Internship Portfolio - looking for advice and feedback

DanMihaila

Hello!

I just started the second year of education at a 3d art school and soon I will start applying for internships.

There are a couple of specific things that I want to know on top of any general critique that you guys might have:

1 - When I started school, I was quite focused on Character art. Eventually I got to make environments for school assignments and I realized I like it a lot. At the moment, I want to apply mainly as an environment/prop artist. Do you guys find a problem in the fact that I kept the characters in my portfolio?

2 - How is the general presentation of the work itself? I think I suck at presenting my stuff so if you could give me any tips on this, that would be great!

Other than this, as I've said, please let me know what you think in general about the website and if there is anything else I didn't think about and that I could improve.

Link:
http://www.danmihaila.net/

Thank you!

BagelHero

Heya, first, your art is pretty nice, which is a good start, but there are some problems here. I just woke up, so I'm putting this in blunt dot-point form. Sorry in advance if I'm a bit brief.

• Your site was not working for on my phone very well (Google Chrome mobile, Samsung S2). I would try to fix this-- seems to be an issue with small screens, it just kinda crushes everything in.

• You don't update your blog a lot.

• I would honestly put your Skills and Software above your Education, seems more relevant. That's subjective though!

On actual work and the pages including your actual work;

• You talk a lot. Actually, you talk so much on pages that should be about showing off your art that I was skimming through it. If you were applying in a lot of other industries this might be okay, but as an artist in the games industry it feels like you're perhaps revealing too much. This is fine on your About Me, but on your actual portfolio it feels overly word-y and odd. This is also a minefield for spelling mistakes! You have a small number of them scattered around.

• With that in mind, your page layout for the scenes should probably be

1. Fly through
2. Beauty renders
3. Asset renders
4. Breakdowns
5. Explanation of breakdowns, anything notable that you had to work with in terms of restrictions or unforeseen circumstances.

• As mentioned above, I didn't really bother reading your "Focus Tasks", and when I did I couldn't help but feel they're revealing a bit too much about your goals. For example, that you didn't until recently know how to do X (and thus still might not, and what else don't you know how to do?), That you wanted to work as fast as you could without sacrificing quality (is that code for rushing it? could you have spent more time on it?). Try to read those things from an employers perspective-- they raise more questions than they answer. I'd just get rid of it.

• The explanation of the concept however, where you got inspiration and the concept behind it, is great.

• Capt'n is spelled wrong multiple times. I don't mind how you format the "'s" because that's arguable in a few different ways, but "Captn" looks like you just spelled Captain wrong.

• In Capt'ns Cabin, you clearly show a lot of poor understanding of PBR. I cannot tell what is your gloss map in this because all of the maps shown break the rules for a gloss map, or are just very poorly done. Your Albedo contains lighting information in most of these, too. The singular asset sheet makes all the assets look flat and grey and boring.

• This in particular (http://www.danmihaila.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/UE4_Furniture-1024x1024.jpg) speaks to me on what you don't understand about PBR. Not only does the albedo have straight up lighting information in it, what I think is the gloss has color information in it and you seem to be trying to use Colored Spec in UE4, which it doesn't support. Learn the Metalness workflow, and stop including AO and lighting information in your maps.

• The next one down has lighting information in the spec/gloss, too.

• The carpet is floating in that second-to-last shot from behind the character model.

• WIP environments are not valued unless they could be mistaken for an amazing finished piece, or they're really so mind blowing that even only sorta done one can see the expertise involved. Cut this one until you re-work it, because you're only as good as your best piece... even when you slap WIP on the not as good ones.
  
  This would be a good thing to show yourself working on in your blog, btw. Again, cut the "Focus tasks" re-cap. That stuff is for a blog, and here you openly state that you don't know how to do certain things, and are bad at some others, and made a lot of mistakes. This is your portfolio, you're supposed to flash just how awesome you are. It may be the case that you're a rookie in some areas, but you're not meant to mention it-- it looks bad.

• The Capt'n himself has a serious case of the crazy eyes, and his texturing and material definition kinda falls flat. In the literal sense that the texturing is kinda flat color and he doesn't feel grounded, and in the more vague sense that the material definition is pretty poor. The shoes look like the same stuff as the pants, which look like the same stuff as the shirt, which looks like the same stuff as the belt... Again with the main goals that outright state that you struggled.

• Apart from the lack of surface details, your high poly is very very nice, but your bake sorta isn't. Why does he suddenly have lumpy shoes? Was that the rig/skinning messing up? He also has no actual hair and no eyelashes which is... weird. Your texture packing is pretty bad here, too.

• Unless you want to go back and work him some more, I'd say maybe dump him. He's irrelevant to your Environment art work. And, kinda weird, but honestly Bekanovski is kinda.. a nicer character piece. He has material definition, it's pretty decent actually. His texturing isn't too bland either... Which really makes me wonder what happened to the Capt'n, actually.

• Not sure about keeping the Ogre, either. Not a very impressive piece, though of some interest that there was a link to Microsoft.

• Whatever you do, move Hovercraft up to right under your two Environments. It's a good showing of your skills in relation to an actual project.

In terms of presentation,

• you could stand to work on your lighting a lot more. It's a bit all over the place right now. Work on your composition, so you can frame each part of an environment well and show you can lead the eye and thus the player. If you ever go back to characters, you really have to make the pose stronger and more interesting.

• Your high poly models are pretty universally nice, but the Low Poly textured version often looks sub-par. Work on your texturing, too. Go back, also, and seriously sit down and take some time to really understand PBR. The problems you're having with basic concepts are not really okay to be showing.

Here's a link that kind of condenses a lot of information into something easy to digest.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=136390

And check out these Marmoset tutorials.
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice


Sorry this is so huge, and perhaps a little blunt, but I mean well. You have a lot of promise, but you keep talking about how you don't know things on your portfolio, which you should never do. You also dabble in PBR, but miss some core concepts. I think you should make a new Environment, or make a renewed effort to re-work the Capt'ns Cabin, and post here at Polycount for help from the start. People can and will help you understand PBR, if you let them. :poly124:

I hope this short-form advice can help you out a bit, and help make your portfolio more attractive to employers. Good luck!

Meloncov

I'd get rid of the characters, or at least put them on a separate page, unless you're applying for a generalist position at a small studio. Especially as a student, it's fine to have a small portfolio.

As for presentation, it mostly looks pretty good, but I'd get rid of the text talking about the projects. It's good to list software used, source of the concept, and what portion is yours if it's a group project. Beyond that, no one really cares, and you definitely don't want to be telling the viewer what's bad about a portfolio piece (they can judge on their own).

DanMihaila

@BagelHero

First of all, thank you so much for taking so much time and giving me such an extensive feedback!

- I'll try to see what I can do regarding how friendly the website is to phones.
- Regarding my Blog, I really have so much stuff to do at the moment, there is no change I will spend time updating my Blog. However, I agree with you that it leaves a bad impression so, at least for the moment, there is no Blog anymore. Will get back to it later, when I will have some more time.
- Thank you for saying that... its kinda dumb from my part but what you say makes a lot of sense and I actually just redid my CV altogether (http://www.danmihaila.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Resume_DanMihaila_3DArtist.pdf)

Speaking of talking to much

I tend to be very open regarding where I suck because I think that in this way I'll make it easier for other people to help me when they want to help. BUT... You are right regarding the actual content of the portfolio and that I should take it more easy.
Now is almost 4am here but tomorrow morning, first thing I will do will be to review every portfolio peace and reduce/structure better all the text.

The cabin environment:

I know that this environment has a lot of issues and some of them I will try to fix tomorrow. However, I think I can't really remove it completely since I would be left only with one environment... and since I will go for Environment Artist position..... well... I don't think it will be ok to have only one peace...
Regarding the PBR issues, indeed, I lacked so much information back in April when I started doing this peace. I know a bit more now, but I know that this should only be shown in the actual work.

Thank you so much for the links to the PBR stuff. I knew the ones on Marmoset.co but I will make sure to go again through them before starting my next PBR project.

I can't really answer your question about "What happened" with the pirate dude... But I know what you mean. It was quite a nice character but I don't think I had the skill necessary to do justice to him. I am in a period/situation when I can't afford to meditate to much on why some of the things didn't go as they should have so I will try to see what I can do to improve him while still making use as much as possible of what's already created. I will keep in mind the possibility to remove him, but first, I will try to see if I can do something about the eyes and other stuff that can be adjusted in a relatively short amount of time.

Thank you again for the time you've put into that reply! Definitely raised a few good points and for sure you've put a few tasks on my immediate "to do" list.

@Melancov

Thank you for the reply and, as I've mentioned before, I will review the text and try to chop it/restructure it and also remove the negative stuff.

Regarding the removing of the characters... I'm not so sure about it. To be honest, I see what you mean, but on the other hand, I think there are certain skills that those characters show and those same skills could be used in environment/prop creation. But, again, mostly when having AAA studios in mind, I know that you do have a point. I just think that there is some value I can show with those peaces... I might be wrong but that's what I think at the moment. However I will keep this possibility in mind if I get to create more environment content because than I might be in a position where it would make more sense to remove them.

DanMihaila

Hey guys!

So I've done a few changes based on what you guys suggested together with other people I spoke with.

- the text amount on every page was greatly reduced and more or less, I left only the description/concept at the beginning (the only exception is the actual game where I wanted to describe exactly what I did and talked a bit more about the whole process but I tried to keep this one as short as possible as well)
- I changed the lighting in the Cabin scene and I added a particle effect for the candles and for the lamps (also, the of the whole scene was changed to avoid any confusion )
- I have changed my CV altogether and changed the order I placed stuff
- I moved the game I worked on right after the environments as suggested
- Cleaned the pages that were not in use and tried to make the overall navigation more smooth
- Tried to make the About me more smooth and more to the point while still keeping it personal.

Thank you for the help guys and, I will keep in mind the more fundamental changes you suggested for every peace and I'll try to find ways to improve them.