3D Modeler Portfolio Critiques: Brutal Honesty

ma_riss93

Hello fellow artist, my name is Marissa Santos and I'm in dire need of critiques and honesty. My ultimate goal is to become a modeler and texture artist. As this next year unfolds I am dedicating my sweat, blood, and tears to becoming a better modeler and texture artist.

So what can help me tremendously is if you could visit my website and take a look at some of the work and projects I've done. Giving any advice and knowledge on how to reach my goal to becoming a person for the industry would be greatly appreciated.

This is my website link:

http://marissasantos.weebly.com/

All the best and Thank You!

Marissa S.

Tobbo

So your ultimate goal is to become a modeler and texture artist? So what kind of a modeler do you want to become? Environment? Props? Characters?

It's good that you have dabbled in multiple areas.

But if you really want to get better the next step will be for you to decide and narrow down what you really want to do. That way you can have a focus and spend your time improving in that one area instead of spreading your time out too thinly trying to become the best at everything.

So what do you want to do? If you're not sure yet, just give it some more time and really try out new and different things. But sooner or later you're going to have to decide.

DWalker

I'd strongly recommend replacing the auto-running slideshow with a traditional thumbnail/larger image layout. You're showing off your artwork, not your flash skills.

PyrZern

Get rid of the splash page. Make it the gallery page instead. Show off your best pieces right away. And as for your Demo Reel, reserve it only for animation. Don't put still images in there (like the last 20 seconds, chop chop em off). Turntable is kind of up to you. Personally I'd use multiple images or one very wide image to show model from different angle. People usually have low tolerance for video. (loads too long, plays too fast or too slow, want to skim/skip to cool parts but don't know where to skip to and so on.) [the worst kinds are auto-play and with audio.]

JustGarry

Your texturing is your weakest point I would say, all your textures look very muddy and low res, spend some time learning next gen texturing, with high res maps, including normal maps, spec/gloss or even PBR materials including metalness/roughness maps.

Try out Ddo and see how it can improve your texturing workflow, and use it as a good base for your textures (would always recommend still giving everything another pass yourself).

Also always take a step back, don't just throw a texture onto a model and call it a day, ask yourself does the texture work with the colour palette of the scene, does it work with or clash with other textures in the scene, does it look like the material your trying to emulate (e.g. if it's a metal does it look metallic). If the answer to any of these is no then go back, modify the material and repeat the process until it looks perfect.

Watch a whole load of tutorials and don't be afraid to fail, just learn and move on.

Shrike

Ok you asked for it : P

Well its a good start, but theres a long way to go

Its not as important by now, but the first thing i see is bad presentation.
The lighting is weak, the presentation graphic design is far from nice (fonts and layout are ok tho, but the palette is a no-go) Dont make white to grey gradients or grey gradients in general, dont use that color for your font and dont mix neutral grey with colors. Check adobe kuler if you want a good palette.

The website is not nice, bot visually and from a functional point. You use weebly i see, just put your images one after another in a vertial list, no slideshows no gallery nothing.

From the 3D art, it seems you got the basic lowpoly thing right, what you really need to do it start with subdivision modeling, check out grant warwicks tutorial and others, and learn how to bake down objects as early as possible.
Also texturing needs to be improved, try jumping in the PBR thing as soon as you can, use marmoset or UE4 and forget the last generation stuff and dont even think of rendering in your 3d package :P.

The character is pretty decent for the start, but you gotta decide if you want to be a character artist or environment / hard surface artist and focus on that.

The pictures of your scenes are also so small that you can barely see anything

Just keep on pumping out stuff and watch tutorials and other peoples stuff and it will get along I would say

IchII3D

This thread is very similar to another one I just posted on. Everything you have made is big and ambitious before you have mastered the basics.

I personally believe these steps should be done one after the other.

If your looking to focus your time and improve your skills quickly I would recommend this.

Modelling - Don't worry about texturing or design, find something that is within your skill range and try and reproduce it. Start small, something like an arcade machine, industrial machine etc... Use reference, you must be able to model accurately before jumping to original designs. Once you can confidently replicate an small object from reference move up in complexity to something like a van or tractor.

Baking and UV Mapping - Using what you learned modelling take a step back and create something you can produce and iterate on quickly. A good example would be a barrel or crate. Learn how to transfer high polygon model data onto a lower polygon model. Keep iterating as you learn to remove seams, reuse texture space and create good bakes.

Texturing - Now use the models you just baked and try texturing them. Remember, the models you produced should have been simple boxes, barrels etc... Only when you can create textures your happy with should you move on.

That should give you a foundation of modelling, unwrapping, baking and texturing. You must learn to crawl before you can walk and you need to walk before you can run. You can still dream of becoming an athelite but must practice and master your ability before jumping into your first race :P

ma_riss93

Tobbo: Yeah you're really right! I do need to narrow down this Modeling passage. I have dabbled in several different areas, and I actually have several projects coming up that vary as well. While I do these upcoming projects I will take into consideration how much I enjoy doing each one and which one I loved doing the most. Then by doing that I'll finally be able to narrow down what type of Modeling Artist I want to be.

Dwalker: Less is more! I'll do that as soon as possible.

PyrZern: Thank you for that! I was trying to add some oomph when creating this website, but it seems like being straightforward is more the way to go! Plus it'll look awesome as a gallery. I planned to get an ArtStation website. I think that will help with presenting my work in that gallery style.

JustGarry: I agree, that's my toughest spot right now. I've been dabling in Digital Tutors and Gnomon Workshop to learn. dDo! My goodness that's an awesome program I was introduced to it about two weeks ago by a fellow classmate. I'm planning to do random exercises so I can learn to make and paint my own textures which I think will help, also learning the fundamentals of how texturing works in the Animation industry.
Also, I plan to do some personal projects outside of school, having all this free time with no deadline I think will help with my creativity and ability to spend as much time as I need on texturing! But I love your idea of stepping back and taking that second look. Very important, I think I somewhat forgot to do that, but I will remember from now on.

Shrike: I enjoy brutal honesty! How else would I learn all the helpful hints. Yeah I was trying to be "fancy" with how I presented and making everything have a theme, and by doing that I think I just made everything cluttered and disorganized. How is ArtStation for a website, I plan to merge that way once I finish these upcoming projects I have planned. Hopefully that will help me simplify and pay attention to the main focus: Showing of my artwork.
Also, I've recently realized my school offers free access to digital tutors and gnomon workshop, so I plan to watch a quite a few tutorials a week and apply it to whatever I am working on.

lchll3D: I will take a deter back to the basics! learn slowly and take a small project until it looks amazing. Then move on. Sounds like a great place to start.

beefaroni

PyrZern wrote: »

Get rid of the splash page. Make it the gallery page instead. Show off your best pieces right away. And as for your Demo Reel, reserve it only for animation.

I'm going to add to this by linking a few portfolios. They're all varied up in presentation style; however, they all get to the point super quickly.

In addition, when uploading images to your site, do a Save-As for Web in photoshop to really get the file size down. I don't have any statistics for this, but the faster you get your images to the viewer, the better. Especially when there's something else to look at a click away.

http://www.undoz.com/
http://www.artofben.com/
http://torfrick.com/

Also, the thread is a bit old now, but here was a good discussion on portfolios. I believe there's also something in the wiki if nobody has mentioned that yet.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80509

Swarm22

In that Tomb Raider image, don't show your reference image that you took from the actual game. I don't mean to be rude but the game image looks better than the one you did and showing the better version after showing yours doesn't leave a good impression.