Long Lost Member's Website

pliang

web page

Hey everyone, I haven't been posting in the forums since my very first "pimp" posting, to start I have a lil html website with some updated works since my graduation from school dating back to January this year. I was also delayed for three months in my job search endeavour as I was in the Pacific sorting out my legal age drafting issues...apparently my embassy in Vancouver don't do anything to sort it out here.

Anyways, my point is if anyone can provide feedback on my past works I would greatly appreciate it. I look foward to keep posting at this wonderful forum and better my work as I progress.

Penzer

Hey Peter, saw you just the other day and now you're on here again

In my oppinion, the thing lacking the most in your work is lighting. I've seen your stuff from when you were at school and I remember really liking it. I think having some more dramatic lighting setups could help your work pop and shine a lot more.

In your Prague scene, some nice warm lights with some more contrast would make things pop a lot more. More cast shadows from your props would make them look more connected with the rest of your environment.

I really like your motorbike and sidecar prop, it looks like a fun machine to play with. The same comments apply to that as well. Lets see some shadows under those barrels and under the cart.

Xaltar

Another thing you should look at is image sizes, I (as well as most other artists) always have my resolution set high and your images are just too small to make out detail. Valid points above, all the work in your galery looks flat, it may well be much better than it looks but your renders are really letting it all down. I would also suggest you either do some work on your character model or take it out of the galery, to me it just seems that its not up to the same standard as most of the other work. I know its nostalgic (sp?) to post up early models and gives you a good laugh as you get better but prospective employers will likely not see it that way. If you really want to have it on your site then make a section for "old work" and put all your older stuff in there. That way when a prospective employer looks there they will look at how much you have improved as opposed to thinking its current work. Also, I don't like that the links pop up in new windows, I actually had windows block the popup the first time I opened your galery. Not what you want on a portfolio / artist site. Otherwise it looks pretty good to me.

All that writing to make 2 or three little points lol.

pliang

Thanks guys and Sam.

In my upcoming work I'll try and make sure it stands out a little more.

Old Gallery is a better idea though, I wasn't exactly positive on if I should put my first character in the main gallery too.

And for sure I will make sure no new windows pop up in the next update...had issues loading my updates as it was having network issues.


Thanks guys

MAUL0r

ugh, is that hamster your service provider? It took over a minute to get MOST of your page loaded. I'm at Sont Electronics so I know it isn't my connection.

Penzer

It loads fast for me.

pliang

Well I'm sure it must have something to do with the images I upload, I also had a few unused and old sliced gifs of my old web templates which I should get rid of, that could be it.

Cubik

Very, very blurry. That's my main impression. Which is confusing since your textures are pretty nice and sharp. Right now it looks like you done tiny, tiny renders and blown them up in size.

Presentation that hurts your work, no lightning, many tiny images with a few of them having no focus at all on the models themselves and too thick wireframes in the several of the scenes. Figure out a style for your presentation and run with it, easier to evaluate and it look more professional.

Enormous filesizes, you can easily get those images down to a third of their original size with no differences at 100% zoom.

45 mB resume at 50kb/s? No thanks. Get several providers and get some people in different parts of the world (unless you are only gunning for US and Cananda) try out the speed. Streaming crapping out a couple of tens of seconds in = AD closing and ignoring it.

conte

troubles with site, it won't download fully some images.
and design is pretty strange.
"resume""gallery""demo" could be littler than now.

pliang

Well most of my other peers don't have issues downloading the site, so I don;t know why is it not over here.
And what in particular do you mean strange? I know the colors is a little unupbeat but if you can be more specific I'll appreciate it.

I will rerender those things (Larger Renders) and resort them once I get my next update on.

Panupat

The repair depot, that big canon seems like the high light of your zone. But should also show that shot without wires.

Rick Stirling

Change the title of your site to have your name in it. Your resume is Untitled Document, as are many others.

Resume - All text? Yes - stored as an image. Horrible harsh edges. You've been using Zbrush for 1 month? I don't care how long you've been using it, not important - but it does tell me you don't have much experience with it. It doesn't matter if you're a god with it, people equate time to knowledge.

Text as images all over the place? Text is faster to download, text wraps and flows and text allows quick changes.


Ilike the presetation here:

http://petermakeart.com/images/shelfset.jpg

Consider making a lower polygon version of the same carton and using that to add depth to the shelf. I'm not sure if the 512 represents all the textures, or that each texture is a 512, but I suspect the latter. If each texture is a 512 I *personally* believe that is too large - you're pissing away a lot of memory on what is essentially scene filler.



As others have mentioned - several shots are very blurry, and very small - I want to see those environments at over 1000 pixels when I choose to.

thnom

Just a couple of crits:

http://petermakeart.com/images/PradaMarfaTexture.jpg

The handbag texture really is awful. There isn't ANY reason for it to be 512x512. Everything is mirrored vertically (on the texture sheet) and then the two things on the right you've just copied that aswell.. what a waste of space.

http://petermakeart.com/images/MotoShot.jpg

I don't really see a reason for clicking this image, its basically comprised of 60% wordmark of 'Motorola'. The texture sheet again has tons of wasted space and the shots of the model really don't show anything.

http://petermakeart.com/MotorBike.html

I _think_ this is really good but you've compromised quality of presentation. It just looks shoddy at that quality and the "final render" doesn't really show the work that is going on and seems apparent in the models/texture sheets.

The presentation seems alright but your work itself seems to be the afterthought in terms of compression and showing it off.

pliang

After reading the list of suggestions, I changed the resume section but I'm going to make a new layout for the gallery and put the other works in a scrap section as some were for practice.

I do agree the renders are way too blurry, I'll rerender at 4X the original size and upres it some more.

The cannon shot, I'll make a highlited version so it would display the unwired as well.

Thanks a lot for the much needed crits...

pliang

Just recently made a total new layout with just my better work put on there....unfortunately not that much new stuff to look at...once my new work's laid down I'll keep everyone updated.

http://www.petermakeart.com

In case anyone's wondering, some of the lay out designs are inspired from Malcolm's wonderful site...sorry Malcolm but I thought it's a great layout.

Ged

In my opinion the background is annoying, makes the site too busy and takes the focus of your models(which are real good). Just have a plain colour or gradient. The title bar looks like its been copy and pasted onto the webpage, it would be nice if you integrated your title into the webpage more.

breakneck

that hdri gear done w/ mental ray is a tutorial floating around somewhere - i would suggest modeling something different or taking that one out completly.

Sage

The way you have your navigation for your reel, the play button I assume is your reel and your resume, looks really, really bad, stuck in with the rest of the thumbnails. That should be with the title and not mixed with the thumbnails of your gallery. If I were you I would get rid of the huge demo and resume text, because we all can see it, sorry because I'm being harsh and a bit of a dick here, but that text seems really redundant and out of place. This is your art site after all so I don't think you need to state it. Below your name which should be the largest in font size, your title, then Environment Artist smaller but bigger than anything else in the header. The header of your site is making my eyes bleed as it is now. I have tried to kill the little Graphic Design Artist inside me for a few years but your have awakened him. I think what gets to me is that you have a very nice site but that header just ruins it for me. You need to look at your header as an ad, your name is the most important thing of the ad and that's why it needs to be big, next your title, then since this is a website your navigation buttons should be clear and easy to read. I think I made the navigation text too big, since after saving the jpeg and looking at it outside of Photoshop they just compete too much with the text size of your title and just look bad, but I didn't feel like fixing it since I closed the Photoshop file and didn't save it. I'm just trying to give you an example anyway.

That background image needs to go, because it's too distracting and because it looks like a bad background image put in the html tag, that is supposed to tile, but the image doesn't so it looks like it has a big seam in it. That makes it look bad, really bad. I suggest you make a simple navigation bar that contains say for example, Reel, Resume, 3D Art or Gallery. Then have everything else how you have it except like mentioned get the reel and resume to their own section under a navigation bar.

The large views of your models are tiny. Why? I want to see the work, and not be upset with you because you won't let me see it. I'm trying to admire it. Please, HUGE images to show off your work when the viewer clicks on the thumbnails and more views of your environments. Do you have a bargain web hosting service that will break your legs if you have too many images? Or are you a tease? The images are smaller than 512 x 512? I don't get the problem, are you targeting people that surf the net with a 28.8 KBps connection? I don't really like that Malcolm has his background images either, but his works, because his 3D work appear on the portion of the image that appears to be the sky and as a result just doesn't compete for attention like yours does. So if you really want a background and have your work on top of it make it so there is enough clear space so there enough space between the 3d work and the background, and of course fade your background into the background color you are using, in your case grey.

That's it. I like your work, consolidate all the views of your cars under one page, I'm not sure if you have all those thumbnails as place holders.

Header example, mostly showing what I meant by navigation and font size. I was thinking of making the navigation bar look like a bridge so it doesn't look cheap like in my example, but that is way too much work, even for me. Looking foward to seeing big renders of your work.

Alex

pliang

Yeah you're right, at first my linked thumbnails were oversized(2240?x1440) then a friend of mine suggested I shrink it to that and now I don't like it either, guess I shouldn't jump off the cliff with his ideas and stick with the original plan instead....

And yea I do agree to a certain extent the resume and the old demo reel should be combined with the header, I'll try and fix that once I'm ready to update again.

Lastly, I'll take out the gears once I make something more appealing that matches the level of my other work.

But I will keep the cars the way they are and just update them with finished renders as I go...as of now it almost seem like I'm trying to be a car modeler instead of a world artist.

BUT anyways, I agree with most of you guys.


Thanks again

Sage

Plaing, on the hdr test, if you want to show that you can do that, why don't you do it with like say a car show, boiler room or inside a clock tower scene like say in Castlevania 3 for example. You have a few cars already so it shouldn't take that long. I think I might have been to harsh with the entire header bit, so sorry for that. Keep at it, I'm sure it will look great once you are done.

Alex

pliang

Yeah as I was saying, I still have lots to do though I am going to take those other side projects to the next level once I am able to.

And keep the feedbacks coming, I'll be needing them as I go.

Thnx


Now on with the reel.....

Dennispls

Environment is misspelled

MAUL0r

it's loading much faster now

pliang

Really? I looked into with spell check and came up with nothing and I remember that's the actual way to spell it.

But I'll look this up again anyways.

Thanks

Option

no worries pete, he was talking about alex, he spelled it "enviornment", yours is fine.

Sage

Heh I always spell it wrong? especially when I'm rushing. Next time though make a note of who screwed up, saves people time. I fixed it so people won't think Pete messed up, and so he doesn't have his name on something that's screwed up.

Alex