Environment Artist portfolio review
polycounter lvl 11
I'll introduce myself. My name is Beni, I am 18 years old and I do environment art. I am a junior environment artist.
It started out as a hobby: I saw a video of a guy showcasing his udk level, liked it, and investigated it. That was 1~2 years ago, when I was focused on concept art. I stumbled across polycount in my investigation and well, that's were all begun. I started to love more and more doing environment art, and I kept doing it so I could get better.
Now I've decided it's the time to make a portfolio, so went ahead and did one. I would really appreciate some feedback on it, the layout, the content, especially about the resume&written text, since english its my fourth language and well, I probably have some mistakes.
Here it is: http://artofbeni.tumblr.com(Ignore the 'how its made' part, has nothing to do with the portfolio and wll be removed soon)
I also have one big doubt, and I hope you guys might throw some light into it; I would really like to get some experience working into the industry so I figured I would ask for a summer internship at Tequila Works, spanish studio. There are some great artists there, and I'm sure I would learn a lot, but do you guys think this is actually possible? I mean, I would try Tequila because I live in Spain and there would be no problems with relocation, immigration and all those problems. I am also disposed to go abroad if there's an opportunity, but I see it harder (the way I see it, why would a company go trough such a hassle for an intern?). Back to the point, even though a spanish studio seems 'easier', is it possible to get an internship without having finished a degree? And if the answer is yes, do you guys think I would be ready for an internship with my skill level? If the answer is yes, is it okay if I send them a mail asking for an internship even though they don't have listed any internship programs?
Sorry for so many questions, but I've been unable to find an answer so far.
Finally, I want to thank all of you guys, because everything I know about environment art&art in general I've learnt it here, at polycount. Really, you're great.
It started out as a hobby: I saw a video of a guy showcasing his udk level, liked it, and investigated it. That was 1~2 years ago, when I was focused on concept art. I stumbled across polycount in my investigation and well, that's were all begun. I started to love more and more doing environment art, and I kept doing it so I could get better.
Now I've decided it's the time to make a portfolio, so went ahead and did one. I would really appreciate some feedback on it, the layout, the content, especially about the resume&written text, since english its my fourth language and well, I probably have some mistakes.
Here it is: http://artofbeni.tumblr.com(Ignore the 'how its made' part, has nothing to do with the portfolio and wll be removed soon)
I also have one big doubt, and I hope you guys might throw some light into it; I would really like to get some experience working into the industry so I figured I would ask for a summer internship at Tequila Works, spanish studio. There are some great artists there, and I'm sure I would learn a lot, but do you guys think this is actually possible? I mean, I would try Tequila because I live in Spain and there would be no problems with relocation, immigration and all those problems. I am also disposed to go abroad if there's an opportunity, but I see it harder (the way I see it, why would a company go trough such a hassle for an intern?). Back to the point, even though a spanish studio seems 'easier', is it possible to get an internship without having finished a degree? And if the answer is yes, do you guys think I would be ready for an internship with my skill level? If the answer is yes, is it okay if I send them a mail asking for an internship even though they don't have listed any internship programs?
Sorry for so many questions, but I've been unable to find an answer so far.
Finally, I want to thank all of you guys, because everything I know about environment art&art in general I've learnt it here, at polycount. Really, you're great.
Replies
On the viking island, many of the textures feel noisy. You might want to add a bit of blue to the fog to match the shading provided by the atmosphere. The man standing on the beach has a distinctly non-viking outfit. The edges of the torn sail seem far too sharp and artificial; try using an alpha channel to give it a threadbare appearance.
Om the veteran's room, you seem to have the sun peeking in through two windows. Again, the cuts and tears seem artificially sharp; consider using an alpha channel to soften some edges.
Your assets page has only a single asset; consider renaming the page or adding assets. The bullets and shell both seem to use the same material - a dull brass; the bullets are typically copper-jacketed lead. I personally find the noisy background distracting; I'd recommend a solid gradient.
On your resume page, I'd lose the 'Self taught' entry under education.
On your 'how it's made' page, you've confused 'temporal' and 'temporary'. A minor point since it's temporary, but still...
youve got a tl;dr thing going on with the how its made page.
Viking Island
Textures
Textures are a bit noisy need less shadow or AO information baked in the diffuse textures. Right now everything seems to have about the same amount of spec which makes a lot of the textures feel flat. This scene could use a well tweaked specular or roughness pass to get some nice variations. Too much noisy also in the normals from what I can see. try softening the normal hard traditions a bit.
General Notes
Scene layout looks nice and clean. The scene are well set dressed might need a couple more assets like carts to move lumber or planting tools etc. Your shots are well taken and thought out. Noise filter ontop of the screen grabs does not make your image better you are already fighting with noisy textures adding more noise just makes it more noisy. The skybox is so soft and foggy I like the feel your trying to go for but I would have tried taking it further with soft fog clouds in areas akin to skyrim clouds in the mountains and between trees and ocean etc to add an extra layer of volumetric cold fog and softening up the scene more.
Veteran's Room
Textures
Textures are too dark and also a little color less. Again try to avoid adding too much AO into your textures let the lighting do more of the shadowing. The wallpaper texture feels over sized I would make that wallpaper have a smaller pattern and a pattern that has less contrast from white to dark tone right now it really takes too much attention.
General Notes
Biggest issue with this scene is scaling. Everything seems different in scale to relation with a human scale. The couch compared to the table and bed seems huge while the door seems about right for the room of that size and bottles books seem tiny. I think it just needs a general scale pass to get stuff scaled properly to each other.
Noise filter again... I use to do this also to try make scenes feel "real" but at the end it just makes it look noisy I would take it off it is not helping you, your stuff is great I would just let it show without the noise filters. Set dressing is nice it would be nice to see some more information of who the solider was or some special items he kept to further tell the story.
Gun
Noise filter again. Diffuse seems a tad dark I would concentrate on the shader aspect of this and try to get this gun to look the best possible It is already a really good gun it has a nice baked normals and your texture work is in Just need to tweak the shader more.
Get more assets in. Would be nice to see some the assets from you scene in the asset page or the scene page so people can see them closer.
Great work overall !!! These crits are pretty nitpicky stuff overall it is very well done.
Do some videos with some very simple camera pans and get them uploaded I think this would seal the deal on your site. These scenes need some videos.
I would also really appreciate if somebody could throw some light at the internship question.
-changed lighting&color grading on the veteran's room, didn't use noise this time xD (old version image, for reference)
-tried to stop the wallpaper from catching so much attention, mostly trough the new lighting
-added another asset on the assets section, a sword (still wip, have to add images with the textures and maybe some high poly renders)
-toned down the noise on the assets preview background
-removed 'self-taught' under education on the web resume, still have to change that on the pdf one
-removed 'how it's made' menu
Link to the portfolio;
artofbeni.tumblr.com
You have 3 different names (artofbeni, beni butnar, butnarbeni@gmail) which could confuse people. I suggest registering benibutnar@gmail.com, even if you don't intend on using it. Just have all your email from there forwarded to whichever you do use. Ideally you'd also have the same domain name; benibutnar.com.
I like your choice of fonts, mostly. Many people overlook such a thing, which is a critical element if you've got a somewhat minimalist design. I do think that the thin font is a bit -too- thin, because of font rendering anti-aliasing it goes all technicolor on me:
This effect also makes your footer badly legible. With a bit thicker lines this wouldn't be quite as bad. Also I think your email link is a different font? It renders slightly different than your regular small text, anyway. You might want to make those the same font size.
I'd make the whitespace between the homepage thumbnails the same as the whitespace on the sides.
Is the text on the about page the same as your resum
-increased title's font weight
-changed title so it works as a link to the homepage
-created new, less confusing email (same as name)
http://artofbeni.tumblr.com
Still have to update the Viking Island screenshots after the recent changes. Also, I think I should redo the video and make the camera speed waay slower, like in the last shot, so it blends a little bit better with the music. I will probably be doing this in the next weeks, since I'm really busy atm. But anyway, here is the video:
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