Hi,
You can forget this nonsense right away, first without disrespect they can find better artists to steal from, and secondly if they do they won’t last long anyway.
The point of a portfolio is to show your abilities, how can you do a proper work if you fake those abilities ? So forget about people sabotaging themselves and focus on your career instead.
It’s more important to showcase how the mesh is structured.
Well you should concentrate on VFX and realism then, you can work on both cartoony and realistic stuff but you’ll have to spend twice the time to get a good level so it’s better to focus on what you like best.
Yes, I saw that in your portfolio, it’s cool. That’s how small studios function and they indeed prefer people being able to do a bit of everything as they can’t afford specialists. But unless you really want to work on these kind of low-cost project you’ll have to pick a specialty and become really good at that. On the 3 portfolio’s artists I posted previously probably none of them do rigging, animation, lighting or compositing, but they do model pretty well with very different styles.
Again it’s up to you to decide, if you prefer doing a bit of everything then you shouldn’t aim for cinema stuff as it’s pretty segmented, but rather corporate video, stuff as you did earlier, or maybe small indie games.
Yeah it’s a good start, but it’s not enough if you want to really use that skill to work in VFX. It lack some details and realism, as long as the anatomical structure beneath the skin.
To be specialized in character /creature/animal creation this is the kind of result you should aim :
or that :
It’s ok to include what you did in your portfolio especially since the goal is to enter a school, just don’t expect that level to be enough once you’re out of school.
That’s fine since the most important part is the character, but since it’s easy to model a chair it’s more clever to do it yourself. Keep in mind the context and what is the purpose of that piece :
If it’s for professional work, you should use as much as external assets as you can, as the idea is to save much time and money as possible and focus solely on what needs to be hand made for the project.
If it’s personal work, well you can do whatever you want, to goal is to have fun, and practice what you like best.
If it’s about portfolio / job training, it’s best to showcase as much of your work and show dedication. But at some point if something takes more than a few hours to do and it’s unrelated to your specialty it’s ok to use already made assets. Maybe if you made a character in front of a city you might use some already made buildings, just make sure that the city doesn’t steal the show.
Some hardcore artists would probably model everything but if your specialty in on character it would be understandable that you don’t.
Well, that depends, the point of the portfolio pieces is to show your skills.
If what a piece says about your skills is just that you know how to scatter already made 3D assets it’s not very useful. It becomes much more interesting if you do them by yourself, especially if your piece is mostly about vegetation.
Now in a piece like this :
It’s probably fine if the trees where not from the author, as it’s really not the main point of the image. And anyway for tree it’s fine to use generators as it’s tedious to model manually anyway.
But, anyway, it really depends on how much you’d like to impress people that will review your portfolio. Say you use your own tree generator and the result looks great you’ll get much more interest than if you didn’t do them : Forest Nodes - procedural trees using Geometry Nodes
Then about textures, if your specialty is environment it’s probably fine and expected that you reuse images you find or bought online. Same with HDRI.
Now if you want to become a shading artist it’s obvious that you have to do most of the work, a pro-shading/texture artist : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/r9VNn6
Obviously, as an environment artist demonstrating that you know how to create convincing procedural material, or you can photo-shoot your own texture is a great plus, so including a bit of that is ok, but it’s pointless to do everything by yourself. At least once you start to become really good at environment you’ll probably become in need of more and more custom textures and you’ll naturally get to that as well.
The catch is to understand what you should specialize into and what is relevant with that specialization. Like animation and environment modeling are two very different things so you’ll never have to do both at the same time in a standard production environment. So in a pro portfolio, you should include animation if you are a character animator, environment if you’re an environment artist but never both at the same time unless your goal is to do lowcost projects where doing everything is asked.
However, say you are an animator and know some rigging it’s pretty valuable.
Same if you focus on environment and know some procedural shading, lighting and composition.
Anyway, if you focus on one area and study professional artists I’m sure it will quickly make sense if not already.
Well, I don’t completely agree with Joseph here. If it’s optional then it is. But obviously it can add some weight to the decision if there are two similar portfolios. If you don’t know how to draw well maybe it’s best to focus on improving your 3D skills as it should prevail in the end. If you can afford to take some drawing class during that year this might be even better…
Anyway if during the year you get a better understanding of how the industry function, you pick one specialty and improve in that area by studying artists who work in VFX and lastly you make an appropriate letter of introduction I’m sure you’ll get accepted next year.
And anyway, the school should explain to you why you fail right ? Then maybe just listen to their advice 