Portfolio Critique Please

djgardner

Hello everyone.

Would anyone mind checking out my portfolio so far, and giving me feedback on the site layout itself, as well as my work?
Don't worry, the portfolio is not final, and is still a work-in-progress.

Portfolio: http://www.davidjohngardner.com/

A little background info on myself, I'm going into my 3rd year of the Game Development program, specializing in 3D modelling, and I hope to become an environment artist.

As a side note, my resume page is offline for the time being, so it's ok if an error page appears.

Thanks in advance,

Der Hollander

As far as your work goes, don't use CrazyBump for your AO or Specular maps. Use big boy tools like Photoshop adjustment layers to get the job done for your specular map, and bake your AO off of actual geometry. You'll get much, much better looking results that way. It's not bad work by any means, but without a proper AO it's looking totally like a bunch of geo stuck onto each other in a viewport, rather than having sexy baked lighting.

Your website is laid out pretty nicely, but please, PLEASE get rid of your crappy Lightbox-esque plugins. I shouldn't have to wait for an 800x600 image to load in this day and age, and if you simply have a thumbnail that redirects to a breakdown page for a piece, it will look a lot nicer to a potential employer and it makes your site a lot easier to navigate.

North

Having some environments would be nice if you want to be an environment artist.

Your props hold up but the texturing is abysmal. spending 5 minutes in crazybump does not show any employer that you know what you are doing. Crazybump is usually used for a normal overlay or a quick way to process a heightmap.

If you are going to use crazybump, make sure 'shape recognition' is turned to 0 to avoid awkward normal outlines.

Lightbox hurts the speed of your site as Der said

djgardner

Thanks for the feedback so far.
I thought the Lightbox plugin would make it look nicer. I'll have to reconsider using it, and just have all the images appear on one page when you click the thumbnail.
I'm still working towards improving my textures.
Again, it's still a WIP portfolio, and yes, I do plan on including environments in the future.

dii

You should also be optimizing your geometry much better than you are. You've got a 4400 triangle shipping container with no beveled edges. Think about where you're spending geometry and whether or not its actually doing anything useful for you.

nick2730

On your container the texture is very blurry. Your size is also 2048x2048 way to big for an asset of that size. You dont have any scratch detail either.

Keep working at it you will get there. Look at some pictures of containers to get some real reference