[Portfolio] Charles Metze III, 3D Artist

MrHobo

Hey there PC!

As internship season is upon us, I've been attempting to polish off a portfolio for this spring. I figured it was time to get some community feedback on a few things that I might not be seeing myself.

The Portfolio: http://graphiteaddict.blogspot.com/

The main thing that Im concerned about are:

What's hurting my portfolio?
What do you all think I should drop? Iv'e done some pruning myself, but Im afraid I may have missed something.

Should I rearrange things?
I want to put my best foot forward and end on a strong note.

Should I drop 3D Artist?
I figure because Im going for an internship it would be foolish to specify something like character artist.

Lucas Annunziata

Hey, here are some quick first impressions.

1)Your name doesn't stick out. What is graphite addiction? This is YOUR portfolio site, so make your name throb right on out of the page.

2)Get rid of the "home" page. Have it open up directly to your work. About half of all people will leave your website within 30 seconds, so you want to slap em in the face with your work.

3)Some roll-overs on the images would be nice to keep it consistent with menu bar.

4)I'd pair together the sculpts with the low poly of the character. It keeps it all in one place.

5)Why not have the images open up to a sub-page that has the image centered along with the background, rather than the direct image url.

6) On your resume, put your education below work experience. GPA doesn't matter really, and especially not each individual year. Condense that to an average.

7) For the butcher, if you've got the gut interior textured, instead of just showing a blobby thing, do a beauty shot of his stomach ripped open, maybe with some blood particles.

Hopefully that helped.

LRoy

I'm not sure why you have graphite addiction bigger than both your name and email address combined? Not really a fan of the blogger setup with all the extra stuff on top and on bottom but if you can't afford hosting yet it's not too distracting.

Clicking on the work and having one large image load slowly on the left with the big white background isn't really the best way to showcase it at all. I suggest having it load like your current tabs (meaning centered with the black background and your name/email) and broken into smaller images with the option to go bigger.

Also just noticed on your homepage, the Welcome links to the same homepage except the url is graphiteaddict.blogspot.com/2012/02/portfolio-stuff-is-done-yay.html. Should probably fix that haha

MrHobo

darbeenbo-
1) Got it, done and done, I'll make that switch tonight when I get home.
2-3) Unfortunately can't do rollovers (It's a actually a blog) but I'll shuffle one of the content pages onto the "home"page, instead of the welcome thing.
4) I broke them into two groups because I have more sculpts than
low poly right now, If I do smash them together how would you handle the spill over?
5) Back to the blog limitation, you can only have a msx of 10 pages, so Im trying to work in that constraint for now. I plan on having a full site at graduation
6) Good point, I'll do that tonight too.
7) Thats the plan for him in the end, but I have to wait till this summer till I can implement all the other ideas I had for him.

LRoy-
Your the second person to call me on the header so if there was any doubt before then it's all gone now. I'll have a full site when I graduate, but for now I need something for internships.
I'd prefer a more traditional gallery setup Im back to the blogger limitations. I looked at alternate solutions like carbonmade but the images feel tiny so I decided to stick to this approach.
Based on darbeenbo's suggestion I'm going to drop having a home page a just stick the work in peoples faces lol.

Thanks both of you for the feedback!

GOBEE

I too use blogspot for my portfolio. You can find all kinds of templates out there and make your own adjustments. For example, you still have Subscribe to Post, Home, Older Posts and Powered by Blogger. Google search, 'How to get rid of _____ in blogger' and you will find it's much easier than you think to get rid of all that crap you don't need. You'll have to scroll through some of your xml, but find it in there, and delete it so it doesn't show up anymore, and the viewer won't automatically know that you are using blogger. Also, an easy fix is to change your Blogger Favicon. There are sites out there that will allow you to upload your own custom favicon, look into it. I changed the same Blogger logo to black since my name starts with a B, so I just kept it.

With regards to your work, I like it. Good stuff. However, I'd get rid of the Laptop. I don't think it's doing much for you. If you don't want to get rid of it, consider re-doing some things. First, the DVD movie image is way too blurry. Plus, the lighting isn't helping at all, considering your alpha plane is showing up in the shadows. I'm sure you noticed this, and it happens to me all the time. It's a pain in the ass! But if you used Maya, look in the Attribute editor for 'shadow attenuation', and reduce that down all the way. Sometimes this fixes the issue for me. Other times, it's a matter of double checking the alpha's blacks are completely black, or just switching from Lambert to Phong. Where is your normal map?

Last thing, put at least one image up front on the main page. Your best piece. You want to give the hiring manager or recruiter a good first impression. I also think your best work is in the Low Poly section. Make that the first thing people click on and maybe change it from Low Poly to Game Art or something. Hope this helps!

cholden

Remove homepage. It's not a portfolio.

1 portfolio page. Since your sculpts are for some of your low poly's these should be together.

Remove "graphite addiction" branding. This is a personal portfolio, not an art house.

Larger font in resume.

Goat Justice

I agree with cholden about larger font for the resume. Right now its just a wall of tiny white text. A bit of formatting would help as well. I'm sure there are tons of resume writing sites around the web you can check out for examples. Also, definitely put any relevant internships/work at the top.

I'd also recommend taking another look at the laptop prop. The textures are really flat looking. you've got spec and gloss maps, but they're not really selling different areas of it as different materials. A normal map would probably help pop some of the details. The area of texture for the entire bottom of the thing is actually painted darker in the diffuse/spec/gloss maps. also, the alpha'ed out area around the CD is rendering as grey in several images.

JTerry

Everyone else's comments on the structure and style of your portfolio are spot-on. In addition, a hugely important thing to consider is the quality of the work that you show. It is often better to show fewer examples of amazing work than a bulk of mixed-quality work. The reason for this is that an employer is almost always taking a chance when hiring a student. Don't give them a reason to doubt you by showing poor work; it will make it look like you got lucky on your successful pieces rather than demonstrating an ability to consistently produce good work.

Therefore, I would suggest that you remove almost everything from your sculpt section other than "Nefertiti" and "Deus Eqqus." These are fairly solid projects, the rest of them make it more clear that you were learning/experimenting when creating them.

In the low-poly section, I would remove the car and "Mutanta."

The unfortunate truth about internships is that character art internships are very rare. If it is at all within your capabilities I would highly recommend that you complete at least 2 more solid high to low-poly prop assets to flesh out your low-poly section.

Orangeknight

I have to say get rid of the first page and go straight to the art.

MrHobo

Sorry for the delay. I tried to take everyone's crits into account and reworked a lot of stuff in my layout as well as dropped some stuff off the portfolio.
Thanks for the awesome feedback everyone, lesson learned.