Portfolio - Serios need of polish

Richard Kain

Click Here to View Portfolio Site

Here's my extremely humble portfolio site. Being a Flash animator by trade, I used that particular program to create it. Naturally, I know that isn't necessarily the best move. Traditional webcoding is generally considered better for a portfolio site. It breaks things up nicer, offers more options for displaying images, its more scalable, and its easier to edit. (databases, etc...) When I retool this puppy, taking it out of Flash will probably be job #1. I had to produce this particular portfolio under a very tight deadline, though, and this was the fastest way for me.

But now I'm looking into the possibiliy of graduate school, and I need a portfolio that will kick-ass. So I'm humbly coming to the polycount boards for suggestions. I've seen a lot of the portfolios around here, and they kick ass. If anyone can help me, its the polycount boards. Please, be brutal. I'm very open to guidance and suggestion on this.

Squirmy

at 1024x768 I see alot of dead space around the edges. Maybe this is to help loadtimes, but its an eyesore.

I like the flatshad, wireframe, and texture modes. Thats a nice idea but the wireframe mode really shows me nothing becuase its too confuseing. I would combine the flatshade and wireframe into a flatshade with the edges highlighted, so you cant see through to the backside of the mesh. kind of like this



I dont think the flash content hurts your folio, as long as its used to display what your really advertising. Your artistic skill.

cholden

Do you have more finished work you can put in your portfolio, as in textured models with final materials?

fogmann

I'd say look at the requirements of the grad school and what they would like to see in a portfolio and work on that, and also have more finished and well polished pieces. If it is fine art school, most likely they will want to see some life drawings, and I noticed this is almost no matter what specialization is. Not sure if this will help, but my friend made last year portfolio site specifically for getting into grad school, and she got accepted at Academy of Art in SF, SCAD and also CalArts in animation program, and her site was done in Flash too, so I think with Flash you will be good to go. Here: http://studioharumi.com/

Ghostscape

If your model is 150 triangles and doesn't have a texture, it's really not worth displaying.

This is 2006. We have monitors higher than 320x240. Design for 1024x768.

Your non-3d work is much more impressive than your 3d work. The level of polish on say, your Spiderman or your troll, is lightyears above your bazooka or your bigfoot.

I'll second the wireframe overlay on top of geometry - just plain see-through wireframes are very difficult to read, unattractive, and don't really display any useful information about the model, because you can't examine the polyflow.

Move your mechanic guy to the illustrations section. Putting him in the flash section, when the only flashiness he has is the color-fade in, does not demonstrate your awesome flash skills the way something interactive does.

Richard Kain

Great replys so far guys...keep them coming!

Yes, you are all right, most of my models lack polish. I am not very good at texture painting, so most of my models only feature default filler textures. Also, I mentioned that I threw this site together in less than two days. (and I have a 9-5) So I couldn't exactly whip up textures for all the models in that time. I promise I will be going back and finishing most of these models with complete textures. Oddly enough, pretty much all of those models are already UV Mapped.

Great suggestion on the flat + wireframed rendering. You're right, that would be a lot easier to see. (less confusing) I also agree with the suggestion that the site be bigger. Although most Flash sites tend to be smaller these days, I could easily double the resolution that it is currently at. In order to better showcase larger pieces, I could add a loading system so that the entire thing isn't stored as just one big file.

Thanks for the link to that other student's flash site. It was indeed impressive.

Jarrod1937

one critique that i have is that your flash section needs more polish. i mean you have shown you can do the stuff but you didn't, for example, draw in much detail for the video card (which looks more like a tv tuner), you could have it looking a lot better with not much more effort.
and what everyone else said.
however i like your website design, nice, simple, and clean.