2D Art in Tech-Art Portfolio?

Professional
1

Hey everyone! It’s that time again - noob portfolio advice.

I’m getting a lot of mixed opinions, but none from tech artists on this topic.

Some job descriptions mention the want for artistic skills beyond that of rigging, FX, tools, etc.

I’m thinking about adding an “Extras” tab to my portfolio to show a variety of 2D work, and 3D renders I’ve done. I’m no professional illustrator or concept artist, but I like to think it’s decent enough.

Some say this will clutter my portfolio and confuse employers, and some say it will harm my chances if people concentrate on the “Extras” not being up to standards held for other art positions.

What do you guys think?

2

I would prefer seeing 2D art as part of the process of a project and not as a tab of his own.

Like some anatomy drawings as research for the edgeloops of a model so you can rig/skin it properly.

Or paintings for finding the look you want to get with with a shader.

This way you proove you are putting an effort in decent research to get the best result.

3

Some say this will clutter my portfolio and confuse employers, and some say it will harm my chances if people concentrate on the “Extras” not being up to standards held for other art positions.

These are both really valid concerns. Don’t include anything in your portfolio that someone wouldn’t actually hire you to do.

Don’t give people a chance to critique work that isn’t applicable to the job you’re applying for. If nothing else, they might question your judgement in including work that isn’t, as you say, up to standards.

Have up on your public portfolio only work in your core skills, work you think is your absolute best. Prospective employers that haven’t even contacted you yet will look at anything that’s public and form an opinion about you based on what you’ve shown. If you think you’ll need to show artwork for some applications, prep a gallery but make it private and share it only when you need to.

Think about the impact of each thing you add to your portfolio. How much time does someone have to look at something to form an opinion? What does the piece say about your skill level? People who look at portfolios are always trying to take shortcuts, because there’s so many applicants out there to look through. No one is going to take more than two minutes to decide whether to pass on you or follow up. If they can look at an image instead of watch a video, they will. And it’s a lot easier and faster to form an opinion about a game dev based on an image than on sample code, especially if the person reviewing your portfolio is in HR, not engineering. It might be useful to think of it this way:

portfolioEntryValue = ( perceivedSkill / ( timeRequiredToFormOpinion * skillRequiredForAssessment ) )

Work that out and average it over all the pieces in your portfolio. Get someone you trust to verify your perceivedSkill score for each piece as a gut-check. See what the final tally is with the images included, what it is without. If your score goes up without the images, definitely leave them out!

Also, if you have lots of videos or sample code, maybe think about a different way to present the work you did that takes less time to look at, or can be understood by someone without domain-specific expertise – bump your score that way, too.

(That isn’t to say you can’t show sample code. There may be some people out there who will read it. But I’d offer it as an optional link from a page that describes the purpose of the code in plain text and images, there only for those who are doing serious digging into your application.)

Now, if you do prepare a private gallery of your artwork, be extremely selective in what you show. Pick only the very best. Showing even just one great image is better than one great image and two poor ones. Don’t be tempted to pad out your portfolio. It’ll only bring down your score.

4

When I make hiring decisions, I’d like to see some art pieces in a TA’s folio - especially in junior folios since those people often do not know which direction they really want to go to. Knowing they have some good taste and some artistic ability puts me at ease when I assign them to projects where their skills will contribute to the look of a product.

TAs knowing about lighting principles, color theory, who have a good eye for realism, know about the daily troubles production artist face are so much more effective. All this can be used to your advantage to achieve a certain look, requiring less feedback from artists or art directors (e.g. when you’re going to work on VFX, lighting, rendering or shader related tasks)

Now I don’t require art to be perfect. It won’t be your job to, for example, model. But if you got your hands dirty at some point it shows me that you might have encountered some of the issues our artists deal with day in and day out and that, for example, what people are doing (in concrete steps) inside zbrush, isn’t a complete mystery to you.

For a TA folio, I don’t really think there’s a right way to do it, since TAs positions are often so different. Just think of all the fields tech art touches…engines, VFX, tools coding, rigging… if you really want to focus, you have to custom tailor a folio to certain position and then, depending on the position, decide if it makes sense to include art or not. But personally, I always love to see a little art skills in a folio.

5

I’ve had personal struggles with this as well. My ultimate decision was take all my art off my page, and put it on my blog. Ultimately I’m not good enough to do art as a job. That said, if people really want to see it, they’ll find it. But, I think if your stuff is good enough there’s no reason not to put it on there, it shows your more than just a programmer.

Also, I think a lot of it has to do on what size company your applying for, generally, the larger the company the more specialized each role will be. So if your applying to say, a large company, the recruiters may think, “man this art is shit, compared to our artists,” and that will probably be true. But if your at a small company, the artists will respect you for knowing at least some of their craft.

Also depends on the person reviewing your portfolio, it it’s an art lead, it might help, if it’s a programmer, probably not. It’s a gamble. If you want to post the images here, we can give you a thumbs up or down.

6

thanks for your feedback everyone! i especially enjoyed this formula

portfolioEntryValue = ( perceivedSkill / ( timeRequiredToFormOpinion * skillRequiredForAssessment ) )

it’s good to hear this sort of feedback from TAO. my school is geared towards environment artists, so though I appreciate my professors’ advice, they definitely have a different mindset for portfolios.

I would prefer seeing 2D art as part of the process of a project and not as a tab of his own.

That’s a really cool idea. I don’t have anything like that right now, but I’ll try to incorporate it more into future work.

TAs knowing about lighting principles, color theory, who have a good eye for realism, know about the daily troubles production artist face are so much more effective.

Do you mind if i steal this quote? It may come in handy in case I do decide to add the “Extras” tab. :slight_smile:

If you want to post the images here, we can give you a thumbs up or down.

i’m actually going back and touching up some of my 2D pieces right now. I’ll put 'em up sometime in the next few days.

7

I can verify what Jami spoke about our school, Guildhall does a good job preparing you to become an environment artist in the industry. Not that they discourage you from going other tracks, in fact they highly suggest you focus on what you’re passionate about. But it is a valid point that the most common entry level job for an artist these days tends to be in environment.

I’d say if you’re going to include your 2D pieces, make sure the art fits the track. Just a suggestion, like if you were to focus on rigging… characters/anatomy studies would be great supplements. But if you’re mainly showing off tools you’ve written, I suppose your 2D can be just about anything. :slight_smile:

8

okay. i threw some 2D stuff here

http://www.justjamij.com/projects/4272264

let me know what you think if you have time to check it out! thanks :slight_smile:

9

my first instincts are they are pretty good, for a tech-artist! :wink: I think they add to the portfolio. A few things to nitpick.

1)I don’t think you need to rationalization at the bottom for why you have these online. reads wierd.

2)You need some basic descriptions on what the medium it was. For example, it’s hard to understand if the first image is a digital paint, 3d, or both. might also add that you know certain programs, (maya, photoshop, painter, etc)

3)for the character, I would move the bottom one on the left, up with the other 3 on the top, and remove the rest(the closeups). (only have one single horizontal row with 4.)

4)maybe make a higher res, for the images, so a link takes it to the biggest possible size that you have.

5)watch this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxW0lq47mcE

10

I agree with everything Shawn says, but I would say that you should probably remove the puppies in space character sheets. IMHO it’s not on the same quality level as the rest of it.

I would also reorder it with the first character sheet for FEMUR first, then the one with the girls and the hamsters second. The river third and the opera house last. That’s not really a reflection of their quality order(they’re all pretty nice), but more in order of what catches my eyes.

Also just on a presentation note, instead of putting links to different sections of your site , I’d put your reel directly there and push the other sections to a navbar or something secondary. Just what a lot of recruiters have told me is to have your reel up front and center for when they see your site.

11

Thanks for the nit-picking. I’ll get right on these suggestions. Also- WHY does that video only have 380 views? It’s pure gold.

Two issues with my portfolio host (Carbonmade)
-I can’t put a video straight away on my homepage. I have to use the tabs.
-I can’t put a click-thru link directly on my pictures, but I can add a “comment” under each photo, where I could put a drop-box link or something.

These issues are lame, but the video hosting provided by Carbonmade is pretty amazing, everything loads really fast, it’s fairly affordable, and looks great on mobile devices. So until I can put together a better solution, this is what I have for now. But I totally agree that my reel should be immediately playable.

12

Wow, that’s a lot of good advice.

As an aspiring TA, I’m in a similar position as Jami. At my school, the animation program is taught through the art department, so I have a lot of 2D art from drawing/painting classes that I’m not quite sure what to do with.

People have emphasized tailoring the art to the position, so it makes sense to include industry-related things like character sheets and concept work, but is there place in a TA’s portfolio for more art-schooly things like still-lives, master studies, or gesture drawings?

13

@justjamij, I was thinking today and I’m surprised how few people take advantage of Tumblr’s html editing to create freely hosted portfolio sites.
Theoretically, you could create a static site hosted on Tumblr and with a cheap domain name.

Anyway, just a suggestion if you ever need free hosting.

@JonStrong, I say if it’s on your site, then it’s all good. I wouldn’t necessarily include it in a reel unless it’s directly related.
But I think, if you’re sure it’s good stuff, that you can and should put it up on your portfolio site somewhere.

14

portfolioEntryValue = ( perceivedSkill / ( timeRequiredToFormOpinion * skillRequiredForAssessment ) )

So if it’s crappy work (low perceivedSkill) that anybody can see is bad almost immediately (timeRequiredToFormOpinion -> 0, skillRequiredForAssessment -> 0)… we end up with an almost infinitely valuable portfolio piece! Yay! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

–
Been meaning to reply to this for a while, but I wanted to say this without sounding too silly, and pesky work kept stealing time away. :slight_smile: Also, disclaimer, I say this as someone who is very much a generalist, and no expert on tech animation. :wink:

A renowned artist once told me that he sees a portfolio as a tool for answering all of the basic questions about the kind of work you can do. An excellent addition to a portfolio would be one which answers many questions while raising few new ones. In this case, I’m guessing the question you’re hoping to answer is “Does she have art eyes?”

With your aiming to be a technical animator, the way I believe this question would best be answered is using character poses that you’ve created using your rigs. It’s about whether you can sculpt a face, or a body part, using the controls in your rig, and allow it to hit truly appealing poses (!!!). If your rigs can’t do that, your animators are screwed. This would be a portfolio piece directly related to your work, and the most clear, direct application of why a rigger should have great art eyes. :D: I feel that, ideally, whether or not you have art eyes should be self-evident in the form of your reel! Sure, it can show some fancy tech, with sliders, and buttons, and automation. But really, it should show just as much (if not more) of the beautiful, sculpted poses. It’s not about whether a mouth can open or close, or brows can go up or down, but whether it can do this with all of the beauty, elegance and energy found in the one still frame of the scribbles of a 2D animator! :cool:

Your current reel breezes through the poses, so that it’s sometimes a bit of a blur as to whether something is a hit pose or an inbetween. With a bit of work, I think you could clean that up, make it much easier for someone to see poses without having to scrub a web video, and really work on those poses being able to look great. Get some animator critique if you can! :slight_smile:

With the “art eyes” test presented in the form of 2D, the questions I end up asking are, “Why is she showing this in 2D? Is it because her rigging reel doesn’t show this well enough – in which case, why not? Can she see that pieces with very high contrast (especially blacks) all over end up making depth and 3D form much more difficult to see? Can she see 3D form? Does she know that these figures don’t have accurate anatomy? Does she know anatomy? If she doesn’t, would she still be able to make a competent rigger?”

That said, I think you’ve re-arranged your site since you started the thread, and they’re now in an “Extras” category, which is better than it was before I think. :slight_smile: If you keep them in your portfolio, and you happen to be painting some new work to replace them, I’d suggest showing other artists and getting lots of critique, or posting the pieces on art forums (like polycount, where candid feedback is quite freely given).

I hope I helped. :slight_smile:

pretty good, for a tech-artist! :wink:

I know it was a bit of a joke, but there are so many tech-artists that cover such a wide spectrum of technical art. I’d hate to think that technical artists are inferior, or have poorer artistic sensitivity, or aren’t good artists in their own right. Granted, there are those who don’t spend much time actually making art, but I’d hate for that to be the way that people see all of us, and I’d hate for us to see ourselves that way too!

I mean, I’ve seen portfolios of technical artists that do include some ridiculously awesome 2D work (granted, most of them have a good few years of industry experience to their names), and hell, they could totally get “pure” artist jobs if they wanted to. I’d like to think that these aren’t just one or two super special individuals. I hope I’m not wrong.