Portfolio Critique Please - Di$array

Di$array

Hey guys

Well after another knock back from a games studio, I’m at that point where I need to please ask for some help in going over my portfolio and possibly giving me some feedback or direction in where to take it next as I hold all you guys in high regard.
My gut is telling me that a creature or a large stylised character project may be the way to go for my next project, but as you can tell I’m in that “doubt” phase when it comes to my work.
At the moment I’m currently working on my latest project, Star-Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy, which can be viewed here. So you can see what my latest piece/skill level looks like.

Portfolio: HERE

Thanks
Phil

PyrZern

But you make really nice stuff
Do you think it's presentation that is lacking ?

Larkbeef

Hey Phil!

I've seen you applying for jobs just as long as I have so I can feel your frustration. I've managed to land a 6-month temp contract at a casual games developer for the moment, so yay I guess.

As for critique, I also think you make really neat stuff. I'm on the same line as PyrZern, maybe a slightly better presentation would help.

So here's my thoughts:

maybe go with a darker grey on your website, or lighter, it feels kind of in between right now.

I'm not really digging the font in the menu. It looks a bit scrawly (?) right now.

Maybe skip the 2D section for now. Your 3D stuff is leagues better. Versatility and all, I know, but it drags down the rest of your stuff. As for the presentation of the 3D pieces, I think they are really great!

That's what I got from the top of my head.

Hope you land somewhere soon, mate!

lamar McHaney

I think you should change your title from "3D artist" to "3D Character Artist". Most studios don't want to hire a generalist. However if they did want to, your work mostly shows characters it would be hard to say that you would get that job. You should think about adding a favicon to your website, it makes it feel a bit more official. Also, your nav bar moves a couple pixels to the left when switching pages from home page to one of your character's page. I agree with Larkbeef, you should kill the 2D section.

slosh

Your stuff is solid but I'm guessing you run into similar problems as I do. I'm not sure what sort of jobs you are applying for but I found that studios would not even consider me if they were working on next gen games because my art was not good enough. Stylized studios wouldn't consider me because I don't have enough handpainted cartoony stuff. Basically most of my stuff is in no mans land and that killed my chances. I would say if you want to do next gen work, start doing stuff that pretty much looks real. Make game assets but just go higher on everything...polys, textures, etc and see if you can get near realism in vray or mental ray. I think marmoset 2 is prob still a good option as long as your characters can look as real as possible. If you want to go for stylized jobs, start doing characters that don't really require a lot of maps and just focus on handpainted textures ala riot or blizzard. While I like your guardians of the galaxy character...same deal, try to sculpt tons more detail and get the materials as close to real as possible. Use PBR on everything new and really understand that system. Good luck!

Drav

Hey, I think your sculpting is good, I think your materials and lighting let you down. As slosh said, push everything, and really think about each material, and for instance, don't stop with leather until it really looks like leather.....don't be content because it's brown with a low gloss!

Shrike

The new things look decent but you gotta get rid of the old
youll be judged by the worst piece, and id say cut the whole misc, and think about the 2D art what you really think is good, but definitely cut the bottom thing with the workers

Also maybe make the font slightly bigger and consider a different one, and definitely change the background to something way lighter or darker, Id say something like 35 35 35 would be better. 50% grey is something you use to test an interface for once, its just never a good contrast. Also try unify your picture presentation more.

Di$array

PryZern – Thanks for the kind words! I think my presentation skills aren’t the best they could be. But I’ll try to address this in future projects.

Larkbeef – Hey pal, first off congrats. How are you finding it?

Cheers for taking the time to give some feedback. Yeah as I said to PryZern the presentation work isn’t that stellar. I think I’ll need to plan better and play about with ideas more. I made the amendments as you suggested such as making the background darker, changing the font so it reads better.

I’ve had concerns about the 2D section for a while, I’ve gotten rid of it completely in favour of a fresh start while I create some better pieces.

As for getting a gig, you and me both

Lamar McHaney – Thanks for the input and suggestion. It never occurred to me about a favicon, kinda got over looked but I’ve went ahead and added one. As for your sharp eye about the menu bar moving it appears to be a problem with the template, so I’ve dropped that one in favour of another.

Slosh – Hey buddy, thanks for the feedback. Now you come to mention it I believe the no man’s land theory is right. Maybe we could forge this as a new alternative style and make a market for ourselves, eh?. :P

I think it may be best if for my next two projects I create a Next gen and stylised character to show better versatility. Cannot hurt right? Thanks for the luck.

Drav – Cheers for the honest feedback, I’m definitely going to take all the feedback you guys have generously given and apply it to future projects. There is no point going back over old ground redoing old work. So in future I will refine my materials better and I have yet to present something with Toolbag 2 so hopefully the amazing lightning system will help me.

Shrike – Aye, I think you’re right. Nostalgia was keeping them around. I’ve altered the font and colour. Plus the new layout mean less clicky, clicky and more scrolly, scrolly.

lamar McHaney

Wow, It looks a lot better. Good Job and Good luck.

artstream

Here are a few quick thoughts:

-- Pose your characters, it helps sell them being "alive".
-- Have some close up shots of parts that really look solid/have a lot of detail worth showcasing (faces, detailed chest armor, cool guns, etc)
-- Simple turntables of the characters posed.

Dimfist

All good info. I'm going to steal this wisdom.
@Di$array: I don't think it will be long before you land something. Are you willing to relocate?
I'm kind of in a no man's land due to over abundunce of great artists and no jobs. I'm not at that point that my work says "wow, hire this dude" but I think you are close and if you put follow this advice that was given and choose a really bad ass piece to work on you should be fine.

verzun

Checkout the Artist Del Walker he did work for Batman. He's got some nice shots of heads, arms, hands and it's all close up! Looking at your work it's really nice but some close ups and better presentation would go a long way.

MrHobo

I think your work is solid but echoing what others have said there's a few things that aren't coming together.

I think you need to pose your characters. Personally I almost always take a couple extra weeks and rig up my characters. I understand that you might not want to go so far a building a rig, but you can always take your low poly into zbrush for posing. I think the the CS characters and the Space Opera Princess could really be brought to life with some good poses.

Your lighting could also use a bump I think. Try and match a lighting style that fits each character. For Cable you have a couple decades or so of comic books to reference for cool lighting ideas, this for example:

Really try and show all the work you put into the sculpt with lighting that flatters. This will go a long way towards helping your presentation.

Lastly you really could use something PBR based (As slosh said) that shows you can really define materials. Maybe even a likeness (or very realistic) based character. Your Star Lord piece is really coming along and with an extra push ( and some good dynamic lighting)it could be a good showcase of this.

Best of luck and stay vigilant!

Popol

The new layout look way better, good job.

What bothers me in your portfolio is that you have only one very good piece, Cable. The second one we see, the space opera princess, is miles away quality wise from Cable. She looks really rushed. However I think that just by retexturing and posing her you could bring her to the same quality level than cable. That would take only 4-5 days in the worst case and really bring your portfolio to the next level.

Good luck!

dwgagner

K so couple things I wish I knew when I first tried to get into the industry.

#1 Getting a position as a character artist at a studio without a shipped title under your belt is like winning the lottery. In fact you might have better odds at winning the lottery. Sadly it counts for a LOT and generally these slots go to more veteran artists because they are high trust positions.

With that said your execution is nice. You clearly have talent and know how to use the tools.

However, your uv layouts are killing you hard. You need to maximize the uv space. Avoid using multiple texture sheets for a single character (minus weapons, obviously don't put a weapon texture on the same sheet as a character). But beyond that try to keep everything on a single texture. Mirror uv's wherever possible. Do not unwrap things at a 45 degree angle, not only will it be a pain to paint but it creates weird artifacts when it's down-resed.

Also your speculars are pretty weak, I don't really see very much separation between how different materials feel. Skin should feel different from cloth / metal etc. Utilize a good character shader with some masking along with some solid speculars to achieve that. Edit: If your specular looks like a grey scale diffuse with different value ranges, it's done wrong. Look up varga hair tutorial for some examples on character specular textures.

If you are dead set on being a character artist, do several naked male and female "fine art" style zbrush sculptures. While they might not seem as cool if you are ever going to have a chance at landing a character position it needs to be very apparent that you understand human anatomy. You should be able to name every major muscle / bone in the human body and if you can't then you better get studying.

And finally look for internships. Honestly, even if you are super amazing solid with anatomy and do everything I've described above you will still have a very hard time finding anyone to hire you full time without any titles under your belt. Get in as an intern and prove that you can be trusted and you'll do fine.

Note about me and the experience this advice comes from:

I started out wanting to do character art during my 4 year road to my BFA in production art. Reality hit after graduation, took me 6 months to get hired as an intern at Disney. And only because I started doing environment art and they liked my stuff and had an environment internship open (there are generally 4x the amount of environment artists in a studio then there are character artists). Now I'm full time and do both character and environment work.

Hope this helps, hang in there and keep hammering away.

Di$array wrote: »

Hey guys

Well after another knock back from a games studio, I’m at that point where I need to please ask for some help in going over my portfolio and possibly giving me some feedback or direction in where to take it next as I hold all you guys in high regard.
My gut is telling me that a creature or a large stylised character project may be the way to go for my next project, but as you can tell I’m in that “doubt” phase when it comes to my work.
At the moment I’m currently working on my latest project, Star-Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy, which can be viewed here. So you can see what my latest piece/skill level looks like.

Portfolio: HERE

Thanks
Phil

oxblood

Hey Di$arraythe new layout is a big Improvement, the comic book themed maps on the cable piece are really nice and creative. The only crit I have is that you could do without the sword perhaps? and there is a little too much space between each project, it kind of breaks up the flow of things. Besides that, I think you did a great job.

Larkbeef

Yo! Nice updates to the portfolio! Just add more stuff in there ;P

As Dwgagner mentioned about internship, it's actually what I got now. I'm doing environment stuff. In Maya, on Mac, using offline renderer. Being used to Max and PC and real time workflow, pretty useless first week

But I learn a lot as it's a creative place (Just imagine the things I could pick up if we had a character artist in the studio!)and hopefully it'll get me closer to doing character art.

Now get back to work, mate!