Beginnings of a portfolio website - Critique and feedback requested

StormTheGates

Hello everyone

I've spent the last 6 months or so teaching myself how to use 3D Studio Max, Photoshop and other tools with the ultimate goal of getting a position in the games industry as an artist specialising in hard surface modeling. I've just finished the first incarnation of a portfolio site which I have designed to be simple and easy to update in order for it to grow and change as my skills do, as well as being simple to navigate.
I am aware that texturing is one of my weakest areas and is something I am now focussing more energy into, but I would be very grateful if I could get some more feedback on the general layout and design of the website as well as the presentation of the models found therein.
What I have on display there at the moment is pretty much everything which is at the best of my current ability.

Link:
www.stormthegates.co.uk

I look forward to it being torn apart so I can build a shiny new one

Cheers!

Mike "Storm the Gates" South.

DWalker

It's a matter of taste, I suppose, but I prefer a two-tier layout - project image links on the main page leading to images for each project. I just find this makes navigation cleaner and allows me to quickly get to those images that interest me. I also prefer thumbnails that are considerably smaller than the linked image for much the same reason - it lets me get a general overview with far less navigation.

You are already including your name & contact information on each image, but - for low-poly images, at least, you should also include poly counts and a description of some sort.

I personally prefer the striped layout for texture sheets, but again that's a personal choice; I just feel it's somewhat cleaner. Also, remember to include the size of the textures.

Your textures overall feel as though you stop after creating the initial color. You'll need to add basic material properties - proper specular intensities & colors, for example - and then add in some wear & tear to give it personality.

The training knife confuses me a bit - it's obviously a low-poly mesh, but the textures seem huge. The normals near the tip of the blade seem a bit off, creating a stair-step appearance. You might need to add some polygons to the blade; I'm currently seeing somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 triangles for the blade. I'm not certain where you are spending most of the rest. While 900 polygons is fine, I'd expect better definition from that many. Modelling the hole rather than just using an alpha mask in the texture may account for some of the excess.

I'd strongly recommend creating a low poly version of the tank hunter and the tripod and then baking the high-poly version onto it. Since you would've just created a texture layout, there would be no reason not to texture it, right?

I'd also recommend importing into an actual game engine - Unreal, Cry, etc. - and taking screen shots from within the engine.

Remember to sort your images in a logical manner - best-to-worst or most-to-least recent. Also, don't be afraid to cull out any projects that fall short; it's better to have 3 good projects than a dozen mediocre ones.

StormTheGates

Thanks for the feedback Dwalker. That's all good stuff, I'll write up a to-do list to get this implemented over the next couple of weeks.