Mezz: I'd like to be able to see texture flats and wireframes of your models, as well as some general tech specs (polycount, texture res, etc...).
Arctura000: Your site's pretty good as in it has all the required information there, but if you're going to use images to display your text content, you might want to ensure you use a high quality jpeg (or if it's just white text on black, a gif would give you lossless compression, probably for a similar if not smaller filesize) - the compression artefacts make it hard to read and makes the site in general look pretty muddy.
Thanks Arctura, Reich, and Talon for taking a look
@ Reich: Glad you like the feel of my website! I hadn't realized... but I guess it is pretty 'me'. As for the armpits of my characters... yes, I do realize there are problems in that area. It's mostly a problem with how I set up the mesh, I believe. Next time I make a character... I'll be sure to be more careful about that part And I'm not sure if her arms or short or if it's just the pose... I'll have to take another look.
Reich & Talon: Yes, I'm realizing belatedly I should really have the info about the models on the site as well... It's in my demo reel, so I don't know why I didn't add it to the site too. :P I'll add that stuff when I get a chance.
Bump. I've updated the portfolio. There is some semi-filler in there, and the nav is now functional. For now I've gone ahead and put it live.
Big shout out to achmedthesnake. Thank you man, your paint-over was really helpful. I took several of your suggestions. TheSplash, I am still considering putting a footer element in. But for the moment there wouldn't be any purpose to it aside from aesthetics. I'll put that idea on the back-burner, and bring it up again the next time I revise the site.
Now that I have a basic structure, I'm going to go back to working on content to populate it with. (as pretty much everyone has been suggesting) Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted on this thread and the last one I started, you've all helped immensely.
heh cheers mate - though the little squares i had we're just for a quick color palette, not actually for any design purposes... still looks good though.
just a nother suggestion - the resume, it could still go to a new page displaying your education/employment history and then still have download link for the word doc. - just for those who don't trust downloading anything or don't have the time...
After working retail for a couple months here trying to save up some money, I have decided that I can't be waiting around any longer to try to get my career in art moving. As such, I decided what I love doing is concept art and 3D modeling. Not sure how many concept artists get to take their work into the 3D program themselves, so really my main focus is going to be the concept portion.
Now then, I think my portfolio is way too varied right now. Whether it really is or isn't, I'm hoping to find out. My take on it is there are far too many styles and not enough strong pieces to really make a potential employer interested in me. I'm going to be taking the next month or two to create some really top notch stuff. I would like to know what I should keep and toss out of my current display, and what I should get more of. I do have plenty of figure drawings I just don't have digital prints of yet that I could put in. Not all of them incredibly detailed, but they show form and gestural drawings.
I also want to get some opinions on how I should structure my portfolio in general. Obviously since I want to be a concept artist, I want to show a lot of concept work. However is it good to focus on one potential topic (IE steam punk, fantasy, etc..) or branch off and show multiple areas. I can honestly see the merits of both, but my main focus here obviously is to be able to attract employers and eventually get hired. Also, how many pieces should I aim for as far as showing what I am capable of? Obviously the more the merrier if they are strong, but I'd like a minimum to aim for before I start sending out resumes and the like. I would think 4 or 5 really well thought out and strong conceptual pieces would be enough to at least start, but again, I'm honestly not sure and need some help.
If anyone feels like giving me some additional advice, and I do realize this is getting a bit out of the realm of critiquing my work but I am really struggling here, I would like some tips on maybe where to look for freelance work or a full time employment. Moving and the like really isn't a big deal to me. My main concern is just what I can expect to go through in this process. Freelancing is also an interest of mine, but I have a hard time finding any. Craigslist and Monster.com have yielded absolutely zero replies rejection or otherwise from multiple e-mails, and by multiple I mean well over 30, so I am beginning to think I should look elsewhere. How are these forums and Conceptart.org for that sort of thing? Are there other websites I should be looking at?
I live in PA near Maryland. There are pretty much no jobs for 3D artists or illustrators in the area so I really am just having a very tough time with the entire thing right now. Any and all advice, brutal especially as long as it's reasonable, is appreciated greatly. Most of you on this forum are in the industry and know your trade. I really look forward to what you all have to say.
I'm really unclear what sort of concept job you are expecting to be able land with your current portfolio.
You have zero completed turnarounds.
You have zero completed human / character models.
You have zero FX / particles diagrams.
You have zero environmental concepts.
You have zero vehicle concepts.
You have zero weapon / gear concepts or turnarounds.
You have zero prop concepts.
You have zero animatics / storyboard layouts.
Your website is a complete fail. I have no clue whatsoever what you are wanting to do, and none of your work is presented in such a way to even remotely resemble professionalism. If you want people to take your line drawing seriously, perhaps you should take it into Photoshop and clean it up off of the shitty line-paper drawings and frame it.
None of your 3d models are complete. You rendered most of them on a white background, in a T-Pose, and for one of the character the only sort of material I can make out of his uniform is "black". I have absolutely no idea what is going on with his uniform/armor, so that basically tells me that you don't want to / know how to texture, and that you don't know how to rig.
Personally I'm not convinced that you are aware of what employers do / don't want to see when it comes to a concept artist. You need to spend more time finding GOOD ones, see what they have / had on their websites and what got them a job.
You also need to realize that concept art is one of the hardest jobs to get at a game studio. The ability to draw, and draw well is only a small portion of it too.
Valkier: Posted my thoughts on your portfolio in the original thread, but seems it got moved while I typing and dissapearing into oblivion after submitting .
Honestly, your portfolio needs a ton of work. First I'll try to answer your specific questions:
I think my portfolio is way too varied right now...there are far too many styles and not enough strong pieces
You don't have enough strong pieces, this is true. 'Styles' are not your problem, incomplete work is. For example, one of the first pieces I saw in your 'flats' section of a cat looked like a doodle done in 2 minutes, or your objects-based one where you seem to have spent all your time working on recreating the reflections but never put in a proper light source. If your going to be showing off doodles and incomplete work they better be damn good.
I also want to get some opinions on how I should structure my portfolio in general.
Put all your work on the main page in thumbnails (direct link the full size, no popup window bs), don't make me go through links to find it, that's the no.1 rule of any artists portfolio website. Also, don't break up your 2d into two sections (flats/figure) unless you have a significant volume of work to place in them.
is it good to focus on one potential topic (IE steam punk, fantasy, etc..) or branch off and show multiple areas.Also, how many pieces should I aim for as far as showing what I am capable of?
No, unless you want to cater to a specific companies needs to boost your chances of getting hired their, it's better to show that you can be versatile and would be fine if they needed you at some point to move onto different projects with different art styles. In 3d five pieces can work for a portfolio, but for 2d I'd say ten minimum.
As for freelance and fulltime work, I honestly don't think your ready yet for either. If your determined to still try atp then other then the sites you listed try posting your info on cgtalk, 3dtotal, and gameartisans as well.
Now for a brief on the problems with your work:
Flats:
eye=good, probably your best work
objects=no light source
cat=junk, scrap it
figure:
face=anatomy's off (forehead height + nose), shading needs work, and eyes highlights don't reflect the light direction.
text woman=incomplete, finish or scrap
light woman=face features need to be lower on the skull
skeletons=forehead again, foreground skeletons legs too long
3d organics=weak. spline hair (games can't use this), fuzzy textures, no skin texture/variation. monsters jaw anatomy makes no sense (lower jaw would break off)
3d environments:
bathroom shower=curtain is way too reflective and has no texture, rooms shadows are distorted, no color variation, too perfectly clean
tree stump=boring, grass falloff too abrupt, scene needs more color variation
edit: sense Ott seems to have held nothing back I might as well too.
Your portfolio is crap, and I pity you for going to an Art Institute (They don't prepair their students at all, just suck up all their money). You have nothing right now that I think could even get you into a casual games studio. 2D art is even harder then 3d art getting a job in due to the amount of competition. If your going to really try for 2d its going to take at least a few more years of serious study to get a job in, and if you want end up wanting to go 3d I'd suggest starting over and learning low-low poly before moving up. visit the forums lowpoly thread and try making work similar without wasting poly or texture space.
Valkier-
I'm not one to speak about not doing enough actual art, because i'm probably the laziest bastard I know.
However, I would not call what you have varied. A hippy in armor, dolphins, and a creature. Unfinished sketches (not a problem, drawing is a good idea, keep it up)
I have zero personal experience, but I can still tell you not to aim for Concept artist straight away.
You will be . Refine your style, and for godsake DRAW constantly, otherwise you will lose touch with your skilly things
uhh...
keep working at it
I should probably take my own advice
So basically what I'm hearing is pretty much what I always suspected. The Institute I went to was, for all intents and purposes, crap. It was supposed to be a 2 year intensive course designed to "Do as much as a four year college" which never felt right. I will say that they taught me the basics to a decent degree in 3D studio but never really expanded on it much after that. Their 2D art training was non-existant. 11 weeks with a prof who would get angry really easily and storm out of the life drawing class, as well as others who were teaching classes only because they were short staffed.
Also, I think the last time I talked to my job placement prof, it was him telling me he wasn't quite sure how to help me find a job. Great plan, eh? They spent most of their time making us prep for interviews and barely any on presenting our work digitally or otherwise. I at least spared you and horror and myself the embarrassment of putting up my Demo Reel. My entire class knew it was a train wreck before we finished any of ours.
So, I suppose my next question is where is a good college I can look at? Clearly what I was taught is going to take me nowhere. While I could sit down and crank out some high quality pieces easily enough, I think some added guidance by professionals might be a better route.
Valkier - get involved in mods or indie game projects if you can. I'd really highly recommend it. Though, be a bit discerning; ensure they know what they're doing and actually have something to show for themselves (there's a lot of mods out there that go nowhere, even with really skilled people on-board).
But, really, working on a mod work taught me more in 2 short years (for nothing more than my spare time and effort) than I'd have leared at the full 3 years of my university course (for a cumulative total of about £10k). As did lurking around forums such as these soaking up not only crits on my own models but the crits on the dudes on here who are far superior to me (because I figured - if they're critting *those* models, that's where the really high-end stuff to aim for is coming from). And critting other people's work on forums like these makes you start to work out what you should be looking out for in your own.
Valkier, I understand you frustration with AI, but in the end it is only you who can guarantee your success. The same goes for anyone else who has gone to a "game art" school. It is total shit that they make all sorts of absurd promises of job placement and whatnot..but it is what it is, nothing to do but move on.
The first positive thing you've done is show up here, this is where you need to be. It's harsh, but it's honest and with hard work and dedication you can get to where you need to be to get a job. Only if you really, truly want it, otherwise...back to retail.
I have been where you are, graduating from school where you might have thought your portfolio they graduated you with was a good start, finding a place like Polycount and realizing that you've been sending a big ol stinky pile of art shit to employers.
I look at AI like this: they gave me a starting point and the basic tools to get going, but it was up to me to put in the hours to make it good.
You don't need to spend another single cent on another school, school is not the answer. Hundreds and thousands of hours in front of sketchpads and your PC is. Keep making new art, post it here, take the crits, use them..rinse and repeat.
Valkier: If your looking to going onto another (better) school, their are several that are actually worth the cost. Think Tank, Vancouver Film School, gnomon, and animationmentor.com (an online school if you want to do 3d animation) immediatly come to mind. Otherwise you could take such as (like suggested by Talon) join a mod team and/or spend some money getting some quality training material such as the dvds sold by gnomon, eat3d, etc. and just start learning from their.
Arctura000: I only wish it was that simple. I went to an Art Institute myself (its one of the largest art college chains in the world), and they not only didn't teach me or my fellow students what we needed (a fact I thankfully realized less then halfway through though foolishly stayed so I'd have a degree) but they were indeed shady. On more then one occasion I caught the staff mass installing pirate software on the schools machines (much of which still remains). For a time I also lived at the dorms and the living environment was so bad that a large number of us got together threatened the school, eventually getting the local news station involved. Unfortunatly they threatened to expel the lot of us if we showed the news people what was going on. When asking school officials on sever occasions why the training given was so abysmal I ended up getting one of two answers: "Your not here to learn, your here to make contacts" and "It's too hard to find good teachers".
I had 2 classes of max, they never taught photoshop or after effects. In the xsi class they didn't teach xsi. I never learned about shaders, nodes, normal maps, nothing. I actualy taught normal maps to the teachers. And I'm 80 grand or so in the hole (VERY expensive school). To say I'm bitter would be an understatement.
But ultimatly all I'm saying is this isn't surprising, the Art Institute has just failed to prepair yet another student. And if it was possible to get the money back I'd be on that bandwagon myself.
All right. After an exhausting discussion with a few people online (Elysium, Beaver, Vindog, Pea, etc.. and sorry if I got your name wrong) I have been persuaded that college really isn't the route to go. Instead I'm going to work heavily on my 2D skills and keep 3D on the back burner. 2D work is what I am best at even though my portfolio is abysmal and does not demonstrate this very well, but my 3D work is sorely lacking in ways I wish it wasn't. Once I have a few strong pieces of 2D work I will move on and make some decent low poly models of my concept work. I will indeed be posting my finished work and ask for thoroughly brutal reviews of what I have done. I realize if you look through my history of posting I haven't quite finished many of the projects I started here, but I am hoping returning to the basics of what I love doing will encourage me to change that. I will be giving myself one month to change some things around. Maybe not find a job, but get a much stronger start to a portfolio.
My experience with the art institute was really terrible. We had one lady come in who was supposed to teach us After Effects but considered teaching beneath her. She was a habitual liar to our class and constantly looked down on some, while kissing ass to others. The end result was neither side of the fence learned anything and she was fired just before the term ended, giving us two weeks with someone who knew what he was doing. Not much help.
The 3D side was all right really. The prof we had would do what he could to find us answers to questions. The intro course to 3Ds Max however was terrible. While I don't blame the prof so much, I think the school seriously screwed us over. She was an awesome basic drawing prof, but she did NOT KNOW 3DS MAX. She knew it, we knew it, and she was put there because they were short staffed. We spent 11 weeks using basic shapes and modifiers to create weavels. We didn't get into editable polys until the next 11 weeks.
Flash animation? Why did we learn this in a 3D course? A better question is why did they have someone who obviously didn't know how to use Flash teaching us. He would walk in with one script to teach us in a 2 hour class. When it didn't work, he would just shrug and give us a study hall. No amount of complaining about him or anyone did anything. I could to talk with the dean of admissions at one point when I complained because I was considered the top of my class and respectable. Didn't do anything.
So yeah, there's various other things. Bottom line is we all graduated not feeling as though we actually had anything worth showing, but we were all happy to take the degree. I think I have caught on in enough time to start making a difference before years end. I appreciate all the very helpful suggestions you all have given me.
lol its like watching the same movie over and over, 95% of schools exist to """steal""" money, pick all the kids that like to play videogames and make them believe they can do it too just by studying there. Shitty people with no morality or a clue of how things are done.
Yeah, I was always looking at places like the AI a little warily... for one thing, I looked at some good places, and to get in to their animation program I needed to have lots of quality art. To places like these... they just say 'the right attitude' and lots of money. Second, I've seen commercials for these places... they show horrible 3-D models with even worse animation, and then distract you with flashy CG in the classrooms. They also add phrases like "What's the next big game gonna be??? We don't know... cause you haven't created it yet!!!"
However, I'd say there are still some places you can go that might actually give you a good, or at least decent, education. Just be very careful when choosing. All in all, as people have said... it really does come down to the individual working hard for themselves, no matter how they choose to learn.
Valkier: If your looking to going onto another (better) school, their are several that are actually worth the cost. Think Tank, Vancouver Film School, gnomon, and animationmentor.com (an online school if you want to do 3d animation) immediatly come to mind. Otherwise you could take such as (like suggested by Talon) join a mod team and/or spend some money getting some quality training material such as the dvds sold by gnomon, eat3d, etc. and just start learning from their.
Arctura000: I only wish it was that simple. I went to an Art Institute myself (its one of the largest art college chains in the world), and they not only didn't teach me or my fellow students what we needed (a fact I thankfully realized less then halfway through though foolishly stayed so I'd have a degree) but they were indeed shady. On more then one occasion I caught the staff mass installing pirate software on the schools machines (much of which still remains). For a time I also lived at the dorms and the living environment was so bad that a large number of us got together threatened the school, eventually getting the local news station involved. Unfortunatly they threatened to expel the lot of us if we showed the news people what was going on. When asking school officials on sever occasions why the training given was so abysmal I ended up getting one of two answers: "Your not here to learn, your here to make contacts" and "It's too hard to find good teachers".
I had 2 classes of max, they never taught photoshop or after effects. In the xsi class they didn't teach xsi. I never learned about shaders, nodes, normal maps, nothing. I actualy taught normal maps to the teachers. And I'm 80 grand or so in the hole (VERY expensive school). To say I'm bitter would be an understatement.
But ultimatly all I'm saying is this isn't surprising, the Art Institute has just failed to prepair yet another student. And if it was possible to get the money back I'd be on that bandwagon myself.
Polyhertz is a good friend of mine in real life and probably one of the only other artists down in the south florida area I know who ever pushed me or could help me with work, infact on constant basis (even now) we still ask each other questions because honestly we both got dicked BAD by AI. I can go into a whole rant on here about how it sucks, but A few of our educators lurk on these forums, and well....Rather not cause more heat where I work so to say....Its a big BS party down here , Im glad I learned to not learn from those who cant teach, and Learn from those with the ability to want to learn. Hell I had to go to SUCH extremes at one point that I took 2 jobs and at my 2nd job working from 10pm till 5 am I spent all my time sitting on my laptop learning techniques about next gen and just technical things I never learned.To say it easier, if someone where to ask me how angry I am about the way things turned out there, I would say its vast and deep, Like a ocean.
Anyway Off topic back to whats on point
You have potential in your 2d from what I see, but lack guidance or direction, I recommend if you want to take that route, go back to the basics of art, And start learning fine art training, I started to do this recently myself and it has done nothing but excell my technical art (3d)
I also recommend you really just take down a site, you might be able to get freelance work for something simple at your current skill level, but honestly from what im seeing you have to many hands in to many cookie jars and not enough skill in any real one of these.
I also recommend Atilier workshop, its a goodbook that explains about the fustrations of art when going to colleges/ versus learning on your own and good approaches you can take and practices to become a better fine artists.
Weither or not we live in the future or pasts, the principles of art remain the same, and you just like others I know have skipped that important principles, you learned technology before art and skimmed on the principles very briefly (Your work shows it), Anywho, Thats my 2 cents.
Dont take anything I or anyone else says to badly, take it as a big eye opener before your in a situation you cant turn back on
Well, we've decided that this thread isn't really working as well as we'd hoped.
I've made a new sticky thread with the new rules for all future Portfolio pimps, have a quick read as we feel this should be a better alternative to the solution we had earlier :poly121:
Amm.... man... i just read the whole thread and looked at ur site, and i guess everyone has been reinforcing how brutal Ott was but personally i think he is right. There are elements that u don't need and that first piece if you are goin to keep it put something more impressive. Textures look sloppy and smudged. I know you have better work than that.
Anywho... u should try to make the thumbnails in ur gallery enlarge a litte bit so u can see more of it, and when u click on it u open a small window inside so if previews the whole scene. People that look at ur portfolio dunn wanna loose, so the more clicks u implement for them to see ur art the less they want to spend on it.
Do check ur grammar....
make it simpler, and i know you have a whole theme with the color palette but i find it distracting. The simpler ur site is the better ur work is going to show.
So far i find ur concept art ur biggest asset, so try to emphasize that the most and back it up with ur 3D work and texture paint.
apart from that i think ur work could be presented in a better fashion. So just keep iterating on the comments that everyone has given you. Since most are to the point and make sense. It's good to see work from u once again man. :]
deviantart is a bad idea, its instantly going to look unprofessional.
Getting a domain with your name on it its pretty important, you want something easily remembered. You dont want someone to come across your site, and then later want to tell their art director about your work and only be able to remember that it was some wanker on deviantart.
I am mainly looking for feedback at this point regarding the general idea of what I am about to illustrate now. Do you like, think it can be improved? I should note here that I am not a native english speaker and not so good at grammer in general (no matter which language) so excuse that for now. I will create a propper thread once I am about to finish it to get finishing tips.
This portfolio will be used in early 2009 for job seeking outside of germany.
introduction
Right now I have merely a temporary portfolio online (~1 year old):
online link(you can look there for older stuff from me, though there is a lack of 3d content yet)
But this online link basicly was a rough conversion (done in 1 day of a past engine I wrote) of a printed book to satisfy the temporary needs of my professors at that time. Many things I did at that time are left out, I want to add more drawings and paintings and there is so much more content to come especially in the fields 3d animation/ realtime, low poly and scripting. The final portfolio the one to be used for my job seeking will be thus bigger and apart from that a evolution of what I tried so far.
Evolution
I like the general idea of porting the print version to the online version so that I can save layout, structure and content. This means for me however that I want to focus on the online version on the way it behaves because the expierence will be different anyway - so why not making it as exciting as I can online.
My general idea can be described with a simple illustration:
you can flip pages like a real book in a 3d alike view with popping elements of items. The main idea is to to highlight each art content more as a single item instead of having some loose focus because of the integration in groups on each page.
mockups
this is a quick mockup so far how I could imagine it could look close like in the end (text content just roughly made up). The book itself is a screengrab atm. from 3dsmax so there is no antialiasing and texture filtering but that will be different in the end because textures will the look smooth and edges wont have stairs in them, so like I said its more a quick mockup for now.
when you click on a single item you would get a bigger and un-distorted version like this:
and clicking back on it would return to the page flipping or book mode. At the upper panel where it says 'ink graphics,...' one could alternativly tab previous or further ahead lying pages.
I know that with this idea I have requires to load alot of image data but with smart loading mechanics I hope that there wont be a lag at all in the end. A smooth, quick and simple impression is what I want to trigger in people's mind regarding the navigation. No popup windows, javascript delays or default galleries.
I plan to use the upcomming semester time for developing booth the print and online version (as a project) and have it done by the end of this year. Layout and texting will be done in InDesign and be printed again as book. The online version will be written in Actionscript3 and propably use XML as layout container for the images to be loaded and meta text information to be displayed.
The last year I have been programming a few 3d engines in flash so that I feel confident that I can pull this off resulting into a smooth and quick to be loaded web application - because what matters for me is to have a unqiue portfolio with unique content (and a unqiue engine).
Hey guys just got out of school and looking for critics on my new website.(I bet you haven't heard that before) so any who check it out http://www.rmatey.com any thoughts are appreciated
Replies
Arctura000: Your site's pretty good as in it has all the required information there, but if you're going to use images to display your text content, you might want to ensure you use a high quality jpeg (or if it's just white text on black, a gif would give you lossless compression, probably for a similar if not smaller filesize) - the compression artefacts make it hard to read and makes the site in general look pretty muddy.
Enjoy.
@ Reich: Glad you like the feel of my website! I hadn't realized... but I guess it is pretty 'me'. As for the armpits of my characters... yes, I do realize there are problems in that area. It's mostly a problem with how I set up the mesh, I believe. Next time I make a character... I'll be sure to be more careful about that part
Reich & Talon: Yes, I'm realizing belatedly I should really have the info about the models on the site as well... It's in my demo reel, so I don't know why I didn't add it to the site too. :P I'll add that stuff when I get a chance.
Thanks for the comments!
Big shout out to achmedthesnake. Thank you man, your paint-over was really helpful. I took several of your suggestions. TheSplash, I am still considering putting a footer element in. But for the moment there wouldn't be any purpose to it aside from aesthetics. I'll put that idea on the back-burner, and bring it up again the next time I revise the site.
Now that I have a basic structure, I'm going to go back to working on content to populate it with. (as pretty much everyone has been suggesting) Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted on this thread and the last one I started, you've all helped immensely.
Just in case you don't want to scroll back up to the top, here's the link again...
http://www.willhawthorne.com
just a nother suggestion - the resume, it could still go to a new page displaying your education/employment history and then still have download link for the word doc. - just for those who don't trust downloading anything or don't have the time...
After working retail for a couple months here trying to save up some money, I have decided that I can't be waiting around any longer to try to get my career in art moving. As such, I decided what I love doing is concept art and 3D modeling. Not sure how many concept artists get to take their work into the 3D program themselves, so really my main focus is going to be the concept portion.
Now then, I think my portfolio is way too varied right now. Whether it really is or isn't, I'm hoping to find out. My take on it is there are far too many styles and not enough strong pieces to really make a potential employer interested in me. I'm going to be taking the next month or two to create some really top notch stuff. I would like to know what I should keep and toss out of my current display, and what I should get more of. I do have plenty of figure drawings I just don't have digital prints of yet that I could put in. Not all of them incredibly detailed, but they show form and gestural drawings.
I also want to get some opinions on how I should structure my portfolio in general. Obviously since I want to be a concept artist, I want to show a lot of concept work. However is it good to focus on one potential topic (IE steam punk, fantasy, etc..) or branch off and show multiple areas. I can honestly see the merits of both, but my main focus here obviously is to be able to attract employers and eventually get hired. Also, how many pieces should I aim for as far as showing what I am capable of? Obviously the more the merrier if they are strong, but I'd like a minimum to aim for before I start sending out resumes and the like. I would think 4 or 5 really well thought out and strong conceptual pieces would be enough to at least start, but again, I'm honestly not sure and need some help.
If anyone feels like giving me some additional advice, and I do realize this is getting a bit out of the realm of critiquing my work but I am really struggling here, I would like some tips on maybe where to look for freelance work or a full time employment. Moving and the like really isn't a big deal to me. My main concern is just what I can expect to go through in this process. Freelancing is also an interest of mine, but I have a hard time finding any. Craigslist and Monster.com have yielded absolutely zero replies rejection or otherwise from multiple e-mails, and by multiple I mean well over 30, so I am beginning to think I should look elsewhere. How are these forums and Conceptart.org for that sort of thing? Are there other websites I should be looking at?
I live in PA near Maryland. There are pretty much no jobs for 3D artists or illustrators in the area so I really am just having a very tough time with the entire thing right now. Any and all advice, brutal especially as long as it's reasonable, is appreciated greatly. Most of you on this forum are in the industry and know your trade. I really look forward to what you all have to say.
Sorry,
I didn't know I have to post it here.
I already got some good critiques.
But I would like a couple more before I move on and change the whole site.
Thanks in advance.
You have zero completed turnarounds.
You have zero completed human / character models.
You have zero FX / particles diagrams.
You have zero environmental concepts.
You have zero vehicle concepts.
You have zero weapon / gear concepts or turnarounds.
You have zero prop concepts.
You have zero animatics / storyboard layouts.
Your website is a complete fail. I have no clue whatsoever what you are wanting to do, and none of your work is presented in such a way to even remotely resemble professionalism. If you want people to take your line drawing seriously, perhaps you should take it into Photoshop and clean it up off of the shitty line-paper drawings and frame it.
None of your 3d models are complete. You rendered most of them on a white background, in a T-Pose, and for one of the character the only sort of material I can make out of his uniform is "black". I have absolutely no idea what is going on with his uniform/armor, so that basically tells me that you don't want to / know how to texture, and that you don't know how to rig.
Personally I'm not convinced that you are aware of what employers do / don't want to see when it comes to a concept artist. You need to spend more time finding GOOD ones, see what they have / had on their websites and what got them a job.
You also need to realize that concept art is one of the hardest jobs to get at a game studio. The ability to draw, and draw well is only a small portion of it too.
Honestly, your portfolio needs a ton of work. First I'll try to answer your specific questions:
You don't have enough strong pieces, this is true. 'Styles' are not your problem, incomplete work is. For example, one of the first pieces I saw in your 'flats' section of a cat looked like a doodle done in 2 minutes, or your objects-based one where you seem to have spent all your time working on recreating the reflections but never put in a proper light source. If your going to be showing off doodles and incomplete work they better be damn good.
Put all your work on the main page in thumbnails (direct link the full size, no popup window bs), don't make me go through links to find it, that's the no.1 rule of any artists portfolio website. Also, don't break up your 2d into two sections (flats/figure) unless you have a significant volume of work to place in them.
No, unless you want to cater to a specific companies needs to boost your chances of getting hired their, it's better to show that you can be versatile and would be fine if they needed you at some point to move onto different projects with different art styles. In 3d five pieces can work for a portfolio, but for 2d I'd say ten minimum.
As for freelance and fulltime work, I honestly don't think your ready yet for either. If your determined to still try atp then other then the sites you listed try posting your info on cgtalk, 3dtotal, and gameartisans as well.
Now for a brief on the problems with your work:
Flats:
eye=good, probably your best work
objects=no light source
cat=junk, scrap it
figure:
face=anatomy's off (forehead height + nose), shading needs work, and eyes highlights don't reflect the light direction.
text woman=incomplete, finish or scrap
light woman=face features need to be lower on the skull
skeletons=forehead again, foreground skeletons legs too long
3d organics=weak. spline hair (games can't use this), fuzzy textures, no skin texture/variation. monsters jaw anatomy makes no sense (lower jaw would break off)
3d environments:
bathroom shower=curtain is way too reflective and has no texture, rooms shadows are distorted, no color variation, too perfectly clean
tree stump=boring, grass falloff too abrupt, scene needs more color variation
edit: sense Ott seems to have held nothing back I might as well too.
Your portfolio is crap, and I pity you for going to an Art Institute (They don't prepair their students at all, just suck up all their money). You have nothing right now that I think could even get you into a casual games studio. 2D art is even harder then 3d art getting a job in due to the amount of competition. If your going to really try for 2d its going to take at least a few more years of serious study to get a job in, and if you want end up wanting to go 3d I'd suggest starting over and learning low-low poly before moving up. visit the forums lowpoly thread and try making work similar without wasting poly or texture space.
Either way, good luck, you'll need it.
I'm not one to speak about not doing enough actual art, because i'm probably the laziest bastard I know.
However, I would not call what you have varied. A hippy in armor, dolphins, and a creature. Unfinished sketches (not a problem, drawing is a good idea, keep it up)
I have zero personal experience, but I can still tell you not to aim for Concept artist straight away.
You will be
uhh...
keep working at it
I should probably take my own advice
Also, I think the last time I talked to my job placement prof, it was him telling me he wasn't quite sure how to help me find a job. Great plan, eh? They spent most of their time making us prep for interviews and barely any on presenting our work digitally or otherwise. I at least spared you and horror and myself the embarrassment of putting up my Demo Reel. My entire class knew it was a train wreck before we finished any of ours.
So, I suppose my next question is where is a good college I can look at? Clearly what I was taught is going to take me nowhere. While I could sit down and crank out some high quality pieces easily enough, I think some added guidance by professionals might be a better route.
Thanks for the advice guys.
But, really, working on a mod work taught me more in 2 short years (for nothing more than my spare time and effort) than I'd have leared at the full 3 years of my university course (for a cumulative total of about £10k). As did lurking around forums such as these soaking up not only crits on my own models but the crits on the dudes on here who are far superior to me (because I figured - if they're critting *those* models, that's where the really high-end stuff to aim for is coming from). And critting other people's work on forums like these makes you start to work out what you should be looking out for in your own.
The first positive thing you've done is show up here, this is where you need to be. It's harsh, but it's honest and with hard work and dedication you can get to where you need to be to get a job. Only if you really, truly want it, otherwise...back to retail.
I have been where you are, graduating from school where you might have thought your portfolio they graduated you with was a good start, finding a place like Polycount and realizing that you've been sending a big ol stinky pile of art shit to employers.
I look at AI like this: they gave me a starting point and the basic tools to get going, but it was up to me to put in the hours to make it good.
You don't need to spend another single cent on another school, school is not the answer. Hundreds and thousands of hours in front of sketchpads and your PC is. Keep making new art, post it here, take the crits, use them..rinse and repeat.
Best of luck.
Arctura000: I only wish it was that simple. I went to an Art Institute myself (its one of the largest art college chains in the world), and they not only didn't teach me or my fellow students what we needed (a fact I thankfully realized less then halfway through though foolishly stayed so I'd have a degree) but they were indeed shady. On more then one occasion I caught the staff mass installing pirate software on the schools machines (much of which still remains). For a time I also lived at the dorms and the living environment was so bad that a large number of us got together threatened the school, eventually getting the local news station involved. Unfortunatly they threatened to expel the lot of us if we showed the news people what was going on. When asking school officials on sever occasions why the training given was so abysmal I ended up getting one of two answers: "Your not here to learn, your here to make contacts" and "It's too hard to find good teachers".
I had 2 classes of max, they never taught photoshop or after effects. In the xsi class they didn't teach xsi. I never learned about shaders, nodes, normal maps, nothing. I actualy taught normal maps to the teachers. And I'm 80 grand or so in the hole (VERY expensive school). To say I'm bitter would be an understatement.
But ultimatly all I'm saying is this isn't surprising, the Art Institute has just failed to prepair yet another student. And if it was possible to get the money back I'd be on that bandwagon myself.
My experience with the art institute was really terrible. We had one lady come in who was supposed to teach us After Effects but considered teaching beneath her. She was a habitual liar to our class and constantly looked down on some, while kissing ass to others. The end result was neither side of the fence learned anything and she was fired just before the term ended, giving us two weeks with someone who knew what he was doing. Not much help.
The 3D side was all right really. The prof we had would do what he could to find us answers to questions. The intro course to 3Ds Max however was terrible. While I don't blame the prof so much, I think the school seriously screwed us over. She was an awesome basic drawing prof, but she did NOT KNOW 3DS MAX. She knew it, we knew it, and she was put there because they were short staffed. We spent 11 weeks using basic shapes and modifiers to create weavels. We didn't get into editable polys until the next 11 weeks.
Flash animation? Why did we learn this in a 3D course? A better question is why did they have someone who obviously didn't know how to use Flash teaching us. He would walk in with one script to teach us in a 2 hour class. When it didn't work, he would just shrug and give us a study hall. No amount of complaining about him or anyone did anything. I could to talk with the dean of admissions at one point when I complained because I was considered the top of my class and respectable. Didn't do anything.
So yeah, there's various other things. Bottom line is we all graduated not feeling as though we actually had anything worth showing, but we were all happy to take the degree. I think I have caught on in enough time to start making a difference before years end. I appreciate all the very helpful suggestions you all have given me.
Cheers!
However, I'd say there are still some places you can go that might actually give you a good, or at least decent, education. Just be very careful when choosing. All in all, as people have said... it really does come down to the individual working hard for themselves, no matter how they choose to learn.
Polyhertz is a good friend of mine in real life and probably one of the only other artists down in the south florida area I know who ever pushed me or could help me with work, infact on constant basis (even now) we still ask each other questions because honestly we both got dicked BAD by AI. I can go into a whole rant on here about how it sucks, but A few of our educators lurk on these forums, and well....Rather not cause more heat where I work so to say....Its a big BS party down here , Im glad I learned to not learn from those who cant teach, and Learn from those with the ability to want to learn. Hell I had to go to SUCH extremes at one point that I took 2 jobs and at my 2nd job working from 10pm till 5 am I spent all my time sitting on my laptop learning techniques about next gen and just technical things I never learned.To say it easier, if someone where to ask me how angry I am about the way things turned out there, I would say its vast and deep, Like a ocean.
Anyway Off topic back to whats on point
You have potential in your 2d from what I see, but lack guidance or direction, I recommend if you want to take that route, go back to the basics of art, And start learning fine art training, I started to do this recently myself and it has done nothing but excell my technical art (3d)
I also recommend you really just take down a site, you might be able to get freelance work for something simple at your current skill level, but honestly from what im seeing you have to many hands in to many cookie jars and not enough skill in any real one of these.
I also recommend Atilier workshop, its a goodbook that explains about the fustrations of art when going to colleges/ versus learning on your own and good approaches you can take and practices to become a better fine artists.
Weither or not we live in the future or pasts, the principles of art remain the same, and you just like others I know have skipped that important principles, you learned technology before art and skimmed on the principles very briefly (Your work shows it), Anywho, Thats my 2 cents.
Dont take anything I or anyone else says to badly, take it as a big eye opener before your in a situation you cant turn back on
I've made a new sticky thread with the new rules for all future Portfolio pimps, have a quick read as we feel this should be a better alternative to the solution we had earlier :poly121:
-caseyjones
Amm.... man... i just read the whole thread and looked at ur site, and i guess everyone has been reinforcing how brutal Ott was but personally i think he is right. There are elements that u don't need and that first piece if you are goin to keep it put something more impressive. Textures look sloppy and smudged. I know you have better work than that.
Anywho... u should try to make the thumbnails in ur gallery enlarge a litte bit so u can see more of it, and when u click on it u open a small window inside so if previews the whole scene. People that look at ur portfolio dunn wanna loose, so the more clicks u implement for them to see ur art the less they want to spend on it.
Do check ur grammar....
make it simpler, and i know you have a whole theme with the color palette but i find it distracting. The simpler ur site is the better ur work is going to show.
So far i find ur concept art ur biggest asset, so try to emphasize that the most and back it up with ur 3D work and texture paint.
apart from that i think ur work could be presented in a better fashion. So just keep iterating on the comments that everyone has given you. Since most are to the point and make sense. It's good to see work from u once again man. :]
something like this
http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs36/f/2008/246/6/4/portfolio_by_jujikabane.swf
do you all think that it will be a problem?
Getting a domain with your name on it its pretty important, you want something easily remembered. You dont want someone to come across your site, and then later want to tell their art director about your work and only be able to remember that it was some wanker on deviantart.
This portfolio will be used in early 2009 for job seeking outside of germany.
introduction
Right now I have merely a temporary portfolio online (~1 year old):
online link (you can look there for older stuff from me, though there is a lack of 3d content yet)
But this online link basicly was a rough conversion (done in 1 day of a past engine I wrote) of a printed book to satisfy the temporary needs of my professors at that time. Many things I did at that time are left out, I want to add more drawings and paintings and there is so much more content to come especially in the fields 3d animation/ realtime, low poly and scripting. The final portfolio the one to be used for my job seeking will be thus bigger and apart from that a evolution of what I tried so far.
Evolution
I like the general idea of porting the print version to the online version so that I can save layout, structure and content. This means for me however that I want to focus on the online version on the way it behaves because the expierence will be different anyway - so why not making it as exciting as I can online.
My general idea can be described with a simple illustration:
you can flip pages like a real book in a 3d alike view with popping elements of items. The main idea is to to highlight each art content more as a single item instead of having some loose focus because of the integration in groups on each page.
mockups
this is a quick mockup so far how I could imagine it could look close like in the end (text content just roughly made up). The book itself is a screengrab atm. from 3dsmax so there is no antialiasing and texture filtering but that will be different in the end because textures will the look smooth and edges wont have stairs in them, so like I said its more a quick mockup for now.
when you click on a single item you would get a bigger and un-distorted version like this:
and clicking back on it would return to the page flipping or book mode. At the upper panel where it says 'ink graphics,...' one could alternativly tab previous or further ahead lying pages.
I know that with this idea I have requires to load alot of image data but with smart loading mechanics I hope that there wont be a lag at all in the end. A smooth, quick and simple impression is what I want to trigger in people's mind regarding the navigation. No popup windows, javascript delays or default galleries.
I plan to use the upcomming semester time for developing booth the print and online version (as a project) and have it done by the end of this year. Layout and texting will be done in InDesign and be printed again as book. The online version will be written in Actionscript3 and propably use XML as layout container for the images to be loaded and meta text information to be displayed.
The last year I have been programming a few 3d engines in flash so that I feel confident that I can pull this off resulting into a smooth and quick to be loaded web application - because what matters for me is to have a unqiue portfolio with unique content (and a unqiue engine).
what do you guys think?