I agree 100% with all of the above, very good points. My 2 cents to this are:
1. InstaMAT kind of mixes some of the best feature of Substance Painter and Designer, plus it offers so much more with their Material from image creator. I’m in love with InstaMAT for that reason alone. It may be still in development, but it’s already ahead in features compared to some other free programs.
2. As far as portfolio goes – I would not recommend it. Results from tutorials show (hopefully) great progress and are good to fill up your social media, because that’s not considered a portfolio as far as I know. For a portfolio that might be meant to find a job one day you should only include your own ideas and polish those as much as you can. It’s not about the quantity, just quality. Personally I don’t even scroll through a portfolio someone promotes and the first things I see are donuts, soborg chairs and that weird arm robot thingy from blender bros. (not saying they’re not good tuts, done them myself)
I see it this way: If I want to hire a worker in my company and to weed out the best I task them to design and build a little chest of drawers, I would not even consider those who just copy a certain “thing” from the Swedish abomination in blue and yellow.
So long story short: Social yes with reference to the course ideally, portfolio NO.
