How I Got Hired as a Character Artist For Games

you don't need a perfect portfolio to get a job and you don't need to be famous on social media I got my very first job as a character artist over 10 years ago since then I've been able to work on games like evolve Titanfall back for blood and Apex Legends breaking into the entertainment industry or just finding a job as an artist can seem impossible the sheer level of talent and competition today is insane all you have to do is go to Art station or Instagram and instantly be overwhelmed with amazing new art but there's actually even more opportunity today for game artists than there ever has been what you really need is a little bit of strategy dedication and patience because if you continually work on improving your artwork and be open to possibilities in the long run good things will happen so today I want to show you my very first portfolio and how that led to my very first job how my portfolio has evolved over the years and I'll share with you what I've learned to maximize your personal projects to make the biggest impact you can and some tips on how you can increase your chances of becoming a professional artist so let's do it let's first take a look at my portfolio 1.0 which is this guy there he is this is actually what the word portfolio means and uh in here is what's called paper this is a collection of work that I did as I graduated art school I went to college for game Art and Design actually and I took this portfolio to the game developers conference GDC which happens every year and I took that book around to the different Studios back then they would have people set up at the different Studios and these really cool people would review your work and so people like me aspiring artists would stand in line and wait for feedback and I think we were hoping to get a job to be honest I thought I would go there and just like get hired but instead I got some feedback from I think it was Ubisoft and that advice has stuck with me to this day so I got to the table I showed the artist my book he opened it I was probably the 400th person he saw that day and he just started flipping like this and I just saw him flipping past like characters that took me like two months to make just Bam Bam Bam and I was like oh oh could you oh and then he landed on this one and he said huh and then he asked me some questions about it and then said do more like this and that was the first thing that really shifted the way I thought about my artwork my personal projects and my portfolio because that work in there was the thing in my portfolio that took the least amount of time and it was not a production asset and I really added it to my portfolio to like have more things and this was the thing that caught the attention of an industry professional so that definitely changed what I thought about what I should be putting in my portfolio and how important that first impression really is so that's it for the book that was really the only time ah I also made a website which was super crucial and nowadays you would do that on Art station or something like that but we can take a look at my very first portfolio website here we go to do that I'm going to go to the Wayback machine and I'll go check out Jason hillcg.com there we go 2009 and then there it is oh I have some text oh that's gonna be cringe don't read that don't read that and look at the this logo I just straight up stole David Blaine's logo I'm not gonna lie and it looked like a heart imagine I was a little emoe art student you know cut me some slack the wallpaper that looks like I'm in a saloon though no excuse for that no excuse for that one and what's going on with this uh I just I put the accent on the E what am I doing here and look at look how I'm breaking up this word trying too hard are we but anyways I digress so yeah I actually made this website in HTML like this back then and I thought I was super cool anyways back to the art so here you go this is essentially that book but in a website form and this is what I sent around to some studios and didn't hear back from them these links don't work so let me pull up I've got some of these on my computer actually so we can take a look at these so this grifter is my very first full game character that I made this is based on a comic book made an impression on me and I thought hey here's a character that is a little niche that people haven't seen and it's like superheroey comic bookie doesn't have a face so I thought this was achievable so this is my first ever game character going a little too hard with the warm and the cool lighting effect which is definitely an art school requirement you know I think everybody goes through a phase lots of pain over on this guy this is what he actually looks like in Unreal Engine just kind of raw you know not gonna be too hard myself these are my first things you know I think it's okay hair looking like crinkle cut chips though not gonna lie the arm though I'm gonna give myself a pass on the arm I remember focusing a lot on the arm just wanted a super sexy dude arm right there got the veins and everything first character in Unreal Engine there you go here is my second ever character that I made complete with the high poly low poly and all that here again warm and cool lighting check this time with a face you know if this isn't recognizable this is the character from the movie Appaloosa that Viggo Mortensen played named Everett still kind of a Cowboy head so here's an actual like kind of raw screen grab you can see down here in the lower right Unreal Engine 3 we're in we're in five now we're doing five but again not too hard on myself you know hey first character it's a thing they're posed pretty proud of myself for posing both of them definitely always recommend that to students coming up makes a huge difference so much better than just like a t-pose makes them feel more like characters makes them feel more like they're doing something there he isn't unreal again spinning around here's a wireframe kind of crazy to see this is like 12 000 triangles nowadays they're like 120 000 triangles or more for a portfolio why not and here's that character Sarge and again pretty fast that I made this is a zebra sculpt and then just I did a render and then just painted all this and Photoshop the eyes all painted in Photoshop everything there's no color it looks more like this in zbrush like heavily inspired by Kobe jukes Kobe Duke's so dope and his work at the time was like some of the best I'd ever seen still I think is great so this is kind of my crappy like attempt at doing something in a similar vein to the cool stuff he was doing even though it's not a game character and I think that's an important thing to realize so looking at my portfolio now you can see like this guy right here is not production uh Nema not a production model not a production model these are because these are my professional work here's another one that's not production this one's not production so I've really taken on board this idea of I'm gonna have some examples that are of game characters or here's some examples of some production quality work but then in between is a lot more examples that are not bad that are really just more for like hey here's a cool character model and that does really a lot and that's the number one thing I want to convey right now for people that are building portfolios and trying to do more with what they have is to put a little bit of strategy in your portfolio overall before you go deep into it as an artist you are a business of one and your product is your artwork your portfolio is your online storefront and your images and your thumbnails are like your marketing I really believe that shifting your thinking about your portfolio and how it is your kind of online storefront thinking about that user experience that whoever gets your portfolio has really maximizes the impact of each of the posts that you do another bit of strategy that I encourage everyone to onboard is the result of that initial feedback that I got and how I build my portfolio today which is I think of it as having pillars of projects that are what you want to be hired to do in between those pillars you can put smaller projects like bricks that take much less time and are much smaller in scope you can do three or four of those in between each pillar and that's how you can build a big portfolio and you can really curate a message a style a level of quality an aesthetic while having those really big projects that are doing everything you need in terms of answering questions for people that might be thinking about hiring you but you don't have to do that every time then you can just make cool stuff that's about making things that are interesting growing your own skills and having fun because that's what we should be doing anyways the next piece of strategy that I think is really important to have is to have variety within your portfolio now I don't think it's beneficial to just have things all over the place you know like you don't know what you want to do maybe like here's some style and here's some photo real and here's a bench I think you should narrow it down to what you really really want to do but show variety within that you know if you're doing characters for games that are in some kind of stylized thing or photo reel then let's do different ages different genres different ethnicities you know maybe you have a big guy and some armor then maybe you want to do a woman military character contempt temporary person like Nathan Drake and then maybe we could do something that's sci-fi and so we're building out this variety that's showing the different materials that's showing the different Aesthetics that's again proving it out so that we're answering those questions of somebody that arrives at the portfolio can this person do my fantasy game can they make a Sci-Fi character we want to broaden our artistic ability and we want to advertise that we can make a variety of characters and artwork right you can see how when I do something like here's a self-portrait next I do a big ugly creature orc guy and then next I do a stylized sci-fi girl so if I complete a project the next project I want to be different it also keeps things interesting back to my old portfolio this was the biggest project that I did while I was in school this was like my graduating project as it were so I spent a long time doing this this is based on the book stop staring by Jason osipa I actually read it first when I was in high school definitely one of the most tech technical books I've still ever read I'm not I don't normally do that but I'm just so obsessed with the making of characters and how it's done that I found that book super fascinating and was itching for an opportunity to try to put it into practice that book shows you how you can model your own face and rig it and animate it and that's what I did so this is actually a self-portrait and before zbrush so this is all box modeled you know from a box just building it Point by point but I did a full rig and I recorded a performance of something from Fight Club and I animated it and I really wish I still had that video today there is no video I haven't seen it in years maybe maybe almost 10 years I haven't seen it I lost it on some drive back in the day so save your work people because when you get old you might want to look back on it so all I have is this one render test render and no animation and then some screen grabs that I put in a zbrush later on so that was portfolio 1.0 and that portfolio was good enough to land me my first job initially I found out about this job because people I went to college with that were also studying game art design we're working at this small place down in Orange County and they knew me so they just kind of told me about it and recommended me that portfolio was good enough for them to give me a shot they hired me in one other character artist and that was my first gig it was a contract the contract was to make digital characters using Maya and zbrush for something that was going to be like a cinematic for a slot machine that never came out but it doesn't matter they paid me to make characters it went well enough to do a second contract so those two contracts were the extent of my first gig or gigs of being a character artist after that I put those character models back into my portfolio and added some other stuff so we jump back over the Wayback machine here I guess 2011 I probably got the job around 2010 I guess take a look there you go so in 2011 you can see some roads are starting to fill out you can see this young male which was based on Orlando Bloom this older male and then this guy who was Will Smith kind of a Will Smith likeness that I tried to like video game up this one was not for that gig this was actually just something for fun I started while I was in college again to practice and then this young lady that was part of that first job and then this other young lady so I got four character heads and one full character in my portfolio from that job and one of the cool things was the variety that's something that now I try to be conscious of but back then I was a little bit fortunate to just have a a brief that was let's make different people different ages and different genders all right my next tip for you is to be open I want you to cast the widest net possible in terms of opportunities and be open to unexpected opportunities that might come up so again I don't think you should just shotgun the kind of art that you do try to be as true to yourself or at least follow your interest as genuinely as you can but then from there we can apply to so many jobs that very first job that I got that resulted from an interview that someone I went to school with helped me get that was after six months of not getting work after graduating you know I applied to valve and naughty dog and epic and ID and that's it Infinity Ward you know just I just applied to the biggest Studios I knew off the top of my head and then I just waited around and nothing happened and that was it you know it wasn't until I got a really crucial piece of advice which was hey why don't you apply to some places every day and that made a huge difference in my thinking Shifting the mindset from applying to a handful of specific places to I'm gonna apply to job descriptions that interest me every day forces you to do things that you're not doing like researching different companies looking around at different resources that have job postings digging a little bit to find the opportunities that aren't on the surface level that aren't on the top of mind and in a market that's like huge with competition everyone's trying to work at Riot everyone's trying to work at blizzard but there's so many startups for like mobile stuff and now VR stuff or I don't know crypto stuff you know it doesn't matter if someone's willing to pay you to make the kind of art you want to make that's the goal and we can build from there because some of these big studios require years of experience which is impossible to get without getting some experience if you're open to move that's a plus and that's also also going to increase your chances I know in today's day and age we're all wanting to work from home I want to work from home and we're all able to do that a lot more than we could before and that's great but there are some studios and some opportunities that still require people to move and if you're one of those people that are willing to do that then it increases your chances quickly I'm going to show you this website called gamedevmap.com this is something that was big when I was trying to find work 10 years ago it looks like it still works I don't know how up to date it is but just for instance you know these are all just Geo locations right so if I just clicked Southern California here it just gives me a big list so you could just start opening up each one of these go to their website seeing if they have job postings so if you're someone that's really trying to get a job setting a goal of applying places every day is going to really help get you there and get you to start doing the things that you're not doing right now and the hustle that you need to find Opportunities you didn't even know existed so after that first gig you can see my portfolio essentially doubled at the bottom you can see keeping the self-portrait alive some 2D things which I just wanted to have three full rows let's be honest I wouldn't suggest people put 2D in there if you're trying to be a 3D artist and then in the middle you can actually see the model that was the subject of my very first YouTube video which is still on the Channel please don't watch that so that was portfolio 2.0 now if we take a look at my portfolio today we can scroll all the way to the bottom and what do we see hey it's the Will Smith video game guy so I kept one of the things from way back then just as like the first anchor to my portfolio you can definitely see I mean I'm trying hard with this presentation it's a studio lighting it's something you know I'm trying here going super hard with the chromatic aberration definitely art student check right there and then some 2D so this bottom row is something I would probably recommend people cut I just keep it here for like demonstration purposes and you know I've been kind of talking about this stuff in the public for a while that I thought it'd be good to show the progression you know over time but if someone was asking me to make like the purest best portfolio possible I would recommend removing this stuff because it's a little bit confusing but I think I have enough examples where it doesn't really like deter so yeah so I'm actually getting like game art in here so full production characters and then mixing in the busts what I learned from that very first piece of feedback on my portfolio book doing things that took less time than I found personally interesting and that I was just having fun and showcasing stuff and not worrying about the production requirements just trying to make something cool I've been kind of continuing that this whole time if we look here after the production work you can see this dread zbrush quiche shot and then Photoshop paint over not production at all same with this a bust High poly I maybe key shot I don't know Photoshop stuff so no UVS and textures just all quick projects and then this character which was the biggest personal project I did at least since the two characters I built for my graduate portfolio this character is the culmination of those things I learned and the different mindset that I had let's be real I made this to do several things one of which was to get the attention of Blizzard you know I wanted to get a job at Blizzard at least throw my hat in the ring and say hey I'm I could do some stuff at the same time I wanted to learn some of these techniques I want to have fun do something that I was interested in play with things like fiber mesh hair and zbrush which was new at the time and play around with stylization which I hadn't done much of or at all up to that point so this character right here is high poly and the textures everything except the tattoo is procedure textures so if we scroll down here I have the character in a t-pose as if it's kind of a production model but it's not I didn't worry at all about topology I didn't do UVS like I say um some of this color is just poly paint and then it's just procedural stuff in keyshot far from a production model and when I put it out this got me the most attention that any of my Works had up until that point because this is like video game related it did good things for my portfolio in terms of exposure and and working well for me in conversation or whatever just you know putting me more on the map as someone who makes characters for games even though it's not a game character that brings me to my last piece of advice and that is to be patient play the long game I really think this is the greatest equalizer people learn at different rates people have different skills but if you can be consistent and really just be relentless that you're gonna make your artwork and you're going to work to improve yourself forever then I think how could it not work out in addition to that never lose sight of having fun I can't stress enough how important it is to just have fun and follow your curiosity and keep that sense of playfulness that you probably had when you began that's the best way to ensure that you're going to be able to do this for the long term and if you mix that with a little bit of strategy showing variety and doing smaller projects then you can build a bigger better portfolio in a shorter amount of time and have fun doing it thank you for watching this video if you want to hang out around here and learn some character art stuff this playlist right here has some of my character art tutorials and if you're someone that's working on making the best game character you can right now or are just trying to make a killer portfolio post I'm actually teaching a class in the near future on exactly that thing so if you're really interested in that you can go to characterclass.com right now and sign up to an email list and I'll send you more info when that comes out thank you for watching see you in the next one peace out

Channel: J Hill

Views: 253,875

Keywords: jhill, J Hill, Zbrush, Character Art, Game art, Character Modeling, Unreal Engine, Digital Characters, Jason Hill, how to, art class, art tutorials, portfolio, game art, game artist, portfolio art, game industry, video game industry jobs, art jobs in game industry, different jobs in video game industry, jobs in the game design industry

Id: Y6fYufrEjHU

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023