What should you have in a portfolio when applying for a technical artist position in games? Here’s my take on it, matched with a lot of practical ideas of what to show. Plus my favourite, minimal website example.
I’ll share practical tips in a second. But before we get there, let’s take a step back and wonder for a while: What traits are recruiters looking for when evaluating a candidate’s portfolio?
Does the candidate understand the problem space?#
That’s the absolute number 1. Make sure that your portfolio shows that you understand game-specific challenges. There’s a lot of candidates with general computer graphics skills (Maya, Painter) or programming (Python, web). Be ahead of that pool, by showing you won’t need extra guidance every day. Mind-bending Houdini setups are not worth much if they generate unique, non-instanced meshes every time. A beautiful post process won’t ship if it takes 10 ms to render.
Show that you have an eye for players’ expectations. Impress the recruiter with interactivity (growing lava, destructible walls, TV reacting to a button). Include popular types of VFX if you’re into particles and stylize them properly for the context (photorealistic vs Riot-like).
Show that you feel comfortable (and motivated) to work with limited RAM, disk space. With avoiding branching on the GPU. Not that you “can do it” if pushed, but on the contrary, that you enjoy this kind of limitations. That it’s like a good puzzle for you.
Be descriptive! People won’t have time (or take the risk) to guess your knowledge. So say it directly:
I optimized this wall generator, so that it finds repeated modules and replaces them with single, bigger chunks. That helps to reduce the number of static mesh components in the scene. Which is great news for the bottlenecked, single-threaded actor management in Unreal Engine.
Show how you used instancing to make the tool relevant for a game context, and the results shippable on a console. Mention that the:
Wall modules weigh just 15 MB, incl textures. Then the tools instances them to produce this 8-storey building. The lightweight structure is further support by usage of Nanite, which helps with draw calls
What value can they bring and in what quality?#
Impress the team’s lead. Show them stuff they can’t have with generic Marketplace plugins.
Promise them customized solutions. Show adaptivity of your tools. For example, in an importer tool, provide input fields for a custom name suffix
Mention the reasoning, the outcomes, the number and the kind of users.
Remember - you want to work for a studio or a client. A real bunch of living people, existing somewhere on Earth. They have their goals, their needs (currently unmet - hence why they’re looking for a TA!)
Use interviews to spy for ideas. Narrow yourself down. Honestly, create something for someone. It’s better to aim towards a particular type of employer than towards nobody in general. Pick or imagine your 2-3 “dream” studios and prepare your website like if you worked there already.
Are you a good match for the studio’s needs? If the studio does UI-heavy mobile games and you have mobile UI in your folio, it’s already a fantastic start. If it fits their visual style, even better.
Do they work smart?#
Use popular Python modules instead of writing from scratch. Again, name it. “I used OpenCV for texture format conversion. This battle-tested image processing library ensures that the user can swap freely between 8-bit, 16-bit and even HDR inputs”
Though, in a few chosen cases, show that you are perfectly able to go from scratch too when need be. For every tool or shader that you show, include one snippets of clever vector math, 2D rotation, edge detection, tightly optimized loops.
Do they have the skills and the attitude?#
Are the effects, shaders or procedural solution on par with the studio’s level (technical, artistic)?
Show that you care. The code or node graphs should be clean, managable (organized into functions), commented where appropriate. It should have useful names of variables. That helps to prove that you’ll be able to work in a group.
d = length(ps) - r; // --- Bad
const float DistanceFromEdge = length(Pos2D) - Radius; // --- Better
Show nice looking, clean user interfaces and a friendly workflow, UX.
The recruiter needs to understand your particular impact. What situation did your tool help to solve? By how many % have your procedural spawner cut the draw calls on PC? What did you do that helped deliver that impossible feature on a Switch? Or, simply - how many artists loved to use your layered shader every day?
Portfolio composition#
If you have time, do a few small but scalable tools (i.e. batch processing), or a great looking piece of UI, or a great looking semi-procedural textured asset. Basically anything that a single artist can’t do, but a programmer can’t as well.
Show your artistic eye and understanding of art workflows (modularity). Make sure the need explains itself (They should say afterwards: “Wow. I’d love to have such a flowery meadow generator in my game!”).
Always show The Tool and The Result, side by side. Don’t be afraid to use looping animations (aka “GIFs”. But please use MP4/WebM instead — it weighs 1/10 of the size, has 16 mln colors and is supported almost universally now).
Your ideas don’t have to be super unique. Actually, many studios need the same things. Do a few simple, classic tools, but do them well. Clean, intuitive UI. Of course it’s better not to try to reinvent the color picker (you likely won’t beat the decades of experts’ iteration). But you can imagine what I mean: validators, outliner cleanup tools, importers, building facade generators, ocean shader and the like.
Potential ideas#
- A few shaders for gameplay-connected VFXes, reactions
- Optimization work, suited for the type of studio you’re aiming for. Show wireframes and/or performance graphs, because it’s cute
- Facade generator. You’ll showcase instancing, shaders, procedural noises (don’t use the analytic ones! -> use triplanar).
- Asset name fixer, converting e.g. Quixel naming to your own (which performs ‘fix up redirectors’ too)
- Tool for making material instances out of textures from AmbientCG (public domain)
- Tool that creates ready-to-use lighting setups out of Poly Haven’s HDRIs. Bonus points: it finds the brightest pixel and places a directional light there
- Tool that draws a top-down map & marks heaviest locations (e.g. cells which are overlapped by more than 3 lights). Bonus: a good occasion to try space-partitioning algorithms, if performance proves to be a problem
- Viewport camera bookmarks manager, with names & screenshots. Allows to mark certain bookmarks as ‘shared’, making it visible for other users opening the project
- Map optimization tools that disables shadow casting for small objects & lights. Can extend to disabling collision if it doesn’t have Simulate Physics enabled. Finding weird scale can also be useful
My favourite beloved best folio on this planet ever#
Okayyy, time for the promised example. Look at that simple yet effective portfolio: https://www.laurakart.com/ (web archive just in case)
There is a bunch of (simple! but relevant) tools for 3D apps. There’s single bigger one (island generator). Then, a well-textured 3D model, which I could imagine seeing in AAA game for a PS4.
So you don’t need to work in a big studio to do that (though of course it helps, because you learn the needs). What AAA is actually looking for is a AAA-compatible mindset. Not necessarily experience. You just can’t be blocked when facing a big scale, multiple users, documentation etc.
And look - it doesn’t have subpages! At all! Pls don’t do subpages, I hate waiting and loading and going back. You’re not a 50-people studio. Stuff you’ve done in your career probably fits well on a single, scrollable page.
What else besides assets, levels and tools?
Write an article! Not dry documentation, though it can be semi- that. Articles are great for:
- Recognition. You may be found on LinkedIn, Medium or via Google and contacted!
- Learning. Do your research when writing. Cite experts, measure (profiling) - you don’t have to be an expert from the start
- Feedback. You’ll learn what kind of questions people are asking in that area/topic
- You can link to them in CV and that sounds just great (“Benefits of micromeshes on GCN platforms”)
Applying outside games#
STEM / serious game / automotive companies totally need what we can offer. They just, probably, are not very good in hunting for us in the game dev space.
When such a company looks for a “3D artist” in Unreal, I think you can safely present yourself as one. Same if they need “Unreal engineer” and list scripting and optimization in the requirements. You’ll fill in the details on the interview.
You need to be a very strong generalist. But not necessarily best in class. That’s because you’re probably be the only, or 1 of 2, TAs in the project. When doing, for example, VR visualization for a medical app, you will handle the majority of all tasks in Unreal/Unity, of all kind, by yourself - from skeletal anim to Blueprint.
Good luck with your portfolio revamp! Oskar