I’m compiling all my work and updating my website for GDC. My animation and environment modeling portfolios are pretty straightforward to put together, but I’m having difficulty brainstorming the best way to go about a tech art reel. I’m mainly on the art side of the tech world, but I’m still interested in seeing all kinds.
If you know of any good tech artist portfolios, please post them! I’ve seen a few students and recent grads putting their portfolios up for critiques, and I think this would help them as well. Perspective and reference is good for everyone
I found a similar post about 4 or 5 pages back in the forums. Bronwen Grimes, I hope you don’t mind me forwarding your reel, but I thought this was an interesting approach
looks like he just made a demo reel of the fully rendered scenes he worked on with his team, but then gave a sub-list of what duties he preformed on each scene.
I think the best advise we have been able to give Redirecting...
“Keep it short, Edit,Edit,Edit. You don’t have to show off every part of the rig working, you can show some unique parts that might not be on a standard rig, we expect the rest to work if that stuff does. Mix between shots of the rig during animation because a good rig should animate not just have a list of features.”
The way i see it is a portfolio is way to get a job.
find the job you want, see what the requirements for the job are.
Then gather examples of the work that best suits the requirements.
i like to cater my work to what i want to do.
a-lot of times when I have to do rigging, the pipeline is set.
we have a skeleton or mo-cap already.but here is some problem with it.
my job as a TA is to make the problem easier for the art staff in some way.
perhaps you can showcase a solution you created for some work around to problem found in a production environment.
You might find that you will need to cater your demo reel for the company you are applying to since Tech Artist means something different to each company. Do research, figure out what they want. If a company wants someone who is a strong programmer, put your tools up front in that version of your reel. If they are looking for someone good at articulation of characters, put that up front.
Also I agree with Brad. Don’t add filler to the reel by moving every standard part around. If your rig setup is doing something unique under the hood to achieve a visual effect, the show the under the hood work. Also, if you are an art heavy, tech artist, then make sure your reel proves that you understand anatomy and volume preservation. Good luck!
Here is my reel. I think I take a slightly different approach and I try and have a little bit of fun. I put this one together some what hastily, but it got me a few job offers.
For me, I let my cover letter and resume tell all the nittiy gritty. My demo reel is more for the entrainment and just something to get them interested. I swear, every time a demo reel starts showing my EVERY slider on a foot roll setup, I either fast forward or close it out.
[QUOTE=AnnieCat;9118]I found a similar post about 4 or 5 pages back in the forums. Bronwen Grimes, I hope you don’t mind me forwarding your reel, but I thought this was an interesting approach
looks like he just made a demo reel of the fully rendered scenes he worked on with his team, but then gave a sub-list of what duties he preformed on each scene. :)[/QUOTE]
I see a lot of Tech Animator Reels, but what about TAs who are less on the animator side?
I’m trying to get my portfolio together while staying on top of my thesis, and I’m not sure my portfolio is being set up/structured the right way.
if you’re not working with rigging, is a demo reel something that is necessary, or is a portfolio with pages for different scripts/projects/shaders sufficient?
From looking at my course leader’s portfolio as he was also a TA, if you’re not an animator TA then you’ll want to have different examples of plugins and shaders you’ve constructed. Either as screenshots or video and documentation, which will be able to show that you understand what you’ve done and also that you can explain what you’re doing to someone else.
