The Art of the first game job.

I sorted through about 100 applications recently when I was lookin' to hire a modeller (not a big deal company or anything, just an indie that got some funding), and yeah, relatively few of them showed their work ingame, which made me faaaar less likely to give them the work.

This is maybe kind of a weird suggestion (I'd hope an obvious one) but for the love of god don't use one of these awful slideshow preview things for your images. I want to just middle click a thumbnail. Probably I'm a huge asshole but I skipped most of a guy's portfolio on account of this shit.

That guy's portfolio is pretty good though.

That portfolio has way too many shots too tbh.

Quote from Lacabra

I sorted through about 100 applications recently when I was lookin' to hire a modeller (not a big deal company or anything, just an indie that got some funding), and yeah, relatively few of them showed their work ingame, which made me faaaar less likely to give them the work.

This is maybe kind of a weird suggestion (I'd hope an obvious one) but for the love of god don't use one of these awful slideshow preview things for your images. I want to just middle click a thumbnail. Probably I'm a huge asshole but I skipped most of a guy's portfolio on account of this shit.

That guy's portfolio is pretty good though.

oh god that's the worst portfolio ever. it had a fucking pop-up ad, i mean wtf. millions of the same low res images, that take way too long to load. fuck me why do people still do this...

They're not even that low res, it just shows them tiny for some fucking reason. I got lucky fucking around with the URL to get to this which would have been a far better portfolio to link me.

I don't really have a problem with having a shitton of shots necessarily as long as it's not a pain to navigate.

Also, this is the Chet Faliszek talk JeanPaul was talkin' about. Definitely watch all of it.

Man that portfolio is bad. Even the image pop-up thing is unintuitive and confusing to use, I could barely work out how to close the damn thing. Just goes to show how a pretty good candidate with decent art can be completely ruined by a badly presented portfolio.

Point °9 by Rick is the most important one, the rest is bollocks; so think it over and over and over before anything

Still, some ideas for a 3d environment artist candidate :

- Have in mind when making your portfolio that you are showing it to someone for only 20 or 30 seconds, so make it fast clear and simple as possible. Put your best work in first and have enough side work to give the feeling of a "full" portofolio

- The ideal of any employer is to get a junior who knows as much as the guys already employed in the company (and the cool thing is that he can pay you less) he is not interested in teaching you how to do your work but assume you already know how to do it.

- If you are worried about standards and what should they be, just take screenshots of the cool looking game of the moment and see if you can do any better. If you can approach it that's already enough

- Choose the employer who is doing the same stuff you do; If you already made medieval stuff for exemple, your employer will know you will be quickly operationnal for a medieval game, and if you already made castles, he already knows what he is gonna get.

- Make assets with the quality of a modern first person shooter ( even more, but don't go too much on details or your employer will think you don't know how to optimize) your employer will assume that if you know how to do assets for a first person shooter, you will be able to make cool assets for any other kind of games.

- To render your stuff use Marmoset, UDK, Cryengine; whatever is real time, powerful and shiny ( very few people will appreciate a very well made low poly model for PS1 standards )

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Quote from NeilJones313

I guess what I'm asking is how does everyone feel about how crazy it can be sometimes to find any kind of work with-in games and why isn't there and industry standard for students. when I say standard I mean a model or concept art that every student can look at and say if I can model that or draw that within this amount of time then I will be o.k.

Well there kinda is. Look at some AAA games assets and environments. When you can do something similar in similar quality then you're good. Wouldn't worry so much about how long it takes you. As a beginner you are slow. Speed comes with experience. Focuss on the quality, get acquainted with your tools and workflow to a degree that you actualy know what you're doing.

Thing is when you can make quality stuff the job offers will come to you. The hard part is not to land a job but to become good enough for a job. For some that's easier then for others. But when you're talented it is only a matter of determination and perseverence to get there.

The mapcore community is a very good example for that. This community has been around for a while and i remember the humble beginnings of some of the guys who now work at big studios. What you got on your portfolio is actualy better then that but you need to stay focussed, work hard and steadily improve over the next couple years if you want to get there yourself.

This industry is changing, evolving too much to have a standard.