Updated Environment Reel, need critiques!
polycounter lvl 10
Hey guys! This is my first real post on PolyCount. I have posted on CGTalk before but I heard PolyCount was a bit more brutally honest on their critques, so that's why I am here.
You can see most of my portfolio on my blogspot. It has links to my website and every other webpage I have dedicated to my environment work. I am still working on my demo so let me know how I can improve it.
http://brandenbrushett.blogspot.com
also, my website, brandenbrushett.com It looks best with Firefox. For some reason IE doesn't load my whole page correctly.
Thanks!
You can see most of my portfolio on my blogspot. It has links to my website and every other webpage I have dedicated to my environment work. I am still working on my demo so let me know how I can improve it.
http://brandenbrushett.blogspot.com
also, my website, brandenbrushett.com It looks best with Firefox. For some reason IE doesn't load my whole page correctly.
Thanks!
Replies
Now I do agree with Polyhertz that some of it DOES feel flat, but I also thinkwhats causeing that is you have really deep / dark shadows, and at points it can create some great suspense, but you're losing a lot of colour and in turn a lot of the detail due to thise over-powered dark shadows. It's rare to find shadows dead on black, this could also be because of youtube compression, I don't know... but your scenes are losing some detail because of the dark shadows.
NOW, onto the good stuff. I absolutely LOVED this demo reel man. After I saw the starting to the construction site scene, I saved this right away to my inspiration folder. Your compostion with this demo reel is refreshing man, it looks like you put A LOT of thought into it, and it piad off big time... I was really interested to see what you were gonna show us next.
The intro to the construction scene deserves some love... the birds flying, and then a long paning shot of the crane, THAT was awesome man.
But again, the last full scene, the darkness killed it for me, I could barely see some of the details. Again, this could be because of compression, but maybe brighten up the video a bit.
But when all is said and done, this was a great demo reel (in my opinion), I would really like to see if again with the shadows not being so over powering though.
Good job Gobee, and Mute Math for the win eh
Polyhertz - oh, ha ha I always thought that was the ambient slider in maya
I hear what you are saying with the music and how it goes hand in hand with the game industry but I'd be shocked if a developer does not hire me, not because of my modeling/texturing/lighting skills, but because he/she doesn't like my taste in music.
I asked him to turn it off because, from my personal experience, most developers don't play the demo with sound on anyway.
One of us should start a new thread asking everyones opinion on whether music is important on a game demo reel or not. I'm interested to see what other people have to say.
Your website looks terrible with the big myspace banner, especially because it splits your work up. That's what makes it look terrible. I would make your thumbnails bigger and make your huge header a lot smaller. Your work is more important than the header. Right now it competes for attention. If you must have music on your site give the option to turn it off, it makes it load slower which is very annoying. You give anything annoying to potential employers and they will not look at your work, no matter how good it is.
The works is nice, but it looks like it doesn't have the next gen stuff. It does look like something I would find in games though. I think the cause is how bright your spec maps are, they all seem to be the same intensity. Might be a huge jump there but I'm saying that based on one of the few shots you get from your props in your you tube reel. The other reel runs terrible, it's all jumpy so I would get rid of it.
Diffuse in Max is color. Raytrace material in Max has diffusion which does the same as diffuse in Maya if I remember correctly. Diffusion (diffuse in Maya) is a gray scale map that tells the renderer how much light ( color actually) a surface absorbs or reflects back to the viewer. So if somethings is 100 % black in the diffuse map it absorbs all light rays, like a black hole, and it would render black. This is something used more in pre rendered 3d though. AO reminds me a bit of diffusion except it's not based on depth, it a property of a material to reflect or absorb light regardless of how smooth or bumpy it's surface is.
Spec controls how bright the highlight is, gloss the fall off of the spec, diffusion controls how much light an object absorbs. Color is just what the viewer perceives it to be, so it's any of the light waves that the material of the object did not absorb and gets reflected back that the viewer sees. Bump well you know that. LOL
After doing a test it shows how it affects glow maps as well. It's the same material except one has a noise map in the diffusion slow and the other doesn't. The diffusion and glow map share the same pattern for the most part. I added another nose to the big areas of black and lowered the contrast a bit there so there was something to look at. In simple terms it controls how much color the color map shows before it to turns to complete black. Both maps are the same except one is white and the other red. glow map is orange. A note is the white and red had the same
saturation.
Nice work though.
bad examples
orange
white
Also, get a resume up there.
I just noticed that it actually seems to be your demo reel that's playing the music. That's fine, but I wouldn't make it auto play, let me choose when to play it. Also is annoying (at least for me) I had to right click the video to stop it, there was no GUI for it.
As for the art, I am not particularly blown away by any of the pieces up there. I know that sounds harsh, but how I see it. One thing I noticed is that you are quite ambitious by taking on full scenes. While this is cool, it's not always the best option, and can be very overwhelming to put the time and effort into each asset. I suggest trying to stay smaller and more controlled. Try just taking a while and focusing on a larger more complex prop. Something you can focus all the attention on. Do a high poly, low poly, etc. And just really tweak the crap out of it, until you are 100% satisfied. I myself really have a hard time doing entire scenes, because I get kind of burnt out on the scene, and want to just finish it. So then I find myself cutting corners, and half assing it to get it done. And that will just be a huge disservice to yourself and your portfolio.
Try and find something you are really excited about modeling/texturing, and take your time with it, and make it look great.
The others beat me to it, the reel should be a linked to and not try and play when the site loads.
The link of the reel that played jumpy is the one found here...
[ame]http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=36574414[/ame]
Keep at it.
the paintover
You went above and beyond right there dude. Thank you so much for that paint over. It's inspired me enough to get off my ass and learn how to modify my site on my own. I've been depending on someone else to do it and well, call me lazy, I've been updating it with new stuff but never figured out how to change the layout of it.
Does anyone have any links to learn web design or does anyone have a source code I could use to get a decent layout going for my page? It obviously needs it. I have limited knowledge of html and I don't know about CSS. I am using GoDaddy.com.
Flewda-
Man you hit it right on the button. I am trying to do full scenes, I am trying to "tell a story." But you're right, I get burnt out. Quite possibly hurting my final product. I think I may even tend to rush a bit. I just get so excited, oh its almost done, its almost done.. then I find something else to do.. oh its almost done again.. so I finally have to draw a line and say, just stop already, move on. I'm trying to do something different but I agree, I need to stay a bit smaller and concentrate more on the texturing and final product. Thanks, I appreciate your comments.
I have no idea how to not make my demo automatically play when you load the page. I'll try to figure it out though.
You also need to learn the difference between a polygon and a triangle - and which one is a more important statistic.
Most of your images and textures look too low res, blurry, dark, and relatively uninteresting to compete with games that are out right now / coming out in 2-4 years.
If you are looking for a job as an environment / prop artist, you need to start much much smaller and get good / awesome results for something manageable. Not something "average" for a giant environment / scene.
2/8 (That being 25% of your portfolio) renders are so dark I don't even know what I am looking at. Assume that the person looking at your portfolio doesn't have an interest in looking at a reel, and wants to quickly look at your images. In the split second they have to look at your stuff, they want to see something inspiring, interesting, unique, original etc, and they want to look at it fast.
I would cease and desist trying to create an entire environment for now, and start with making 3-5 props that would fit IN an environment of your choice. Make those assets awesome, and then go from there.
try this site.
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
I would do a search for
css + hover +layers +
look for ul unordered lists.
here you go try these out too.
http://www.html.net/tutorials/css/
-One thing ive seen in your seen is objects that alor are too low rez,the wheels of the cannon and the frontier wheels in the plains scene stick out due to their low rez.Dont be afraid to use those polygons to give the proper shape. When its off it immidiatly detracts from the believeability.Not just the wheels also i see it often in alot of your scenes
-Alot of scene look flat and lack good unique details. Again it goes down to the resolution you make these objects,alot of the scene elements look like slightly modified standard primitives. Use those polys and use them well. The textures as well add to the look of the flatness. I see no sign of real life weathering or diversity in the texture.In this particular scene for example.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2005/2527113266_74426c7053_o.jpg
1.Floor texture next to same texture used on wall,looks bad. Looks too noisy and it gives no appearene of what material it is.
2. Wooden boards,same board tiled over 4 times,try making a few good and unique boards that differ in detail but fit together colorwise,reuse of texture is good but over and over close together you see it and it detracts from the look of the scene. Also split the boards up,one flat rectangle looks,..well flat.When you split em shift them up,rotate em a tad,make it look disorderly.
3.Yellow crane looks brand new,flat color and no sign that its a piece of equipment being used outside and in the elements,whats the scratches? Desaturated paint from exposer to the sun,dirt,rust? Etc
4.tiles of bricks in the background structures too large.
5.The concrete stumps with wire coming out all over. Try making variants,mess with their shape a little,make some more weatherd than the other,they all look like duplicates.
6.Item placement like tubes and such,be sparing with how many duplicates you make in a scene. Reuse is good but to a certain degree.
as for the rest of the porfolio.
The uv layout for the shipping crate could have been done way better. I see four long sides mapped of the crate and can only assume you gave equal layout to all sides. For something as heavy as a crate and large,unless theres is a reason to ,you shouldnt give that many space,if any to the botom. Players will likely never see it and it takes resolution away from the other sides. As for the other sides,unless you want to add unique and quite noticeable differing detail to one side as opposed to the other,you shouldnt map it unquie when you can use the one side twice by overlapping the uv's .That will also allow you to have even further more resolution to your texture.
Also no weathering and flar colors dont add to the items believeability.
Three things you need to imptove upon would have to be
-More use of resolution make it look less like standard primitives and to add unqiue and more peronalized elements to the scene to draw the persons eye.
- More weathering and variety in your textures.
-Better lit shots.
Keep at it,you have potential but need polish.
Cheers
Jav
Keep going!
I couldnt agree more,if a job is what your shooting for,keep your portfolio veered in the position you want to get a job in. If animating is what you want to do,make that your focus.
If its environments make it that. When having your work looked at by a person who might see dozens of reels a day any delay to get to your work could cause you.
That same reaction that Frozan got will be the same reaction an AD will get if it takes too long to see.
That's the kind of attitude I like to see. And never lose it either. Even professionals at the top of their game need to remember that other people can always give good advice, and they can always improve.
Questions- Should I REALLY nix the demo reel? Are you guys saying my screenshots/renders would be good enough?
I always thought, and have been told I need to have a demo reel. I need to have my reel on my website and I need to have it also burned onto a DVD for when I send out applications to potential employers. So basically if I am burning a DVD to send out, do I just make it a slideshow with my renders? I have been working non-stop on getting animated renders completed so I have a full functional demo reel, but if I don't need to do hundreds and hundreds of these renders, that would really take some pressure off me. I'd much rather concentrate on one thing at a time and not have to go through animating cameras, etc.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=39516
the first thing that i picked up on when viewing your site, was how bad the uv's were on the container. i could re-jig the texture space to make it in half the space but look exactly the same (minus a little variation from one opposing side to another, that you never see, and people will never pick up on) in about five minutes, just by having one side panel and one roof/bottom panel. and yes the spec doesnt add anything thats worth a 1024x1024.