Yet another shiny new portfolio + reel
polycounter lvl 17
... and so I've made a new portfolio too. You can see it here: portfolio.fogmann.com.
I'm not too pleased with front page (bio), I think it's kind of goofy, but I ran out of ideas for it. Perhaps I'll change that silly photo too. Other than that, I'm unsure if I should include shot breakdown for my reel, which contains turnarounds of characters that are in 3D section with credits included.
Clearly, although not explicitly indicated, I'd like to go with character artist position, but I hear those are kind of hard to get, so I'm considering environments too. Honestly, I love to create both characters and environments, and I find it hard to focus exclusively on one or the other - but at least I've given up on animation... for now. The problem is that most of the environments I made are for animated shorts, and toon shaded, so I included only a few renders of those. I know I probably need some more stuff (working on it!). I still got my old reel 2004 up (not linked to the site though) so if you are feeling curious you can see what I've been up to over 2 years ago.
Anyhow, I'd love to know what you people think, and how can I improve my portfolio.
Thank you for your time.
PS. An irrelevant note about the site: it's my first that doesn't contain any tables or java script, except for a bit that was needed to embed video - all is done with just CSS.
I'm not too pleased with front page (bio), I think it's kind of goofy, but I ran out of ideas for it. Perhaps I'll change that silly photo too. Other than that, I'm unsure if I should include shot breakdown for my reel, which contains turnarounds of characters that are in 3D section with credits included.
Clearly, although not explicitly indicated, I'd like to go with character artist position, but I hear those are kind of hard to get, so I'm considering environments too. Honestly, I love to create both characters and environments, and I find it hard to focus exclusively on one or the other - but at least I've given up on animation... for now. The problem is that most of the environments I made are for animated shorts, and toon shaded, so I included only a few renders of those. I know I probably need some more stuff (working on it!). I still got my old reel 2004 up (not linked to the site though) so if you are feeling curious you can see what I've been up to over 2 years ago.
Anyhow, I'd love to know what you people think, and how can I improve my portfolio.
Thank you for your time.
PS. An irrelevant note about the site: it's my first that doesn't contain any tables or java script, except for a bit that was needed to embed video - all is done with just CSS.
Replies
I dig the new site layout.. you're doing everything right: you're focusing on modeling/texturing, getting other people to help with concepts in places, throwing in a variety of characters, mod work, traditional 2d stuff, some high poly stuff, competition entries.... all I have to say is keep it up, you're improving extremely fast!
I'm really liking your stuff. Strong 2D, strong 3D. I don't feel like any of the stuff you have in there is totally ultra badass but I think it shows you have a solid grasp of a wide range of skills and that is really the hard part. I think if you get one more totally badass normal mapped character you'll have a top notch portfolio.
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It was reallly cool watching your dom war entry come together. It will be cool to see what you do next!
Steady: thanks, man. I fixed the menu as you suggested, and you are right - disabled link was bugging me as well. Before I had CSS rollovers, which weren't perfect because the images didn't preload and they worked slow, but now I just have pure text menu links that I think work better.
As for the seam fixes in ZBrush... well, the fat guy had some serious seam and weird stretching issues that I would never be able to fix only in Photoshop, and if you look at the way his hair UVs are laid out, you'll see that it would be impossible to paint in 2d the hair that doesn't look distorted. So what I did was get the semi-finished texture for the fatty guy on a low poly model imported in ZBrush, set rendering to flat, go to projection master, drop the model with just color being on, and then paint over the seams with basic brush and maybe some different alphas, as appropriate. There are some 3/4 UV layouts on him, so that can be tricky too, because around the seam one side of the texture repeats on the opposide side of the model, while other side is unique and therefore it might take a couple of itterations to get the seam unnoticeable. Try fixing it, lift the model, see if the texture is still messed up, if it is, observe what's wrong, drop model again and paint again, sampling colors from both sides of the seam, and so on. What I do sometimes is to smudge color around the seam so that it blends, but that doesn't work if you have painted details on the texture though. Hope that explained it, and if you have some more questions, I'll be happy to answer.
Joe: Thanks~! It's great to see you around here as well. And I LOVE your avatar
Ninjas: Thanks for spotting broken link, it's fixed now. And now that portfolio and reel are out of the way, I can devote more time to making more characters and I hope there will be updates really soon.
and on your 3d section some of the high res thumbnails have a white pixel on the edges that should be easy to get rid of. One other thing, and its nothing really, is the scroll bar on the bottom isnt nesssary, maybe you could get rid of it. Overall pretty cool site, good luck.
Yeah, the portfolio cropping was intentional, although those other things that you mentioned I don't see happening. I tested the site in Firefox, IE and Opera and there's no bottom scrollbar unless the window is too narrow, but I'll try other browsers and see if I can reproduce the errors. Thanks.
::thumbs up::