Requesting portfolio critique
polycounter lvl 8
http://www.andyleung.net/port/
Hi guys. I'm just about to graduate from uni, and I would like some feedback from the community around here about just anything at all, from my website to my work. Although I can say I put a lot of work over the past year working on my portfolio, I feel its still lacking a bit. Is it the presentation of the website? The level of skill is not there yet?
I think for the next few months I'll have to keep hammering at it until I find a job in the industry. Also I'm planning to build a new environment soon but haven't started any work on that yet.
Please give me any feedback so I can use them to make myself more 'pro'. Thanks.
Hi guys. I'm just about to graduate from uni, and I would like some feedback from the community around here about just anything at all, from my website to my work. Although I can say I put a lot of work over the past year working on my portfolio, I feel its still lacking a bit. Is it the presentation of the website? The level of skill is not there yet?
I think for the next few months I'll have to keep hammering at it until I find a job in the industry. Also I'm planning to build a new environment soon but haven't started any work on that yet.
Please give me any feedback so I can use them to make myself more 'pro'. Thanks.
Replies
Your work is alright, but theres nothing really catching my eye.
The basement has terrible color choices, you need to learn about color theory and complementary colors, thats mandatory. Also check out adobe kuler for palettes. The temple colors are really odd aswell. Get rid of that tiling ground texture, and do a lot bigger tiles. Get some small assets done to populare that scene, and dont overdo the fog so much. You could make it a nice scene with more work, and you need to work anyways, so why not do that.
1) A lot of your assets are really wasteful in triangles. The pipe set you made is crazy high, and I can't even tell how or why from looking at the pieces. Just to put it in perspective a little bit, you have pipes that are 700 and 900 triangles, and I recently made a couple guns that were both around 700 each. You shouldn't be spending that many triangles unless its a major piece in your environment. That firenode in Roots, the boiler in Basement, and the beam in Palace are also crazy high for what they are. You are putting geometry into the littlest detail that I wouldn't even notice the difference if it was just in the normal.
2) Lighting is really bland in all your pieces. Your not taking advantage of color with your lighting, nor values to create areas of interest. Good lighting can take an OK environment and make it look great, but bad lighting will always make an environment look bad no matter what. In the Basement scene why are there no shadows being casted by the light hanging to the right? or the light above the stairs? It is really distracting and makes it difficult to take my eyes off anything but that.
3) Texturing is also a problem. Almost all your textures look really rushed, with no care put into what the material is you are trying to create. Spec maps are not noticeable at all in any of your scenes so its hard to tell what your textures are suppose to be. Could you post some of your spec maps for the Basement scene?
@Shrike
I agree color is always a topic I haven't worked on. Really need to work on that. For the palace scene I think I'll get onto doing some foliage, and figure out what stone tiles I'll do.
@Bardler
1) I think I'll retopo the pipes, and the boiler altogether. My 'reason' for the pipes being so high was to have some slight bend and dents in the body instead of being a straight up cylinder, which would cost a lot less. However, at the scale it is and being not as important as the other assets, the silhouette is hard to see in the scene.
For the firenode I might need some help on that. For what it is its just plate thats pretty big compared to the player size. If it has to look round at that scale, I thought the subdivision in the roundness would have to be around that level to not look really jagged.
2) I think I was running into frustrating light map problems where the shadows were good when placing lights around, but then disappear after the bake. You're right though, I'll keep working on the lighting for all the scenes.
3) Material definition is something I HAVE to learn asap, no excuses should be made. I'll post the spec map for the boiler in the next post, and yeah its pretty bad.....
What I think I was doing was to emphasize the rust part of the texture only, and didn't care about anything else.
Anyways, the plan was to work a new environment, but digging back at some of this work there are things I wouldn't have done even now. I'll get on working on these three pieces.
A general guideline is to look at the scene at your expected camera distance in wireframe; anything that looks solid or almost solid has too many polygons. For textures, keep reducing the texture size until details are lost or become blurry; the final texture will often be 1/2 or even 1/4 of the size of your workspace texture. The capabilities of the engine are an upper limit; the requirements of the scene are usually much lower.
Your spec map needs more detail then just white for metal, and black for rust. The only way to get metal to look right is through your spec map, and with unique details in your spec map. Look up some of Racers texturing tutorials, the tank texturing tutorial on 3D Motive, and the knife tutorial posted here a few weeks ago. Pay attention to how they create their spec maps.
thanks for the tips, I'll pay more attention to that from now on
@Bardler
I'll look into the tutorials, thanks for pointing them out.