A main side project I would like to focus on during this academic year is the expansion of my portfolio so by the end of the course it is in a suitable state to be shown to employers even without anything related to the final major project. When deciding the size I want my portfolio to reach, there is one number of pieces I keep hearing that is the perfect amount, that being five strong pieces. I first heard this in the GDC talk as seen below from 2019 in which industry veterans such as Moby Francke art director for riot games and Claire Hummel concept artist for hit games such as Bioshock Infinite and Half Life Alyx go through several questions regarding student portfolios. In this talk they do go over the 5 recommended portfolio pieces and stress only showing you're best work. The more recent time I heard this piece of advice was from an in house lecture at WSA by guest lecturer Dan Bernardo who is the founder of Playtra Games in which he answered a question about portfolios saying the perfect number of pieces is 5 of your best pieces of work.
Currently all I have for my portfolio is my Art station account, which has only 2 posts up. The pieces that are on my account are quite old and since them I have done a lot more character models for university projects, though I've not rendered any of these out to make portfolio posts. Though personally I do wish to be making new pieces at a frequent rate so by the end of the year I feel like the pieces in the portfolio currently will be out of date and cut from the portfolio.
The two pieces shown are characters I have worked on using software's such as Blender and Substance painter. The first being a piece that contains two characters and street scene based on the Sci Fi film series Star Wars. The second is an original character design of a creature that
is my own take on a goblin. The later piece of the original character creation and how the 3D character model is displayed is how I would like to present my character pieces going forward though I would like to include more shots of the process and the turnarounds and close ups of the final product.
Another area I would like to improve with portfolio work is my social media presence. This will include revamping my current Instagram profile to have a focus on my art work and gain more of a following that in turn will hopefully lead people to show some love to my art station. The other area is to improve my twitter account and upload work there hopefully gaining a similar result to Instagram.
Moving Forward
Over the past months I have been collecting a mood board of characters I think would be suitable to 3D model and would either lead me to learn new skills such as sculpting cloth or to work on characters that have a more in-depth shape. Below you can see the mood board that contains all of my character ideas spanning from several different mediums such as films, Tv, Graphic novels, Art Sculptures and video games. I have got an Idea who'd id like to do first from the list, this character is a remake/reimagining of a character from the first instalment of the Halo franchise Halo Combat Evolved. I would like to start with this character who can be seen to the right of the mood board as I feel this character I could quickly get done and rendered in this period of time just before Christmas as from what I can see I already have the needed to skills to complete him. These skills being Sculpting and Hard surface modelling in Blender and texture work in substance painter, though the more repeatable textures on the armour may need me to learn Substance designer which is typically used for repeatable textures unlike the more dynamic and paintable texture process seen in substance painter. So for these reason I will start with this piece.
