portfolio does matter a ton, but recruiters and the software you get sorted into are the first step, they probably won't look at everyone's portfolio if there are hundreds of applicants, and instead use software to help them narrow down who the best candidates might be based on experience. Then the lists get sent to the hiring managers and they sort through, decide who to proceed with or send art tests to, etc.

I hope that kind of helps clarify

NikhilR

Alemja said:

I've been involved in the hiring loop a couple of times and know some recruiters, so I can give my perspective on some of the areas you might be confused about. This is some advice I've given to students or people struggling with their resume or portfolio

NikhilR said:

"8) Make sure you are looking at the right bar.

Thanks! This does help,

8.
I'm mostly looked at Grasetti and Slipgate (Vadim B.) portfolios as something to aspire to even if I don't have the work experience to back it up.
For the moment I'm trying to get my porfolio closer to jakob hill since it seemed to be the most balanced of the 3 and reflects the level I'm a

For the moment I'm trying to hit all character types, so male, female, body types, different races and variation in themes from medieval to sci fi.
Not sure if this will improve hiring chances, but I do try to tailor my work to match the studios output and quality.

I'm not sure if people who are early in their career are always required to follow protocol.
But I'm also not sure what early career is since every studio and reviewer has their own metric to assess this and its usually done according to their budget rather than what works best for the candidate.

There's also a difference in the outlook on someone having worked on something popular vs someone who hasn't, though that's going more into subjective territory so I'm trying to stay focused on what to include in a standard job application portfolio as a best practice.

5.
Having EA on my resume definitely helps with visibility, I could show screenshots of the characters I worked on at EA but their quality is lower than the two characters I have in realistic work.
I also dont have their breakdowns since I wasn't allowed to take screenshots because of NDA

I had my resume review for ATS, so it definitely goes through the system and it is true that they might be deciding which portfolio to review depending on what ATS says about the candidates experience and game credits.

So maybe what Greg Foertsch meant was that he cares about portfolio once the resume clears ATS, which also means that he doesn't really have to care about the resume since it was already cleared by ATS.

Also when it comes to recruiters it was my working at EA that caught their eye, followed by my game credits.
Every recruiter presently feels that my work is great largely because EA thought it was great.
And while i'm not entirely sure what EA thought about it before my interview, when I was at EA, seniors I worked with thought it was of a candidate that is past associate level.
And this would have been addressed had I been made permanent and there was budget and head count made available to accomodate my position.

Its the dilemma I have with my portfolio, for the moment I'm hoping that the revised characters which are significantly improved, have full heads of hair and are rigged and animated should allow me an opportunity to interview for intermediate and senior roles, and atleast for the moment it seems to be working but its a slow process.

in the end its up to the studio of course, 
and each studio has its own metric, like getting to senior character artist level at EA is different from the how this is approached at ubisoft.

The next step for these characters is getting them set up in unreal to make them controllable, though I'd like to also update the stylized work so I can apply to intermediate/senior roles at gameloft.

NikhilR

Alex_J said:

This other peoples characters look like a degree or two of quality above yours. I'm not too great at explaining exactly why but maybe a professional character artist has the right vocabulary to explain it. The others are more convincingly realistic, both in form and surfacing. So if i have to choose one or the other I'd go with the other based on quality of the characters.

Besides that if seeking a job I would rely less on trying to follow generalized internet advices and focus on building connections with people in that world, especially where I want to work. 

Thanks for the feedback!
Were there any specific characters you compared for quality?
I was hoping my work fell close to jakob hill's quality though I do hope to aspire to slipgatecentral's level one day.

I did choose these particular characters because they had never been done before so I was hoping that they would be compared to their photoreference mostly.
Also I have received advice that its not a good idea to do a character that could be compared to a studio's version, or atleast do the required research to see how well it can match up to other available variants.

Its most evident with the Gus character that I was also considering doing at one point.
Here's all the Gus Fring's I found to assess comparitive quality, I'm not entirely sure what the studio's art team considers in a review but it was my assumption that they would want to see anatomy, hair, topology suited for posing and animation and more modern techniques like photoscan wrapping and unreal 5 blue print setup.



While I didn't exactly arrange these in order of quality, its easy to discern where each model shines and falls short. 
I'm just not sure if ubisoft considered this kind of comparison since it is suggested by many senior and lead artists that it be followed or you can't get a job.
Atleast in reality it does seems that they are looking for what they want to see selectively/subjectively which could likely be anything.

The very least I would expect from ubisoft is a comparison with their own model from far cry 6 which is optimised for FACS. 
This is something I considered for my 2 models, I'm not sure if model 3 is optimized for FACS since there is no breakdown elaborating on this or if it is something ubisoft requires (the job listing says the character should be in game so I'm assuming its required)

I have reached out to ask them about their hiring experience, I will update here if I hear back.

The first one : https://mistorm.artstation.com/projects/xY3qGX

The second one is by a classmate from back at game dev school, he only has the use of one arm (tragic loss in afghanistan)
I do feel his work is impressive since he managed this result while facing very unique challenges that no other person could possibly compare with.
 He wasn't comfortable mentioning this in his cover letter to ubisoft for the NXT showcase which I feel would have helped him because of DEI hiring policies that ubisoft is expected to follow by its provincial grant terms.
Unfortunately he's not currently active in the game industry and removed all his work from the web
(gave up from disillusionment but doing okay on disability payments)

3rd is https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rJNkOa

4th is from ubisoft from far cry 6 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/NGqQAd

5th https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8wVvew

6th https://www.cgatlas.cn/items-1218.html

7th which I feel is the best one is from a sculptor who was trained in venice. This model is more digi double but the quality is unmatched.
https://www.artstation.com/marcodilucca
he also makes marble sculpture 
https://www.instagram.com/marco_di_lucca/?hl=en
8th is screenshot from the show Breaking Bad