[Portfolio] - Martin Donald

KartoonHead

http://martdon.carbonmade.com/ <- the link

Hi everyone,

I've been hanging around here for about 18 months now, ever since I first decided to try my hand at 3D modeling. I think I've gotten to a level now where I'm comfortable to collate my work into a portfolio and see what everyone thinks. So here it is!

I've learned a lot about game art in the past couple of months, which made 99% of my previous work irrelevant to my portfolio, and I suspect that's about to happen again soon with the new stuff I'm working on, but for now this is the best and most finished stuff I have.

Any crits on my work, what it lacks, what it needs, or areas where I need to improve, are greatly appreciated.

As a side-note - the images are a tad smaller than I'd like, but I genuinely don't have the $12 a month to upgrade my carbonmade account to allow for larger images and videos

Thanks in advance,

Martin.

Blaisoid

i like the metro station enviro a lot.

temple enviro on the other hand has really poor lighting, it's very flat and not convincing as natural moonlight. in it's current form i think this piece hurts your portfolio rather than adding anything valuable to it.

Rest of stuff looks good, i wouldn't have guessed that you started 1,5 year ago.

btw, if you want portfolio with high res pics for free try weebly.com

ysalex

Hi Martin, nice works.

Just a couple points:

I like your tiling textures section, but I really don't like the wavy block you show them off on. It's fine for the organic stuff, but it makes the straight edge stuff look distorted, and that's distracting.

As for the enviros, they are very dark and hard to see. I think they could be improved a lot with more focused lighting that drives the eye, because as is I tend to just scan them looking for the detail and flow of the pieces and I'm not getting a lot.
Anyways, keep it up.

djgardner

Martin,
Good stuff so far based on your experience.
I like the RPG. Spec is well done in my opinion, but would benefit more with a gloss map and a bit of variation, since you have different types of materials on the model (wood, metal, etc). Do you have a normal map applied?
The forest enviro is my least favourite. Lighting is to dark in some of the views, and I cant tell if it's suppose to be set during the dawn or midnight. The scene would look better (in my opinion) during mid-day, so we can get some good shadows of all the tress and buildings. Also I would show some wireframe renders of it, and a lighting only view.
Like ysalex said, I like the addition of a texture section, but the waviness ruins them. Don't be afraid to show the normal and spec maps for each of them.

In terms of your overall portfolio, I don't like carbonmade, just cause you don't have the ability to upload nice, crisp high-res images, and studios REALLY want to see that. I'm able to have my own domain for $12/year and hosting fees at $5/month with Host Gator, and my site is made with a sick Wordpress theme designed for portfolios that I bought. Everyone I show my portfolio to always mentions how they like the look of it, before they comment on my work. haha. If you can't afford it now, I would say that's fine, but I'd seriously consider upgrading to a better service, or pay the carbonmade fee, before you start applying to studios.

Hope that helps you out, and good luck in the future!

KartoonHead

Awesome crits guys, thanks so much.

I'll get to work on tidying up that stuff straight away. Just registered on Weebly.com so I can start building a proper site for myself there. I've rebaked the Forest Temple environment with hot daytime sun, hope that gives it a better feel. One adverse effect of this is that it makes the poorly-lit foliage bug stick out like a sore thumb, forums tell me that I'll have to upgrade my version of UDK to get rid of it.

Thanks again, lots more work to do!