Eldest Dryas

First off, clarity is WAY more important than a fancy website. Can the person looking for your art see your art immediately without having to hunt and click through a ton of confusing menus? Make sure your art is front and center

Don't have the ability to build a website that makes your art easy to access? Something free like Artstation is fine. In fact, something like Artstation that just puts your art front and center on a very visible grid is the ideal format to shoot for

Write descriptions that describe which part of each piece you were responsible for! If I click on a rendered scene or render of a character I want 2 know if you did the concept or the modeling or the lighting. If it was a group effort credit the other artists you worked with too!

Show your process. Are you a character modeler? Great! Don't just shown a final sculpt. Show your mesh and show your unwrap and show your textures. Credit your concept artist if you worked from a concept. This goes for environment artists too. Show your meshes and unwraps!

If you don't think your meshes, unwraps or texturing skills are up to snuff just throwing your model in a nice renderer and taking glamor shots of it will not fool anyone. If your models have poor geometry the senior artists who live and breathe this stuff will be able to tell

No fancy rendering program will disguise your bad geometry. In fact, trying to hide bad geo by taking fancy renders is a really common thing to see right now so if you DO you have clean geo and texture sheets show them off and it will really make your portfolio stand out!

If you are an artist with a diverse array of skills it is better to make multiple separate portfolios and send over the one most relevant to the job you're applying to rather than trying to cram all of your work into one portfolio. Keep them all clean and simple

Finally, if your college professor forces you to use Wix or Behance or some weird and confusing formatting... Make the terrible website they want you to make, turn it in for a grade, and then take it behind a barn and shoot it and make your REAL portfolio website better

Trust your gut. If you think your college professor is forcing you to show your work to professionals in a way that you think will hinder your career chances remember that their power over you only extends to the end of the school's property line

Also, if you make a student game as a school project just be honest that it's a school project. Don't try to pass it off as some obscure AAA title. Showing that you are able to collab on a project is great! Describe what role you played in the process

Often, when pro artists are evaluating a portfolio they are looking at your decision making process as well as your art. If you don't credit the folks you collaborate with or if you choose a difficult to navigate portfolio format pros will question your decison making skills

AAA game work can at times be a bit like a chaotic theater production or a battlefield experience. When artists hire a new team member they are looking for someone they can trust to have their back and make good decisions under pressure. Good teammates credit their collaborators

If a student is so afraid of showing a mistake that they hide geo problems in fancy renders or if they're so scared of their professors that they let themselves be browbeat into using terrible portfolio formats then they dont give the impression that they are dependendable

A huge part of working on a team is being honest with your teammates about the flaws and strengths your own work has, asking for help if you're struggling, and speaking up when you think some decisions are bad ideas. It's about putting the outcome of the project over your ego

An artist who silently struggles with a difficult task up until the last sec because they are too afraid to admit that they need help is the kind of artist who could put a whole project in jeopardy. No one wants to hire the kind person who will pretend chernobyl isn't in meltdown

Finally, if you are applying to a game studio and you suspect that it's the kind of place where the bosses won't be receptive to an artist who says 'I'm struggling with this' or 'maybe this is a bad idea' then that's a BIG red flag and you may not want to work there

There are definitely game studios out there that are led by intimidating bosses surrounded by scared employees who are too afraid to tell them that chernobyl is melting down and those are not going to be healthy or stable places for you to work