Portfolio curation and content discussion
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
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.
"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.
Replies
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.
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.
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)
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
i didn't suggest your work isn't good enough for probably most games, just compared to the examples you showed, they are more convincingly realistic. To explain why have to compare side by side and it is a lot of effort so I wouldn't want to do it unless you were really focused on that and i thought it would help
edit - just saw this now for some reason but see its a few months old
https://polycount.com/discussion/235441/joao-sapiro-thread-of-ramblings#latest
At the level I was applying, the comparison would be more past the middle of the Gus spectrum, (Gus 5/Gus 6) with any further improvements likely requiring more academic and artistic anatomical knowledge like the artist who trained in venice (Gus 7)
I just don't feel that that level of excellence is necessarily practical for video games seeing how ubisofts version fits perfectly in the very middle of the scale and it was enough to sell Far Cry 6 as a product.
As I understand a studios needs do matter over a candidates and that need might not be limited to the skill a candidate possesses, there can be far too many factors.
Thinking that this is lost on most artists who cannot see a video game as a product built for profit.
Likely why being laid off felt like such a shocker, it didn't really matter how good of an artist you were, only about how much a studio needed you when they did, like any corporate business.
The more desperate employees get the more wages will drive down, and then those "rock stars" who squeezed through the tough times become further entrenched in their egotistic beliefs and cycle is worse for the next generation who now come into workforce under the leadership of extra toxic individuals who let themselves get majorly shafted and never took any personal responsibility for their environment, Instead they did the easy thing of building ego castle rather than the hard thing - making an actual change in the environment.
It's pretty much the same thing everywhere I've ever worked. The old guard is so far up their own ass that anybody actually competent and motivated coming in gets out as soon as they can to do their own thing. So then it's just the toxic sludge left behind which will turn the desperate people who don't have means to escape into the same thing. Of course, there are some heroes but it's rare, not normal.
If we wanted to talk about rock stars in the games industry, I'd shine a spotlight on that animator who worked on the witcher series. He built a pretty cool fighting game in his spare time and it did well enough that now he runs his own studio. He just made a game that he wanted to play, built it around his core competencies, and now he has his own business that he actually built by virtue of his skills - not bootlicking, brown nosing, favor swapping, all that corporate tool nonsense - and he probably won't ever have to work as an employee begging for jobs again. Isn't that what being a rock star is supposed to be? Doing things your own way, not following the beaten path, and certainly not being a corporate stooge that can't even express their own opinions for fear of pissing off some hyper-sensitive person that might have leverage over them.
I'm not too keen on hero worship though, I think it's pretty stupid actually because it works to disempower ordinary people who also have to eat food the same as the rockstars, but if somebody has to be called a rockstar, that's it.
The whole employer/employee power struggle is so anti-human it's depressing to think about. If you are competing against a person then that means they are your enemy, as the normal human way to relate to friends is to cooperate and share, but in the corporate world you have to pretend to be friends even though you work against other to lower each other wages, and what you get in return if you are winning is... allowed to continue making some asshole richer. Maybe.
For regular people who have studio experience and know what's involved in making games and have connections I think it's a much better prospect to identify the leaders that they know and form new organizations with more equitable payout structure. Obviously corporate work is not secure, in fact it seems less secure than just making games on your own and selling them, assuming you aren't a complete boob. Anybody with artistic skill has a huge advantage as most indie games look like ass.
I think the key difficulty is lack of leadership though. It seems game dev attracts a lot of emotionally immature people and then if you live your whole adult life in a backstabbing corporate world, where do you ever see actual human leadership? As always the only thing really holding most people back is lack of confidence. It's like when you watch a nature documentary and its like one big cat harassing 1,000 wildebeest. Those stupid wildebeest, they could kill every last lion in a day if they'd just try.
This field is brutal when it comes to shafting people and AI now being part of the equation gives employers more leverage to shaft people. I think out of everyone creative who works in games, the 3D guys have it the worst because they have no other job fields they can go into where 3D is a primary skill which leads to a lot of them feeling trapped with nowhere to go without having to start over their career as something else entirely, thus they stay in games which allows the abuse to continue.
Industry workers need to look around and ask themselves if they want to keep picking through the ruins of our jobs market and competing with each other, or if they have what it takes to graduate and position themselves to become employers in the future, ideally learning from the mistakes of the past.
Perhaps not brutal, but very rough might be the better word. Either way the point I was trying to make is that, in general, there never seems to be a point where one can feel comfortable no matter what they've accomplished in this field. Its always people competing with one another, often dealing with layoffs that affect quality of life, employers that take advantage of employees and people just not standing up to wrongdoing when they see it, so much so that its an industry wide problem. Its no surprise to me that there are a number of people who leave this field before they even hit 40, often times writing those "how I escaped video games" articles that, sadly enough, I've seen a number of. Thats just not good IMO for an industry to be like this.
The presence of such things doesn't exclude game from being "good" in my view but as a developer you have to consider the fact that in order to make something that will sell enough to pay for your effort, you are pretty much dealing with addicts who expect a certain type of hit or they are going to get bored fast and go to the games that give them that hit they have been conditioned for. And you can't decondition anyone by showing them the light of pure living - that's not how addiction works. So it seems like a lot of the idiotic things that seemingly ruin games for the type of gamers who go on to become game developers are necessary to keep in because, as usual, some anti-social genius fucked shit up for everyone and now we can't just play a silly game to kill some time or enjoy the pleasure of building some skill and overcoming a challenge, it has to hack the dopamine factories of kids and condition them to become slot machine addicts.
And the next generation has grown up with smart phones anyway and are bombarded with mental health destroying content 24/7 so I don't think ideas of what's good from the previous cohort are going to be a reliable way to make a living from games. Could be wrong though what do I know.
I think the only way for developers who don't want to make such type of games to make a living from it is to stay as lean as possible, which of course means fewer people doing a lot more work, which excludes ordinary people from the fun. The AAA developer who expects a team of people to require months and millions of dollars to make five high quality assets isn't going to be able to operate like that and pay for their time selling anything other than slot machines disguised as high quality games. But if you only have to pay for two or three people then 5-10k sales can do it, and this isn't very hard to achieve for people that can bring some artistry to a game.