Stylized Portfolio Feedback?

AustinLabarbera

Hello everyone, this is my first post on Polycount, but I have been a longtime lurker. I finished my Bachelors in December and have been looking for work. I need to get in to doing more realism to help my likelihood of gaining employment in either the games or simulation industry, but doing stylized work just speaks to me. I just applied to my dream job at Blizzard (long shot I know) and would love a critique if anyone wants to do so. Feel free to be completely blunt and honest. I only want to improve. 
https://www.artstation.com/artist/austinlabarbera 

Thanks everyone!

tahakitan

i would work on presentation and lighting more.  alot of your assets are dark and hard to see.  when getting your first job it is also important to show texture sheets and wireframes.  I would work on sculpting and doing normals for your weapons in the future also.  I see the rifle doesnt have any normals on alot of areas. dont just use the blurred background of the environment, it is distracting.  just keep working an you'll keep getting better like everyone else until you can get a job

Alemja

I agree with @tahakitan your renders are very dark, I did a levels adjustment on one of your houses so you can see the difference


There are also many other things I noticed, I'll do my best to go over all of them.

First I would remove these items:

Reasons:

• The Violin suffers from some dark renders and poor material definition
• The motorcycle is not good at all, the wheels are not even spherical, but oblong which just looks completely nonfunctional and bizarre. It's such a weird detail to miss, the whole thing looks squashed. This is your weakest piece for sure.
• The last gun is just not interesting, you did a better job with the more recent rifle.

Now you say you want to work for Blizzard, this is a good goal and direction to have! Since you're focusing on hand-painted I'm going to assume it's either WoW, Diablo or HotS styled. My honest opinion is your materials are not quite there yet. Here are some reasons as to why:

• A lot of your textures are monochromatic with little color variation or use black to get shadows.
• Black for shadows should almost always be avoided
  
• Your brush strokes are getting rather small, if you look at Blizzard styled games they tend to focus on bigger thicker shapes for better readability
  

If you take a look at some portfolios of Blizzard Artists like Shem Dawson, Fanny Vergne or David Harrington you can start to see what I mean. Fanny even has tutorial she did on gumroad for free https://gumroad.com/fannyvergne#

Thankfully the Blizzard hand-painted style is a well documented one and there are some oldie but goodies on the Polycount wiki http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TexturingTutorials

I hope you find this helpful!

AustinLabarbera

Thank you both so much! Looks like lighting is my biggest area for improving, and I totally agree. Cheers!