Portfolio Feedback
polycounter lvl 5
Hi everyone, I hope you don't mind my asking but I was wondering if some of you might be able to provide some pointers for my portfolio?
I'm trying to find work, but with so few people expressing interest I was wondering where I might be going wrong with my portfolio.
One thing I haven't really put on my portfolio (and that I do a lot of) is tiling environment textures. Is it worth sticking some examples of these up?
My portfolio site is here http://alexandervoysey.wordpress.com/
I'm trying to find work, but with so few people expressing interest I was wondering where I might be going wrong with my portfolio.
One thing I haven't really put on my portfolio (and that I do a lot of) is tiling environment textures. Is it worth sticking some examples of these up?
My portfolio site is here http://alexandervoysey.wordpress.com/
Replies
In terms of layout, it looks pretty good, but if you can, you should make your images bigger. Also, the first page people see should be your art, not your about me.
I think your level design isn't showing us your ability to design a level. I'm not sure how to get that point across myself, show wilder view or maybe a top down plan of the whole thing? Maybe some more experience level designer can give you better advise. At the moment they only give me impression that you're a generic environment artist.
I agree with Swarm, it's all nice looking work but it looks 'last-gen', you clearly have the talent, push yourself to make some next-gen content!
Good luck.
1. Diversify your models a bit more. I had the same problem with my portfolio when I posted it that there was too much of the same thing (still kind of is, but I'm working on it). In your case it's obviously that everything is modern military, so I'd try to add some fantasy and sci-fi models as well to show that you can do those too and open yourself up further for work at studios doing games with those themes.
2. I'd like to see the highpolys and know the polycount for your individual models. Posting the flat texture sheets wouldn't be wrong either.
3. Remove the commenting functionality.
4. Add your portfolios URL to your images.
5. Get your own domain as this will look a lot more professional.
6. Redesign the top banner as it looks kind of awful at the moment. To be honest I'd scrap it completely and make a new one with better colors, no phone number and a more specific job title.
7. Scrap the news section as I don't think anyone really cares about that .
I guess I am being held back in many ways by using older tech (Source is the newest game engine I've used, I do all my rendering in Max 9 still); character models are... definitely outdated and should probably go (especially since other threads suggest character modelling isn't entry level anyway).
After numerous people suggesting I move the main page to straight renders of models, I guess that should be fine.
That's a pretty useful example site, I'll definitely be showing my wires from now on and probably reducing the volume of stuff I'm showing.
This is one of those things that's hard to really show with a BSP engine (and probably another reason why I need to move onto something newer), a lot of the practices I used to keep things optimized no longer really apply to newer engines.
I've often thought about that, I wasn't sure if it would give the impression of a less focused theme for the portfolio? I'd certainly like to try doing it one way or another.
definitely keep up to date with technology to within a year or two of current versions.
your work is generally good but definitely HL2 generation
What was more interesting is the leveldesign. From the screenshots it was kinda hard
to see depth in gameplay, so I cannot really judge the leveldesign qualities.
But mind that you can get a job as leveldesigner, if youre really good at that.
Leveldesign is something that can not really learned traditionally and most good
leveldesigners have a similar background as yours, coming from FPS map creation.
The 3D skills are also a plus if you understand stuff better and can fix some problematic things yourself. It looks like you are at a point where you had to decide which of the two you want to do, as getting 3D skills up to level would take quite some time aswell. If you display leveldesign then you have to show top down views where you describe things and show paths and what their functions are, and how the flow of the map is or how the encounters are designed
and so on. If youre pretty young then you have a good start into 3d modeling however, it depends on when and what you want to work
Well, functionally speaking it seems to work fine... but obviously I feel I should keep up to date - what do most people here use now for modelling / rendering?
@Shrike
Honestly I was only ever really good at the artistic side of level design, triggers and stuff like that were always a huge headache for me. So really I'd rather stick to the creation of art assets.