My portfolio ready for critique...

Dazz3r

As title suggests! OK, so I'm mentally prepared for my ego to get a bruising one way or another but also to take it on the chin and act on any advice. I graduate university in 2 weeks with a BA (Hons) 1st in Digital Arts and so will be applying for jobs. I already have but only received rejections. The type of positions I have been applying for are Prop / Environment Artist positions.

In my second year I did a 9-month paid contract as a junior Prop Artist at TT Fusion, but they have no vacancies at the moment.

So if you guys can give me feedback:

I'm already aware its light on actual content and I'm working hard to remedy this by creating more pieces to show.

Here is my folio: www.darylsmout.com

Shrike

Your logo is too small to read and the D is way too bold

Dont take such close up shots from your weapons if the polycount is way too low to look good from close.
Just use more polys in general. You want, no you need to impress. If the model looks good, i dont care about the polycount. Same with texture resolution (aslong its not ridiculous) Use 2k for your weapons per example. At a way later point you can step it down.
Youre way below budget anyways. Like this, you use way too few and youre not experienced enough to make it look great with that budget, so use what youve got in that branch to get on the next level, and then step up your baking and texturing, well modeling in general.

Bake ambient occlusion. What are these black lines on your P90, they look wrong.
If you do something like that, always put a white line under it, a highlight to visualize a actual form

try going away from that brown yellow mud-ish palette, its not very nice and if you have only the same for all your works it is even worse

your lighting could be a lot better aswell

your characters are definitely the strongest in your portfolio, get some nice light setups for your highpolys and everything, get a better background. Subtle gradients and color. The magnum is a good step forward, if you do another step like from the P90 to the magnum, then youre at a presentable level there. The environment is not really presentable like this.

Your texturing is where you need to work the most. Also get color palettes from adobe kuler or something. Cut down your environment to half the screenshots and get more assets in with nice texturing, the meshes can be used with nice lighting and textures. Lighting is very important.

The website itself is good, maybe a little darker background. It looks kinda bland because your screenshots are all grey and mud and lack contrast aswell. LOTR Lego is an insane contrast to all your other images.

Dazz3r

Thanks Shrike

cholden

I'd tighten up the vertical wasted space so the content all fits on one screen (no scroll-bar). Also, resume/CV required.

DWalker

The font you've chosen for your name is difficult to read, and your contact information is too small.

When showing objects, I'd strongly recommend starting with a full-body series of images before moving on to close-ups of specific parts; starting with a tight zoom (even on a high-poly model) is rather jarring. I'd also recommend including in-game images, and for weapons show them in the iron-sight pose.

Your textures on the weapons is probably too large. Another advantage to rendering in-engine is that you can quickly tell what the player can see. If he can't read the text, then having readable text in the texture is probably excessive - the warning on the P90 is a glaring example.

The scratches and wear on the P90 seem arbitrary and excessive. Look at the wear pattern on real weapons (or similar weapons).

You might want to change the texture sheets to the more traditional square with strips of each at an angle.

The environmental textures seem rather dull and monochromatic. Even if the dominant color is grey, there will be spots of other colors - red & amber warning signs, different colored pipes to indicate what they carry, labels on the walls, etc. Again, the wear patterns seem arbitrary rather than indicative of real-world wear.

The lights can also vary - from stark fluorescents to warm sodium arc lights to emergency red lights. Also note that in real-life, things are rarely uniformly lit; there will be definite darker areas even in well-lit zones.


The bump map gives the metal (especially the floor) a feeling of rough stone rather than worn metal. With normal maps, less is often better than more. For the floor, consider a diamond plate if you want to show a pattern.

Dazz3r

@ Cholden, thanks man, I know what you mean, the site is carbonmade.com so I cant really change anything like that.

@Dwalker, thanks matey, lot of helpful advice there, thanks for taking the time v appreciated

Jet_Pilot

IMHO your camera angles on your weapons are too extreme. You are really close up, with only a few beauty shots, and you only need 1-2 shots that show the wire frame. try looking at these as refrence.
http://www.lonewolf3d.com/Lonewolf2011.html
http://www.ilyanedyal.com/weapons.html
http://www.rmgameart.com/hammerburst.html