Building a Great VFX Portfolio

VFX Types, Fundamentals, and Breadth — Reels and Websites — Building a Presence Outside Your Portfolio — Example VFX Portfolio — International Applications

What do I look for in an applicant's VFX?

Let’s start with the actual VFX - we’ll get to reels, portfolio layouts, all that good stuff soon. Below are sort of the checklists I have in my head when I'm reviewing reels. You don’t have to check every one of these boxes, you aren’t locked into the mechanics I’ve listed here; however, the more of them you can check off or check off something mechanically similar, the fewer questions I have left about your basic abilities to execute on lots of different kinds of VFX and your understanding of fundamentals and gameplay communication.

VFX Fundamentals​

  • Gameplay context/communication

  • Clear Visual Hierarchy

  • Strong use of Color, Value, Shape, and Detail

  • Animation Principles

  • Bonus: Readability in varying environments

Practical Skills​

  • VFX built in a game engine

  • Texture painting

  • Basic modeling skills

  • Basic shader skills

  • Bonus points for any one of:

    • Basic 2D or 3D animation

    • Basic simulation skills

    • Basic rigging skills

Mechanical Purpose

  • Impacts

    • Hits / Heals / Buffs / Debuffs

  • Missile with cast, projectile, and impact

  • AoE or Explosion

  • Physical / swipe attack

  • Environmental or looping VFX (i.e. status effects)

Magic and Elements

  • Fire / Lightning

  • “Weighty” real-world elements: water or goo, stone or ice, smoke

  • Swipes/smears - physical motion

  • Bright/additive magic

  • Dark /transparent magic

So, that’s a lot of words and bullet points. How do you fit all that in a portfolio?

The basic approach I recommend using is to take one thing each from the Effect Type and Element columns and pairing it with one or two practical skills that can really be highlighted in it. I don’t mention VFX Fundamentals in there because ideally you’re using all of them across every pieces, but there are definitely some types of effects that show off different fundamentals better,
Some examples of portfolios that could check off basically everything from the four lists:

Example Portfolio #1

  1. Mid-tier fireball with wind-up, missile, and impact

    • Missile + real-world element + texturing

  2. Powerful magic explosion AoE

    • AoE + magic element + texturing + materials

  3. Small healing self-cast with wind-up and impact

    • Small impact + magic element

  4. Three-swipe melee attack

    • Swipe attack + physical elements + meshes + materials

  5. Magic portal loop

    • Environmental + materials + maybe-meshes

Portfolio #2

  1. Mid-tier holy fire explosion

    • Explosion + real element + texturing

  2. Small dark magic trap + triggered effect

    • Environmental + Impact + magic element

  3. Small boulder missile

    • Missile + weighty elements + modeling

  4. Powerful shield buff

    • Buff impact + modeling + materials

  5. Trio of Status Effects

    • Looping + various elements

Portfolio Skeleton

  1. Missile with cast, projectile, and impact

  2. AoE or Explosion with wind-up

  3. Heal, Buff, or Hit Impact

  4. Physical / swipe attack

  5. Looping VFX

What if you’re REALLY busy?

You’ve got a full-time job, maybe two. You can only work for so long at a time. You’re also a caretaker. There are tons of good reasons you just might not have as much time as the average college bear to build a portfolio, but you can have a much better chance of .

The most important thing with this portfolio is to resist the temptation to go big. All of these VFX can look good somewhere between 0.5-2 seconds, or on a relatively short loop, and that lets you create things way more quickly and with more focus on honing in your fundamentals.

Once you have this portfolio ready to start applying, you can also use these VFX as bases to build some more longform or dramatic versions if you want, while still having something to apply around with while you work.

Portfolio Dun Quick

  1. Hit, Heal, Buff, or Debuff Impact

  2. Missile or beam loop (no wind-up/impact)

  3. Set of looping effects (item pick-ups/auras/status effects/etc.)

  4. Fast AoE or Explosion (minimal wind-up)

Pick a different element for each, ideally including one real-world element such as fire, lightning, or water. Keep them short, sweet, and focus on your fundementals.:)

What About The Reel/Portfolio Itself?

Number of Pieces
As mentioned above, I'm usually hoping for 4-12 pieces in a reel. In a junior reel in particular, I'm expecting 4-6, because you probably taught yourself VFX on your own time and likes 

For the purposes of what a "piece" is, I tend to think of it as all the parts of a single effect: a single explosion is one piece, as is a missile that involves a cast, projectile and missile. For very small things such as hit impacts, it may be worth doing tiers, such as small-medium-large or basic+critical, or several aspected variants such as physical, magical, and elemental.

Display
Another entry-level specific detail: personally, if you've never actually worked on a game, I'm totally okay with your entire reel being in a greybox with spheres standing in for characters (I've also seen people have great success with - if you're comfortable in Mixamo or similar I highly recommend this).

Even if you're displaying in greybox, you should still be considering (and hopefully testing) how your VFX look in different lightning environments

In heavily art-leaning reels, I'm rarely looking for breakdowns. In highly technical reels, if part of what you're marketing is your technical capability, showing 

If you have cool stuff (technical or artistic) to show off, you can also show them off below/separately from your reel: this is often easier to view and parse.

Anatomy of a VFX Reel

I hope to see 4-12 solid pieces in a portfolio. These are recommendations only, but I find 6 can generally satisfy questions of breadth and consistency, and 12 or fewer shows that you can judge and curate your own best work. It's always better to leave them wanting to see more of your work.

A 1.5-2.5 minute demo reel is often the sweet spot. Shorter often makes me wonder how much you can actually make - longer just takes up a lot of time.

​Give the pieces some breathing room or 2-4 loops. We won't catch every detail the first time and scrubbing is annoying.

Start and end strong. I don't do this in this reel! My weakest piece is actually first, because this was a Hearthstone-specific reel and I wanted to grab them immediately with the fanart. However, in general you want to start with your strongest piece first and go down from there. How strong the piece at the end is is up to you - I like to go second- or third-strongest at the end so it finishes on a good note. And, again, it's always better to cut a weak piece than make people wonder if you really think that's indicative of your skillset.

Contact info! Start, end, and ideally center. Put it unobtrusively on every piece of media you send it, so it's always readily available.

You'll notice my definition of "12" pieces here is... loose at best. You could easily claim this has at least 28 pieces in it. None of these rules are set in stone and VFX and concept art in particular often have lots of stages/sub-components that relevant to the completed piece.

Credits​​! Unless it's *super obviously* not yours, credit other people whose work appears in your reel or cite the parts you did (whichever's easier).​

​Common Reel Questions

"What about music/audio?"

Many people always mute reels, especially on their first viewing, because they want to focus on the VFX.​ I've seen some reels, especially with ambient VFX, use sound to great effect, but you should never assume that reviewers will hear it.

“What kind of background should I use?”

If you’re just making a standalone effect, a 50% grey background is completely and totally fine (don’t use dark grey or black; I know it’s easier to make VFX look rad on a darker background but that’s exactly why you shouldn’t:)). If your effect has background distortion or something, a simple grey tiling pattern is probably plenty.

A textured environment, even a simple one, will often make you reel a little more professional-looking, but I think it’s main advantage is actually in helping you keep yourself honest about practicing making VFX that look good against not-grey. A small number of devs will also insist on only accepting VFX shown in a fully-textured environment; at the junior level most hiring managers I’ve spoken to feel this is unnecessary because we can tell whether an effect is good or not without that, and personally I’d rather you be putting that energy into the VFX I’m hiring you to make. As you move towards mid you’ll definitely want to show off in-game VFX; but at the junior level, a greybox is just way better for letting you focus on what’s important.

"What sort of characters should I be using?"

It's very common convention to just use static grey spheres as character placeholders, so you don't really have to do any extra animation at all. It’s also common to use free animated characters from places like Mixamo (make sure you credit them!). In some of my older reels you’ll see I use lil' animated grey spheres with sphere-hands; I'm just not a strong character animator, but I like having a little more context than the static spheres and I like the ease of customizing their timing.

"Should I showcase 2D concepts in the demo reel?"

Up to you. Concepting is rarely a required skill of a VFX artist, but if you're proud of how you've realized another person's concept, or of the concept you did yourself, show it off! The only thing I would note here is to make sure that you’re composing your reel in a way that makes the comparison or transition between concept and effect as smooth as possible.

Your portfolio doesn’t have to be fancy! At all!

Seriously, all I actually need from a VFX application are:

  • Demo Reel with contact info

  • Resume with contact info

Boom! You're done. You didn't even need a website, strictly speaking.

However, if you are making a website, please, I beg:

  • Make it ridiculously easy to see your work. Make your portfolio the front page/base URL. Your work should be the first thing prospective employers see, whether you’ve linked them to it or they’re stumbling across it in a search. Videos for your main work are great - they can be much higher quality than gifs, and allow us to slow down or scrub through details if we want. Embedded gifs are great for solo loops of VFX and fleshing artistic or technical details of your process/piece.

  • Display the biggest possible images/videos as the embedded pieces. I'm fine with clicking to enlarge for bonus detail (especially if I can click/swipe to the next image in fullscreen), but if your pieces either can’t be expanded, or don’t have enough resolution to see all the details, both of us are going to be sad.

  • Skip the splash/welcome pages. Again - just let us see your work, immediately. The homepage of this website is just VFX; if I were actively job-hunting, I would have my resume linked up in the header alongside my socials as well, so that people can get everything they need without ever going to another page.

    • If you have application-specific portfolios or portfolios for multiple disciplines, just create a separate page for each of them. As an example, when I applied to Hearthstone I made a custom reel for them and simply had an unlisted /hearthstone page that I linked to in my resume.

    • Having an About/Contact page is totally fine, it just shouldn’t be between us and your work. Also, it’s still better if we can contact you from the portfolio page too.

  • Password-protect things only if truly necessary. It’s one more hurdle for the people reviewing your work, and one where simple mistakes can completely prevent us from seeing your stuff. If you do have some really strong work that can't be made public, pleeease make sure the password is cited in your cover letter, resume, and anywhere else possible in your application. If we can't easily find the password it's very possible we just won't look, because we probably have hundreds of applications left to go through and can’t spend time guessing it.

  • Avoid requiring downloads whenever possible. This is more likely to be a gotcha for designers than VFX or most other disciplines, but if you have a game or demo you want people to play through, if at all possible, have it be playable in-browser. Whether or not you can do that, include a brief playthrough video or highlight gifs on the page as well - not everyone will play even brief browser-embedded demos, and this way they’ll see the highlights of your in-game work no matter what (it may even be enough to change their mind and play the game).

Not making a website? Great! Other totally valid ways to display your work:

  • ArtStation (I don't care if you have a custom website or their default portfolio as long as it's easy to navigate)

    • In my opinion, other portfolio/compilation websites such as DeviantArt, Behance, etc. are also fair game, but I've seen some devs raise eyebrows at these. (Which is silly, as long as it's easy to view stuff and all in one place I'm happy, but it's worth knowing that unfortunately ArtStation is generally viewed as more "professional" than, say, DeviantArt. ArtStation is also, more practically, the place that many art leads and recruiters go to scour for prospective hires, so having an ArtStation increases your chances of being found without having applied as well.)

    • Yes, that does mean I'm okay with a well-organized Twitter thread of gifs/images, too. (But again, that probably won't be true of everyone.)

    • “Make it ridiculously easy to see your work” applies here too - whatever part of it you link employers to should give them the best possible view into your best work. Your reel should be immediately available, and ArtStation’s pages are great for fleshing out individual pieces with a main video and gif, image, or text breakdowns.

  • A direct link to a Vimeo/Youtube is also great if you're only sending a demo reel. Again, it's easy, it's straightforward, just make sure I have your contact info and resume somewhere. (Linking them in the dooblydoo is always a safe bet, on top of having your contact info in your reel.)

The Not-Portfolio (Twitter)

A portfolio, pretty much by definition, should be showcasing your best work and representation of your skills, but finishing a beautiful showpiece is a very small part of the time you’ll spend making VFX. Vanishing into your VFX cave for weeks or months until you can reemerge with a single spectacular piece is pretty lonely though, and means there are a lot less opportunities for you to establish yourself as part of the VFX community or build up an online presence as a potential hire.

Twitter, VFX Discord channels, the Realtime VFX forum, or other informal, discoverable places can be a fantastic place to post your works-in-progress, art or technical experiments, things you did for fun with no intention of them being portfolio-worthy, all that kind of stuff.

If you’re posting these non-portfolio pieces, especially across different channels, it’ll create way more touchpoints for you to show up on people’s radars and build up a community of VFX Artists around you (and they’re very nice:)). It also leaves a paper trail for all the work and learning you’re doing, which can be a great advantage during job hunts, as it reinforces your love of your craft, continued learning and breadth, and helps to bulk out your actual portfolio without having to put things other than your best work in the portfolio itself.

Minimal VFX Portfolio

A VFX portfolio can be as simple as a link to a demo reel with your contact information and resume linked in the description. This can be via Vimeo, Youtube (make sure it’s not running ads), ArtStation, any of those are fine - it doesn’t even need to be hosted on its own page.

Here’s an example of a VFX portfolio layout that I would be very happy browsing and reviewing:

Hearthstone VFX Demo Reel (2016-2020)

Software : Unity, Photoshop, Maya

Contact: hadidjah@gmail.com
Resume: hadidjah.com/HadidjahChamberlin_VFXArtist_Resume2021

 You’re done! That’s all I need to be happy as a hiring manager!

If you want to add breakdowns or details of your VFX, absolutely feel free to - just make sure the reel is front-and-center so that everything it’s really important to you that they see is easy to find, watch, and share around the team.

Building a Portfolio for International Applications

The game for getting hired internationally is quite a bit different and generally harder - for a position that will require you to get a work visa and move countries, there’s often a significant investment required on the studio’s part, so moving countries at the junior level can be extremely difficult. (At least one exception to this is the EU, ofc.)

The upswing in remote work is helping to take a lot of pressure off of the need to move countries before you can even start working; however, even fully-remote work between countries often depends on labor and tax laws, and depending on those laws sometimes even fully-remote contract work can be difficult.

I’ll flesh this out when I have more time, but the tl;dr is that you want to make your portfolio as close to a mid-level portfolio or higher as possible. Things that can really help you here:

  • Show effects synced to full character animations

    • I recommend using free animated characters from a website like Mixamo; you can tweak them to suit your needs, but animating them from the ground up will likely be time-consuming, and may still not be up to the quality that a dedicated character animator could do, which can be distracting from your VFX.

  • Show effects in fully-textured environmental context

    • I’d recommend using nice free textures/assets or something from an asset store rather than making them yourself; again, you just really want to be focusing as much of your time as possible to be making the best VFX possible.

  • Target specific studios

    • Normally I’m pretty cautionary about hyper-focusing on just a studio or two, but when the standards you’ll have to meet are likely much higher, narrowing the focus of your work to really nailing a single, tailored VFX style can be a huge help in letting you get that much better that much faster. Plus, if you do a lot of fan art it may catch their eye eventually as well and you can start to build relationships with their devs.

    • If they use publicly-available tools or engines (Unity, Embergen, etc.), this can also help you pick the software you want to focus on learning.

    • Bigger studios often have more resources to hire and bring over international applicants, so targeting these may help your chances as well (but do your research into the companies that you’re most excited about; studio size is only so accurate of a predictor).

  • Consider getting a degree, if possible.

    • This can be expensive, but it’s a massive help or even a requirement for some visa types. At least in the US, many visas are looking for either a Bachelor’s-equivalent degree or many years of experience in your field.

  • Build your online presence

    • Twitter, Discords, forums - whatever your communities of choice, being an active part of the community there by both posting your own work regularly and helping or simply engaging with your fellow community members can help you become someone people “know” when they’re looking to hire, or when your application turns up in their inbox. (Communities are also, y’know, great for improving your skills and full of very nice people.)

  • Get whatever team experience you can

    • The biggest differentiator between mid and junior tends to just be dev experience, so the more you can work on projects or with others, the more you help improve your chances.

    • Participate in game jams. Shop around for any contract or remote work you can get. If there are any studios in your country or countries that it’s easier for you to move to, consider targeting those first. All of these help make you a more appealing candidate in general and also make acquiring a visa easier.

    • The caveat to these are, of course, that they take time and energy, time and energy that you might otherwise dedicate to improving your personal VFX work (this can be especially true of a bad studio environment). It’s a tricky balance and one where only you will be able to determine what works best for you.