Portfolio critic

Elodin

Hello there!

Im still working on it but I wish to hear some critic and tips for my portfolio. Tell me what do you think.

http://alexenv.co.uk/

MichaelElphick

Hey!

Thought I'd point out some things out, even though I'm pretty beginner myself.

- The layout is good, all the contact info right up top and nice and bold.
- Perhaps get rid of the 'contacts' section (your info is up top!) and perhaps put the image on your resume page.
- I'm not sure if having the links page is beneficial, as people should be looking at your work.

work pages
- the images seem to be huge and are not centred , perhaps make these smaller and then centered so they are the same length as the top 'chevron' style line. Would seem to make it neater.

- I would place your high poly models under your subway environment, maybe even the top, they are your strongest pieces imo.

I would take a look at a few texturing tutorials, such as the treasure chest one from 3dmotive, I think creating a few props that way, working on material definition and your have a great portfolio!

I hope that was helpful and constructive.

Nosslak

The engine looks unfinished as there are angular cylinders that looks like they should be smooth, it also looks a bit blobby in place. I also think you should either texture it everything or nothing as otherwise it'll just look like you abandoned the project.

The cathedral looks kind of promising but the lighting is very crappy and makes it look extremly flat with nowhere to rest the eyes. It almost look self-illuminated. I am not an architectural expert or anything but it doesn't look like you used reference much for the building itself (just the individual elements, which looks good) as the ceiling looks wrong and the building just suddenly stops with a wall.

The fire scene really needs perfectly tiling textures/meshes as that is probably the biggest problem there. It has the best lighting though.

I would either rework the scifi scene completely or skip it, because as it is now there is way too much empty space and it is obvious that you're using tiling textures. So you'll need to either re-size the scene or make more assets to break it up more.

The octopus shield is my favorite piece. I think you really should make a lowpoly for that as well.

The layout of the portfolio itself is pretty good. Not much to critique there. I mean the background is kind of ugly, but otherwise it's good.

All in all I think the biggest problem is that it looks like you make some pretty good assets but then you get tired of the scene/project which results in you rushing and/or abandoning it. I haven't followed any of your projects so I might be completely wrong here though.

Also it looks like you might not be using unique specular textures which is very important if you're making metallic objects. If you are, you should present them when you show the textures.

Shrike

You seem to understand most concepts of environment modeling (maybe check smoothing groups again for your engine) and the technical part should not be a problem, but there is a very obvious lack of artistic vision. There is too much to crit, and im not saying its all bad or something, you already made a big part of the way, but what you really need to do now is hang yourself behind all that stuff, the eye for aesthetics needs its time, you cannot learn this a traditional way.

Work a lot, but more importantly, watch out and behold. Before you do anything, gather references, put a reference sheet. Check out some nice color palettes for that. Look at other peoples work daily, no matter which branch.

http://abduzeedo.com/
http://cghub.com/
Polycount, game artists, games! also very importantly, real life.
If youre in a train, check reflections of shiny metal and rubber and so on, how is the form, how behaves light.

Technical skills are very important and can take a long time, but they are new in every medium / program. The eye for aesthetics is universal. Train them, you will notice harsh differences soon. That is my advice

BARDLER

What is your process of generating normal maps? From the images in your portfolio it looks like you have shading errors, and bad gradients on a lot of your models.

Elodin

Thanks everyone for the critics. I know I'm not perfect, but Im trying )

BARDLER, I create a high-poly mesh, generate a low-poly with decimation master or use maya to create a simple version of geometry.

Then I use xnormal.

BARDLER

Elodin wrote: »

Thanks everyone for the critics. I know I'm not perfect, but Im trying )

BARDLER, I create a high-poly mesh, generate a low-poly with decimation master or use maya to create a simple version of geometry.

Then I use xnormal.

It looks like you are baking with one smoothing group on most of your stuff, this is probably whats causing your shading errors. You have to set hard edges on your mesh where you have steep angles, and where ever you have a hard edge you need to have a UV split. Your other option is to use extra geo to control the shading of your lowpoly, but just make sure to understand why before you just over use geometry. Check out the videos that the Handplane guys have on youtube, also both of Earthquakes sticky threads in Technical Talk.

Elodin

Yes, indeed, I use smooth normals before I bake normal maps.
I was watching hourence's videos and he was saying that I should smooth everything whenever I can.

Ill check the threads though.

netghost03

From a technical point, you really need to optimize your page!
The filesize of your images is WAAAAAAAAAY to huge. 4 MB for 1 image ! And sometimes you have 8 images on one page.

Never ever use javascript for your menu hover effekt!
And don't use images.
You can import fonts with css. And make the hover effekt over css.

And you need to optimize your page for smaller screens. Not even talking about mobile or something, but on my 1280 x 1024 screen I can't properly view your site, because the images are way to big. You need to scale them for smaller screns.

Elodin

All righty, gotta rework the scaling and get rid of .png's

DWalker

If you want to keep higher-resolution or loss-less images, you can always link them from the project page.

breen3d

Looks great. Great work man. The Cathedral looks a bit grainy though.