Jump straight to PBR, It can be a lot quicker to make a material look "right" when you know the exact values in PBR. Since you are just applying for a school, by the time you graduate in a few years there will be much more PBR games out. It's better the be ahead of the curve. PBR can work great for stylized or mobile games.
Thats not what I meant, I was meaning that why spend the time learning old ways of working when the industry is moving towards PBR as a norm. Like I said in my original post, there are only a handful of studios in the AAA market (that are not mobile or related development houses) that still use the older way of creating…
Oh sorry if I misunderstood! I will probably start learning PBR soon, I'll just give the schools a call and see what they think. If they want me to learn the old ways I guess I have no choice!
I have about 6-7 weeks until deadline for my work samples for my school application. So far I have gotten a pretty good understanding of modeling in Maya, sculpting in ZB, retopo in Maya, baking normal maps in Maya and xNormal and AO, Cavity and Curvature in nDo2. My next step is of course making a diffuse, spec and so…