environment artist portfolio critique

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  JordanN interpolator

  Mar 2018

  My honest opinion is that when I look at your portfolio, it really becomes a tough sell not based on your modeling (which I think you're no doubt capable of), but the theme. 
  
  Someone looks at that but what mainstream artstyle is it suppose to follow? Look at the big games or movies and and notice they all subscribe to a distinct style. Whether photorealistic, or cartoony, or hand painted. Right now, your work feels somewhere in the middle. While not bad on its own, competing against other AAA artists who specifically made their portfolio to look exactly like Overwatch, or Uncharted or Pixar might earn them the extra spotlight in an Art Director's eyes whereas your art might be seen as "the other" and gets moved to the back or completely forgotten.
  
  Another critique is that you have a lot of pieces that are just matte objects/untextured. Generally, you don't want this as this shows incompleteness. Texturing an entire environment can be tough, but it's better to have 2 or 3 fully rendered scenes, than to fill your portfolio with 6 grey scenes. You want your portfolio to demonstrate versatility, that you're not just a one trick pony for modeling.
  
  And going back to the texturing, your Swamp House scene lacks presentation. Even for a night time scene, it is very flat looking. Where's the moon or other light sources to best describe the setting?
  
  The Arch on the lake also demonstrates that same sort of incompleteness. There's a pitch black background even though it looks like it could be an afternoon setting. 
  
  Lastly, there's very few breakdown elements. Can you show wireframes, matte/post processing passes, PBR textures?

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  spenser.p polycounter lvl 8

  Mar 2018

  Thanks alot Jordan you made some really good points  ill get to work on revamping the the swamp house and arch lake and finish the matte models  and show break downs of the work 

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  Kingdan97 null

  Mar 2018

  I'm curious as to how much, if any, of your work is built modularly? Assuming you're trying to go into games, most of the work you'd be expected to do is kits and, while I definitely see what look like some repeated assets in your pieces more of what I'm seeing is one off parts that would, in theory, be used as set piece objects.
  
  I would also echo Jordan's point about style. It seems like you've got a wide variety of interest, which is good, but if you're not polishing any given piece to a AAA standard you're coming off as more of a stylistic generalist. I would say, at least to get hired at first to lock in on a style that is more widely marketable. Your theme can be varied(sci-fi, fantasy, etc) but you should either be going heavy into realistic or push your stylized work farther to be challenging the level of detail in a game like Overwatch, WoW, Lol, etc.
  
  If you're curious about how modular your environment work can be, and how to display it past making all of your parts download Unreal if you haven't and find the Infinity Blade levels they have in there. The amount of visual variety they got out of a small number of parts is a really good test case. That said, definitely assemble scenes, just also show the parts you used to make them up.
  

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