Portfolio Crit - [Eric Kimberly]

Subtle 1rony

Hello Polycounters!

Would any of you fine people be interested in reviewing/providing your opinion on my portfolio site? I've seen a few people post a similar thread such as this, and thought I'd give it a shot. I am interested in hearing what you like, what you don't like, and everything in between:)

www.eric-kimberly.com

Thanks and here are a couple images to pique your interest:

Subtle 1rony

site is www.eric-kimberly.com

ducckz

not sure if iam blind or not but it kinda looks like a part of the book is inside the rocks

Kuki

I like your natural environment, very convincing apart from the fence, I am not in love with it, still the entire image is very nice . Any tech detail about it, renderer, wires?

Thanks

Luca

Subtle 1rony

Yes sir, the plants are paintFX rendered in maya with mental ray. I used techniques learned from Alex Alvarez's gnomon dvd, creating plants in maya and mental ray, so they were converted to polys and have mia material applied to them with translucency and alphas for the leaves. The water is a simple plane with a bump map and a mia material with fresnel reflections. I also took a z-depth pass to give a little depth of field

The scene was very heavy, about 11 million polys and took about 3 hours to render the one frame, so that was definitely a negative to creating plants this way.

@ducckz, the book may very well intersect at the base, I think I do that sometimes when I'm trying to work quickly. Hopefully its not too noticeable.

Dhawal

Great work, especially the second one with lots of grass....keep it up buddy..
good luck...

3dcaspar

Hey there! There's one thing I'm quiet curious about: which section in the cg/entertainment industry would you like to join? At the moment you have only got offline renderings of some really small scenes, but no doubt, your stuff isn't bad
If you want to get ready for the gaming industry you should probably do game ready stuff (realtime). So make a scene and put it into an engine...
For me it's kind of hard to make out what you're going for, since the models / textures aren't really complex. So right now I'd say your focusing on renderings things offline and refining materials.

Subtle 1rony

@dhawal, thanks for the words of encouragement, and I will!

caspar, as for your question, I am interested in doing environments, ideally realtime stuff, and of course, for games. Its funny you should mention creating a scene for a game engine, because I am currently in the process of making my first environment for UDK. Going is slow trying to pick up the workflows, but I hope to put up a WIP thread as soon as I have more to show. Thank you for your feedback:)

3dcaspar

Cool! Looking forward to seeing the scene, I'll definitely have an eye on this
Good luck with the scene

Oh, one more thing: it seems that you forgot to correct the smoothing groups in your scene with the book.. (the lower stone wall). I don't know if that's intentional, but I`d change that and use a proper normal map instead.

Subtle 1rony

ah yes, I did notice it, but wasnt sure if it would come off as hard edged rocks or be read as a smoothing mistake left in there. no good?

3dcaspar

Well, I personally would leave that out, since it instantly looks like you just didn't use any smoothing groups at all:
Adjust the smoothing groups, make a proper normal map in ZBrush (with hard edges) and apply that to the stones/rocks. Will look much better

Cheers