Portfolio Review?

Professional
#1

Hi, so I’m an aspiring technical artist. I am entirely self-taught and have no professional experience.

If anyone here has the time, would you mind checking out my portfolio and letting me know your thoughts?

Should I be trying to land a job? or should I be working to improve my skills first?

You can check it out at here

Thanks in advance

#2

Initial review of your portfolio website itself: it is way too busy. (Now if you were going for a WebDev job, that’d be a different story) You need to get to the meat and potatoes immediately, try for something similar to Artstation. Having to learn how to navigate a new Site is a turn off and potential employers want to see your work immediately.

Concerning tech art role in a studio, typically it is not an intro role. So having no professional experience may hamper your odds. From what I gather, the tech artist role is often conversions of 3d artists/programmers that voluntarily take on tasks to help improve the pipeline, troubleshoot issues for other artists, and take on abstract tasks/documenting. At the core, you need to be a problem solver.

Quoting Dennis on Reddit: “Without seeing your portfolio, the best thing you can do for yourself as an entry-level TA with no production experience is to fill your portfolio with a couple solid PBR artworks and show off any kind of scripts or tools that solves a bottleneck in some kind of practical work flow, even if that work flow is something like a mod team or even your personal art pipeline. Houdini is always a huge plus to show off. You can also show custom master materials/shaders, Unreal Blueprints or Editor Utility Widgets, custom Blueprint nodes, rigging tools, etc. There are a lot of options available to you to show you’d be a valuable addition to a studio.”

Your Portfolio is on the right track, I love how you list “Pipeline Problem & Solution”, that’s a great addition and great mindset to be in. As for the content, you need to continue to level up. The FNX-45 is your strongest piece, the UE Shaders are your weakest.

Take some time to find Technical Artist job postings and see what requirements they are seeking, let that be a milestone marker for you to hit. Ex:

Technical Artist (Retro Studios)

  • Experience writing materials using HLSL
  • Proficient in Python and HLSL.

Technical Artist (Gearbox)

  • Analyze memory/performance concerns throughout a project’s development
  • Create efficient and user friendly Master Materials and Material Functions for use in game.
  • Author and maintain Scripts, Blueprints , and Houdini Digital Assets to be used by artists in our content creation applications.

Finally, here’s some solid insight to the Tech Art position from Oskar, Lead Tech Artist in the Industry.

Cheers, Blake

3 Likes
#3

Thank you sincerely for taking the time to offer such valuable feedback, It helps tremendously. I will keep these things in mind as I continue forward