Biggest think most people I know would say is a decent show reel even if it's stills strung together not animated stuff.

Have quite a few friends who are full timers, I just pick up the odd bit here and there in my spare time (4 contracts this year), but I like my day job in software engineering so I'm happy to keep this as a hobby in the background. For me I've done 3 architectural jobs this year and one product visualisation (i.e. pre-prototype). These are from regular clients who know me directly, so not things that I've won, also one thing I've noticed in the pre-viz and the architecture work is that they want to own the copyright of the image. At some point I'm going to do an architecture piece or pre-viz piece that is just for my gallery here....

All my qualifications are in electronics and software so not relevant.

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.