Peer Review on Website/Resume/Portfolio/Cover Letter
polycounter lvl 8
Hey guys! It's me. I know I could be posting here more often. I'm writing here because I'm asking for feedback and advice. I've been out of college for 3 years now. And within that time have applied to 100+ places. Some in game art, some in general 3D art. I have yet to land a single interview.
I've been given feedback before. There are many contradicting messages out there- generalizing vs. specializing, being conservative vs. having character, etc. I figure the more feedback I get the better. I really want to know what I'm doing wrong. I don't know if I just don't have the chops, or if it's in my presentation, or what.
My professional website is at www.roosternichols.com - from there you can see my resume, portfolio, and demo reel.
A word format of my resume is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17002839/JN_Resume01142014.doc
A direct link to my latest demo reel: https://vimeo.com/82133732
And a recent cover letter I've written is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17002839/JN_Cover.doc
Note, I've taken many different approaches to cover letters. This is my most recent one.
Any help would be gladly appreciated. Pick apart my work, my presentation of my work, anything. Also help me answer this question- do I spend more time cleaning up my presentation, or spend more time learning and making new works?
Also, do any of you have experience doing QA and getting your foot in the door into the industry that way? I've heard some good stories, some bad- willing to hear your take!
Thanks once again guys... lord knows I need some help. Landing a gig in this industry is tough, and I don't want to be doing food service the rest of my life.
I've been given feedback before. There are many contradicting messages out there- generalizing vs. specializing, being conservative vs. having character, etc. I figure the more feedback I get the better. I really want to know what I'm doing wrong. I don't know if I just don't have the chops, or if it's in my presentation, or what.
My professional website is at www.roosternichols.com - from there you can see my resume, portfolio, and demo reel.
A word format of my resume is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17002839/JN_Resume01142014.doc
A direct link to my latest demo reel: https://vimeo.com/82133732
And a recent cover letter I've written is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17002839/JN_Cover.doc
Note, I've taken many different approaches to cover letters. This is my most recent one.
Any help would be gladly appreciated. Pick apart my work, my presentation of my work, anything. Also help me answer this question- do I spend more time cleaning up my presentation, or spend more time learning and making new works?
Also, do any of you have experience doing QA and getting your foot in the door into the industry that way? I've heard some good stories, some bad- willing to hear your take!
Thanks once again guys... lord knows I need some help. Landing a gig in this industry is tough, and I don't want to be doing food service the rest of my life.
Replies
But.. The website needs over haul. Put all you good clean pieces on top. The second piece the gun has some serious texture issues. The map size is probably too low; everybody else is using 4k textures and that kinda falls flat when compared. Put the corvette, the fighter or the environment on top. The guy looks good but put some textures on him. The APC looks good too!
The video looks good. It needs more polish though. Try switching with beats in the song. It's frill but it gets people's attention. The problem is people sit listening to the music and following the beat if there is no dynamic motion that person is expecting to get excited. Best way to excite them is doing some changes during beat changes. Like flip to wireframe, or next model. the video then doesn't remain bland.
The second gun you can see sharp edges where the brown cushion is; if its soft you shouldn't see sharpness. Put the thumper in front.
I'm going to tell it to you straight you need need need to overhaul your skills and get some new pieces out there. Learn PBR and apply that and your pieces will look a lot more up to date.
You look like you have a lot of skills but you haven't polished them much.
Best of luck man!
P.S. You should totally get that fighter retopo-ed in Low-poly and show her off for the marvellous beauty that she is!
The corvette looks nice but all of the shots are close ups, so doesn't demonstrate your sense of proportion very well.
I think you're struggling with materials and need to work on them quite a bit. It looks like you lean too heavily on the diffuse to do too much work.
The light armor model has some proportional issues and personally I think it's going to have some problems when it starts deforming. I personally don't like A poses, the arms at an extreme pose that they almost never go into, which means they will always be deforming to another extreme.
I think the design of the armor needs to be reworked to be a bit more practical and dynamic. I can get into a more detailed critique if you want? But I don't think its doing you any favors.
In general 1st person weapons can have roughly the same amount of polys as a character model, so I think your weapons could use some better optimization and a lot more polys overall to really sell the details. Make sure you reference the players perspective when modeling. It doesn't do much good if it looks great from the side but falls apart in the 1st person view. I don't see too many 1st person views so I can't tell...
APC "progress" shots...
I don't care about anything but the final asset, people don't need to see your block out or your ref planes. If you feel like posting shots of a project as you're progressing, to your blog then great but they don't need to be part of your final presentation.
Yellow sub needs to go. It's a weak link and dragging you down. I get it, final project, the beetles how can you lose right? Well it just doesn't fit, it's not really a game art piece and as far as a rendered piece of art, it's pretty flat.
For every weak piece of art you leave in, it has the same effect as leaving out 3 of your strongest. It's actually worse than that because it chips away at any credibility that the strong pieces have.
"YEAH THATS AWESOME" becomes "huh now that I think about it..."
It also raises questions as to if you can accurately critique yourself or not.
Mark Dygert, I am willing to hear you be as brutal as you can on my light armor piece. I also have another more recent armor piece I could show you if you want. By the "A" pose you mean how the feet are positioned, or are you talking about the top as well? I know I model with a T pose for the arms because its easier to rig that way.
I did animate the character- as well as bring the weapons into UDK with first person models. All of that can be seen in one of my older demo reels: https://vimeo.com/66092979 (you can compare if you want).
You're absolutely right on the PBR front- I have been learning PBR and have new work I could put in to show that, just not quite ready yet. On the other hand, I suppose I could take some of my old work and bring it through a PBR workflow too... What do you think?
Yellow Submarine I can nix- I suppose I just wanted to show off some rendering work. But you're right, it is one of the weaker works.
I was always told showing progress shots was a good thing, shows a potential employer your workflow- is this wrong?
Typically with a T pose the shoulders is in it's most compacted state and modeler won't define the shoulder leaving that task up to the skin weights, which normally does a pretty poor job of defining shoulders.
The design.
Typically light armor is sleek, streamlined, and allows for greater mobility. But it has some very thick and bulky pieces? Especially the knee guards, they seem really big and heavy in the 3D preview?
The neck seems really long and stretched, this only gets worse when the arms come out of a T pose.
The Shoulder pad where clearly designed around a T pose model and have an odd shape when in a standard pose. It is also clipping into the chest, it should probably be redesigned with a more standard pose in mind with a emphasis on mobility since it is light armor.
The pose of the character holding a gun doesn't seem to accurately represent the weight of the object. Maybe if the weapon was supported by a stand and they just walked up to it but not if they are supporting it fully on their own. Something like this, this or this. With the current pose it just isn't very believable, it would be really hard to hold such a heavy object, like that.
The manipulation pose at the bottom is not very flattering, it's important to show that it can articulate but pick an inspiring pose that shows off a bit more of the articulation.
About the reel, triangulated meshes are hard to read and typically you want to do a wireframe overlay on top of a solid object, instead transparent wireframe mode where you can see everything, its gets really cahoic and counter productive.
That kind of data might help you understand where the potential employers get turned off. No visit to either of them means they reject you since your email/application. If website (folio page) has more visit than resume page, it means your folio isn't good enough. And vice versa. Also helps if you can track which page of the folio gets more Views than others.
Makes sense that plating would be built around an A-pose and not a T-pose.
And yes- still working out how to show off the wireframe in Unreal engine. As you can tell it's pretty aliased too, on some meshes. Maybe I should just overlay the UV wireframe on top of the mesh during animation... One good thing is, the polygons were culled a bit during rendering with UDK, so it wasn't as chaotic as it could have been (like with the dragon wireframe you linked).
What do you think about the environment of the reel? Is that okay? The lighting okay? Timing I realize could be changed- and I could make other models the focus of the reel.
PyrZern that's an interesting idea. I use Wordpress- it may be possible through them to get views. I'll look into that.
When it comes to armor I've seen a lot of people will have a base mesh that they skin up and then never edit. All of their edits are done to meshes that pull their weights from the base mesh (in max you use the skinwrap modifier, in Maya you transfer weights). That way you don't have to constantly be reskinning your meshes as you edit them. You can animate the base to get a good understanding of how the design moves and flows which would help you avoid some of those design flaws I talked about earlier.
The environment of the reel? Do you mean the white blocky pillars or the hill and valley weapon test area? I didn't see any evnironment art in the reel besides those two things. At 7:10min I was skipping around but I don't think I missed anything major.
If you're talking about the presentation pedestals, I personally would put a lot more effort into them. I would make them just like any other asset and make them to compliment the model. Something that would expand the universe just a little bit and help explain the weapon.
Example #1
Example #2
Example #3
Example #4
Example #5
Each base grounds the characters and helps explain their universe a little. Take a look at #5, notice that those are mountains and trees, and all of a sudden you get a sense of the massive scale of the character. You understand a lot about them with something that is meant to be thrown away.
https://vimeo.com/82133732
Haha... I just realized you were talking about the older one. Yeah, you'll see what I mean about the wireframe here. With the aliasing, but with the culling.
Interested in this workflow you're talking about- you reckon there's videos out there showing it?
I personally think reels for modelers are kind of redundant and you can get all of the information you need across with regular 2D images. The only time I expect a reel is for animation or rigging so I'm not sure you need a reel? You might want to shake down a few other people and see how they feel about modeler reels.
As for the workflow, I've only seen it done first hand with people I work with, but there might be some workflow stuff out there, but I've never run across it.
I've heard a lot of contradicting pieces of advice- so I'm trying to gather as many different perceptions on it to further understand the "truth" behind the matter.
One is generalizing vs. specializing. What is better, a well-rounded skillset, or being awesome at this one particular thing?
And if you're going for a generalist, is it still okay to talk about what you specialize in when you're trying to sell yourself? (Or vice versa- if you specialize, is it also good to talk about your well rounded skill set?)
Another question that sort of branches off the first- is it okay to send in multiple applications to multiple jobs at the same company at once, even if they are in different disciplines? Is it better to apply to just one job but then mention your skillset in the cover letter?
Is it better to sound conservative and sound like everyone else in the cover letter, or is it better to be yourself, throw a few zingers, and show character?
Is it better to have just one resume that you send to every company that specifies your entire skill set, or better to tailor every resume you send out for the job you're applying for?
If you're willing to relocate with or without accommodation, should you not mention that, or where you live at the moment? (Is hiring outside the city even a thing for most companies anymore?)
Again... so many questions, so many different takes on it. These questions matter though- and I feel like the more feedback I get on these, the better.
Still would like more critique on my stuff too if anyone has the time.
No one reads cover letters. More seriously, it doesn't really matter, only your portfolio does. "Hi, my name is Blabla and I want to apply for the whatever artist position. Here's my portfolio and resume." should be enough for most studios.
Just one resume with all your skill set. Even I something doesn't concern the position you apply for it never hurts to let people know.
Always put in your resume where you live. Most big studios have financial helps for relocation. And yes, hiring outside the city is a thing for most companies. Why would you hire only people from your city?