Sarah Lynn Reynolds: GDC Notes

Post date: Mar 16, 2015 7:52:4 AM

Picture from the Epic Party which was a really great networking opportunity.

• 1. Portfolio Observations:

I brought my giant 11x17 physical portfolio with me. After one portfolio review with it I decided it wasn’t worth it and switched to the portfolio on my kindle fire. Most people at the con had their portfolios on their tablets anyways, but I had assumed more would have physical portfolios. Firstly, the tablet was efficient for space. Secondly, the gallery I used (Which was surprisingly, just a facebook album I created linked up to my kindle’s cloud storage) had a really cool, user friendly layout that allowed reviewers to quickly scroll through my work and see a large chunk of it at once without laboriously flipping through pages.

2.  Specificity/Clear Goals

I received a lot of positive feedback with the reviews I got, but the biggest note that I got from probably 90% of the studios I talked to was that my work seemed unfocused in terms of including both 2D and 3D art.

A UI artist doing portfolio reviews at the High Voltage booth was a big fan of both my concept work at my Environment Art and encouraged me to apply for one of their positions (Upon graduating) but essentially said I should “pick one” and get more specific and have more of a focused variety in whichever I chose (For concept she recommended specifically more “call of duty”-esque dark work) rather than have limited options of both. This message was echoed by a Gearbox art lead that looked at my portfolio and the artists at Crystal Dynamic event.

The only person who contradicted that was a concept artist I met who worked at the Indie Studio Iridium who said my portfolio and variety of skills would be great for an indie studio.

Bottom line? a generalist portfolio is great for Indie studios but a specialist portfolio is better for triple a studios.

3.  Relaxing on Optimization

Both of the environment artists I talked to at the Crystal Dynamics event encouraged higher polycounts. One specifically mentioned that it was helpful to do some hard surface prop design for portfolio purpose, but not worry about the polycount or texture size. The other said that their polycount gets fairly high due to organic work, and noted not to waste polygons by putting them on straight edges(obviously), but said it was definitely not acceptable to see polygonal edges in things like rounded edges at our current generation of games.

I was not once questioned about my texture sizes, polycount, or really anything that applied to optimization at all. I still appreciate what I’ve learned about optimization from Ringling, as I know it will help in an actual pipeline, however,  If I worked on any portfolio pieces specifically aimed for a Triple A studio outside of class I’d probably take the advice the Crystal Dynamic’s environment artist gave me and focus more on making something visually sophisticated and throw out some of the stressing over optimization.

Crystal Dynamics Event

The Crystal Dynamics event was probably where I got the most in depth and objective critique of my portfolio. They had a lot of really great artists doing reviews at the event and I talked to three out of four of them. One was a former art director for tomb raider who had recently switched to game director and two environment artists. The former art director (Who had a ton of experience outside of Tomb Raider, formerly working at Disney Interactive and being a lead artist on Silent Hill 5) pushed me towards character work and indie studios. The other two just gave great general portfolio feedback and insight on what it was like to work at a triple a company. It was also interesting to talk to students at other schools and hear about their curriculum. Overall a great and really helpful event.