Suggestions? "Pre" Portfolio Help

oXYnary

Move to general if better fits.

I want to attend that IGDA thing next week in Seattle where pros from companies look at what you have, and give suggestions on how to setup your Portfolio(and hopefully tell you where to focus improvement upon depending on the artists goal).

I have always been VERY bad at organizing portfolios with the stress is causes me in setup. In honesty, that was one of the main reasons I changed my major in college away from Vis Com back in the day.

What Im working on now is more apparent to what I can offer, but Im not at the texturing or even low poly version yet (which is going to be hard to explain how slow I am). Older stuff is all over, from untextured vehicle models with animation imported into UED with slapped on default textures placeholders, incomplete vehicles, to a character model with a few standing animations never imported into a engine.

Also they want a person to bring a laptop to show. Well this laptop only has a 1024X768 screen without a great viewing angle and washed out color.

Ideally, under the best cast scenario, I would like to feel comfortable asking about appretinceships/internships to allow real world experience while I continue to work on my Portfolio (a few companies that attend offer as such). I think I have a good arguement for this that what I have been missing is a work environment which provides the real world setting to allow me to become faster by seeing others workflow first person, while helping build my self confidence in my abilities. But at the same time my disorganization and sometimes vocal explanations in these manners would stand in the way.

How should I present myself and work for this? I just dont want to spend days taking screenshots and animations of older work versus continuing to work on my current project which I think again really better shows where I am going and focusing. (Character Modeler/Texturer/Rigger)

thomasp

ehm, you should work on your 'slowness' if you want to do it for a living. no matter how good your stuff is, if you can't do it fast enough, it will be of little value in the marketplace. so never mention that handicap and practice to get fast. most stuff in production doesn't have to be perfect, just up to a certain standard and not regularly too far behind schedule.

MoP

Indeed, you should work on the speed - instead of spending ages tweaking and perfecting one model, get a few on the go and finish them up to a decent level, but don't obsess over them.
As Thomasp says, it's a reality in the workplace, and if you can't get up to speed before getting a job, you're gonna have a tough time meeting deadlines unless the company is VERY lenient.

As for presenting yourself and your work - just keep it clean and consistent. Presentation doesn't have to be anything fancy, and if it's mainly screenshots, that's ok as long as they're not just random angles in no sensible sequence or layout - put a border round the images, some text about you and your project in the same place on each image, just make it seem professional and clear.

oXYnary

Its hard not to be obsessive when youve been diagnosed as such. Though I know if I just had more people to work off of with someone to say "STOP!" Yea, I know, I know Im not ready to ask.. It just would lower my stress soooooo much to have my foot in the door since I have been trying since 2001.

Thanks for the input. Screenshots it is. Though I think I will leave off the "time" part of the work.

Rick Stirling

oXY - use flickr to store all your work, and you can set everything to private so that only certain people can access it. That way you can have a private and public portfolio.