[Don't Be gentle] Official pre-GDC folio critique thread.
polycounter lvl 4
Folio Critique Thread
Yo,
It'll be my first GDC this year, i'm hoping to have my folio looking presentable. I'm guessing a fair few people are in the same position, so feel free to ninja this thread with your own portfolio link and we can all critique each other. Saves filling half the forum with portfolio threads, and hopefully everyone can learn from each other's mistakes/wins in the process.
Rules:
- If you're going to post your own folio link, make sure to crit someone elses. Pay it forward, baby.
- Feel free to crit anything from layout/structure, to content.
- Brutal honesty is best honesty
I'll start with mine: www.polygimp.com
Edit:
MelonCov's Folio: www.KevinBakerCG.com.
MiamiGator09's Folio: www.bauerleindesign.com
Nosslaks Folio: www.robinkarlsson3d.com.
Veezen's Folio: www.veezen.weebly.com
Kabir's folio: https://www.artstation.com/artist/kabirtalib
Heather's folio: http://www.HeatherNHughes.com
Yo,
It'll be my first GDC this year, i'm hoping to have my folio looking presentable. I'm guessing a fair few people are in the same position, so feel free to ninja this thread with your own portfolio link and we can all critique each other. Saves filling half the forum with portfolio threads, and hopefully everyone can learn from each other's mistakes/wins in the process.
Rules:
- If you're going to post your own folio link, make sure to crit someone elses. Pay it forward, baby.
- Feel free to crit anything from layout/structure, to content.
- Brutal honesty is best honesty
I'll start with mine: www.polygimp.com
Edit:
MelonCov's Folio: www.KevinBakerCG.com.
MiamiGator09's Folio: www.bauerleindesign.com
Nosslaks Folio: www.robinkarlsson3d.com.
Veezen's Folio: www.veezen.weebly.com
Kabir's folio: https://www.artstation.com/artist/kabirtalib
Heather's folio: http://www.HeatherNHughes.com
Replies
Also maybe make the link to your blog a bit more noticeable. You've done a good job on displaying your name, occupation and contact info. Maybe add a phone number there as well.
Hope this helps and good luck at GDC.
I like the way you have thing setup, pretty clean, I like the white background.
This is super minor nitpicky/style stuff, so ignore any of it if you want to.
- you have a bunch of different fonts, between the indie/hipster font on the mucus guy to the grunge font for your title/name, to what looks like Bebas or something bold on the turtle guy.
- the gloss and spec maps on the turtle guy look exactly the same to my eye, but I'm on mobile, not sure if that's a mistake or they really do look that way, I don't see people using colored gloss maps all too often but the piece turned out great whatever you did.
- the turtle guy, I've seen some videos of him on your facebook that I was pretty impressed by. Hyper linking the Vids of him in engine might be helpful to the job search, since they did look so nice and show off a variety of skills.
- personally, just me, not a fan of grunge fonts, and that one doesn't work all too well with the clean colored buttons underneath. Nobody is hiring you as a web designer so I doubt this matters much, but it did distract me a bit. You might be sever better with a clean dark font and dark less designed buttons, but like I said, whatever.
Anyways good luck at GDC I hope it rocks for you.
Why do you have each image linking to a new page? Wouldn't it be much easier to turn it into a gallery that stays within your portfolio page, so the viewer doesn't have to go back every time he/she views an image?
If you have enough images, I'd recommend linking a new page off of each image, which would then have all the images for that piece on that separate page. If you don't have enough images to justify that, at the very least convert what you have to a format that doesn't leave the current page.
Here's an example (my portfolio).. if you or anyone else cares to critique it, please do:
www.bauerleindesign.com
Not a fan of the separate icons for the same project-- kind of looks like you're just trying to bulk the page out. Your work's great, though, I've been seeing it around a fair amount. :thumbup:
Yeah, I'm kinda shit at web design so i recruited a mate from Uni to help me build the page. Gav's and polygoo's sites were some of the few that i linked to him as a reference, he kinda took it to heart. I really like the simplicity of the thumbnail gallery style though (and it scales cleanly depending on the layout of your browser).
How would you guys recommend getting rid of the white space? Now that i see it i can't unsee it, haha shieeeeet.
@bagelhero - Yeah i guess in a way it is bulking the page out, but my thoughts about that were basically that each thumbnail leads to a much larger image. If people want to go straight to the breakdown they should be able to (instead of being sent to a gallery and being given the beauty shot + breakdown, and having to wait a fair while to get what they want). Should i use a lightbox maybe?
@ysalex - cheers man I'll fix that up, yeah i hadn't thought too much about continuity between pieces.
Thanks all for the crit, much love.
Made me sad when I had to look through people's portfolios that had it.
Yeah when i used squarespace the lightbox functions were a bit clunky, i've seen a few good pages with it though.
Also, consider centering your container div and setting it to a fixed width of around 1000-1350px. On a widescreen monitor, all your content is in a line up at the top and it just looks kinda goofy, so making that change will keep things consistent across different devices with varying aspect ratios.
If you don't know how to do that, it's pretty simple. Just open up this file: http://www.polygimp.com/css/stylesheet.css
...and underneath where it says "#container", just add these lines between the curly brackets:
Your website layout is heading towards the right direction, though as many others have said it needs tweaking.
Personally I'm not a fan of the white. Its quite blinding though it could work.
I recommend reducing the amount of colors your website layout has (not its content), like say, the polycount/blog/linkedin icons could have 1 color that is a darker shade of your Header's red. This is to keep the viewer drawn to the colors of your work.
The header's red should be toned down a bit, it looks like its a full saturated red.
As for the hyperlinks, I think you need to change them from the standard blue-underlined links. That on white, gives off a very plain html look. I also think you could take away the blog link there too since the blog button above makes it redundant.
Hope my comments can benefit you!
The content in this case is really what matters. You have some badass sculpting skillz and I hope GDC goes well for you man. Goodluck.
@Matt
What mostly stung me was the logo and the buttons as ysalex said (+ no space left to the borders around) which is kinda a small silly thing but show a weakness in your artistic vision and can make the difference between appearing like a great artist and a guy doing really nice characters. Id wish for unified backgrounds on the front page atleast, that would have some swags, aside the modeling looks tops, but the textures have weak wear and tear, missing both large scale wear and lack any detail in their small scale counterparts, ie I cannot see anywhere in your portfolio that you can texture wear, only the shoulders of the blizzard guy hint at it with a little edge definition
@bauerleindesign
the website looks nice and clean and your modeling looks solid, but you really need to start working on your texturing else this will really fall behind. You show not a single photoshop style texture after current standards and its all kinda basic bodypaint, but it looks like you have good potential and are soon at a nice level if you continue like that , whatever that is supposed to mean : P
for lightbox, well they are not amazing but sometimes opening a subpage for each image is far more inconvenient, bauerleins website negates this very nicely tho by having arrows at the left and right in each subpage, simple nice solution
Good success at GDC everyone!
"For more frequent updates, heres my blog
Get my Resume Here"
Compared to the nice Icons and Brand these 2 lines seem so slapped together and not thought out.
Shrike: The link to your portfolio proper is way too small; my first instinct was to scroll down to where the articles are. I very nearly completely missed it. It'd probably be best to have your portfolio be your main page, and have a link to your articles from there, or at least send a direct link to your portfolio page when talking to potential employers.
Once you get to the portfolio itself, I don't know if it's really showing off what you can do. I think you'd be better of showing a smaller number of projects in more detail. On the first one, for example, I see your assets--which aren't really your strong point--but I can't really tell anything about the level design. Might also be a good idea to split it into sections; UI, pipeline setup, level design, ect. Right now the order seems scattered.
MiamiGator: Layout-wise your site looks pretty good. Aesthetically, the bipedal walk cycle being kind-of halfway in its own row is bugging me (at least on my monitor size), but that's not a huge deal. I do think you should add either an html or pdf resume.
Content wise, I'll echo what was said about textures. Really slow down and focus on logical details, especially when you're making something as simple as a stapler into a portfolio piece. It'd also help to learn the modern PBR pipeline.
A similar thing could be said for modeling. On the whole your modeling is stronger than your textures, but most of your stuff looks like you stopped when you were 80% done.
Ave: It looks really nice on the whole, both in content and layout. I think it'd be good to add a non-monstrous female character, as making someone that looks beautiful is an important skill for a character artist that you're not currently demonstrating in your portfolio.
My portfolio is at KevinBakerCG.com. Any feedback would be appreciated, especially any pieces that seem subpar and should be excluded.
@Meloncov
I like:
- That your contact page is just the info you need to be contacted, not some crazy bio
- Your site is clean and relatively minimalist
- You keep wip/blog work separate from your folio although you do have to be careful with how regular your blog/wip posts are. If you leave years between posts, people can pick up on that
I don't like
- There's no indication of what job you're seeking. Even something in the title frame like "Kevin Baker - Environment Artist" gives an indication of what i should be looking for as an employer.
- Similarly, there's no order to your work. For each large environment piece/project you should have a separate gallery so your splash page isn't as cluttered or doesn't take so long to load. 1 x Environment(and all associated assets) = 1 x Gallery Thumbnail
- This is more a personal preference, but i'm not a fan of a blog style gallery that's completely vertical. I guess its better for mobile devices though? My suggestion would be to split your gallery into galleries (As i mentioned above), just to tidy it up.
- There are no breakdowns, and the text titles under each piece are vague. For example one picture just says "Unreal 4". Did you do all of that or was it a group project? What's the vert/texture count? Maybe give some individual asset breakdowns if you're proud of the asset. I guess just look at it from the perspective of an employer and don't assume they'll just understand everything. Sometimes HR recruiters aren't artists.
- Your site suffers from the same "White space" issue that mine does.
Your portfolio looks pretty nice, however I'd try to phase out the bumper car scene as soon as possible. The reason for this being that the scene itself is IMO pretty boring and none of the models are very interesting.
Your images are also severely lacking in contact info at the moment. If an employer were to save for instance your sword picture to their HDD and later want to find you again they would need to go through a reverse image search to get back to your site. So, yeah, of course you want to make it as easy to hire you as possible, so add at least your portfolios URL to the images.
Your resume has way too much empty space as well. It looks almost like your writing on every other or even every third line, because of the humongous line spacing. My resume is far from perfect (I'm in the process of giving it a big makeover right now), but try to condense the size so most if can be seen without scrolling.
If possible try to remove the commenting functionality as it doesn't really serve a purpose on a portfolio site and just make your site look kind of rushed and amateurish.
Lastly I think you could improve the contact page a bit. I think you should remove one of the email addresses on the contact page as it just adds confusion if you list two without any explanation of what different purposes they serve (if they don't serve different purposes there's no reason for more than one). I would also remove the URLfor LinkedIn and just make the text 'Linkedin' a hyperlink.
I'd appreciate some input on what could be improved on for my portfolio as well:
robinkarlsson3d.com.
Nosslak, your portfolio looks pretty great to me, and I can't think of much I'd change. I might drop the shotgun with the camoflauge; it seems just a touch less polished than the other assets.
Looks pretty great to be honest.
I feel like the Camo Shotgun and the plague mask are sort of weak in comparison to your better pieces.
The futuristic machine gun's textures/materials also feel less fleshed out than some of your better pieces. As a side note, I feel like something that's missing is a more realistic/relatable/archetypal vehicle. The Henderson is really cool, but all three of them are a bit obscure and not instantly recognizable/easy to know what they are/see how they'd fit into a game. I think that's alright, but it's something to think about when you're planning your next vehicle, I guess.
Also, maybe make your buttons stand out a little more? If I'm on the portfolio page, maybe unlink it, so I can tell the Resume page is a link-- It took me a second to figure out it was navigation and not a subtitle, since it was all bold.
Otherwise, really solid.
My biggest critique on your portfolio is: bigger images!
this is what i see on my 2560*1440 monitor:
this is what i see on my 1920*1080 monitor:
I would make sure that whichever device you're planning to show people this on (tablet or whatever), that the images are big enough to over-run the screen and cause them to scroll. I would say that ideally the images should be big enough to cause that on a 1080p monitor actually.
The reason being: you actually have a fair amount of content! certainly enough to show off. BUT, because there's sooooo much blank space, it looks empty. So scale up the content you have and make people have to scroll down to see it all, even if it's only a short scroll. It'll make a difference, believe me.
Also, if you are planning to take this on a tablet or laptop or whatever, try not to rely on having a working internet connection, GDC is in a basement so there's unlikely to be a good connection to work with, i'd make sure that i have all of the files saved locally, and a working local version of the site that looks the same and can call all of the files from your device instead of the web (it's as easy as changing the file locations in the index.html file).
I'm not sure if you changed the resum
Reed
I haven't looked at the folios above, but figured I'd share a thread I made from last year. There are typos and stuff as it was on Twitter, and someone made the list into an image...so...mistakes happen. Though, I still believe the points are true in a general sense, especially since I see these issues A LOT. Mostly students and beginners start from the same place with the same problems (wanting to do it all, having too much, wanting to show everything, having no focus, having no message, etc.) So, hope this helps...
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=132809
Very good read. Thank you for reposting that thread.
Just a question. How much are wireframe shots worth in a folio I read something you said saying its often not needed, but should one wireframe of one of your better models be included?
Beauty: Posed character with nice lighting or the most ideal shot of an env
Sculpt: Shots from ZBrush or a different view
Construction: Wireframe shot and texture flats
The impression I've gotten is that you should include wireframes with character art, but it's not really necessary for environments/props.
Why wouldn't it be? If I was to hire an environment artist, I would like to know how efficient he is with vertx and textures.
I think textures and wires are important.
But, that might be just me
Awesome. Thanks!
@Meloncov:
Ah yeah. I'm doing mostly character art atm. Good to know my topology work isnt gonna get overlooked.
- The emptiness (using swizzles centering suggestion, thanks heaps)
- The white space, using a simple css gradient (which scales to devices)
- The crappy grunge font (Cheers, YsAlex)
- Desaturated the side logo's a bit
- Made a resume logo to use instead of text.
Still have to work on making content fonts consistent.
This is my. I'm focused on game art stuff. Yeaaah, it's weebly, but I'm not web designer or website coder so why not?
www.veezen.weebly.com
What do you think? Should I work on it?
I like your work, but your thumbnails are shitty. The biggest problems are that they are too small, too cropped (so I can't properly see what they are) and there is too much information. The good thing however is that all of these problems are easy to fix:
- Just enlarge the thumbnails a bit (I would change the aspect ratio to make them a bit taller as well, so you can see more on them).
- Zoom out the thumbnails a bit so that I can see mostly everything. It's okay to crop out a little bit to make the thumbnails look more interesting but you are cropping out too much.
- Remove the text. If I can't tell what you've modeled without a description you've either done a shitty job with the thumbnail or the modeling. IMO a perfect portfolio doesn't need any text at all as the images should tell you everything you need to know (except perhaps technical stats), I know I'm not following this too closely either but it's a good goal to strive towards IMO.
- Remove the logo. If I hop onto your portfolio I expect the work shown to be yours or otherwise be told explicitly that it's some sort of collab. A logo on every thumbnail is superfluos.
It's good to have some text and branding on the final big images, but keep that stuff away from the thumbnails.
On the about page you're talking about yourself in third person. I've always found that to sound pretty silly but that maybe that's just me.
Don't show unfinished work like the car. Finish it and then upload it, otherwise it might look like you don't finish your work.
Lastly I guess Weebly is fine, but I would try to get my own domain as that looks a lot more professional. It would look better if you made your website yourself as well, but I realize not everyone wants to do that as it can take a long time and be quite a drag.
Good luck!
Great portfolio guys,
Please review my portfolio too.
https://www.artstation.com/artist/kabirtalib
Looking for your comments.
Thanks
You've got some really nice characters there, especially the first four.
The only thing that stands out as a sore thumb to me right now is the Tarzan character. I think it's got some potential, but you really need to revisit it as looks very unfinished right now. You need to at least give him some proper eyelids IMO, but the mouth and hair could use some additional work. If you don't want to revisit it I think you need to cut it as it just doesn't match the quality of the rest.
I think it'd be good if you made a lowpoly of the browny monster and maybe integrated the eyes better as well. But other than that he looks good.
Lastly it would also be nice to see wires and/or textures along with the mandatory stats about polycount and texture resolutions for all your characters.
http://www.HeatherNHughes.com
@Veezen - I agree with Nosslak about the thumbnails, they're poorly cropped and the text is weird. Your assets are sick but you aren't doing them justice with the gallery. The english/polish translations of your info are pretty sweet.
Get yourself a domain name though, the weebly in the http looks scrubby and makes things unnecessarily complicated
@Kabir - You've submitted an art station link, do you want us to just judge your content? Maybe get yourself a decent domain name and point it to your artstation if you plan on using this as your folio
@Heather
- There's alot of information on your page which could easily just be replaced by a decent gallery.
- A larger body of work wouldn't hurt.
- Having your contact details in the bio page so i don't have to scroll to the bottom or look at individual assets to get your email.
- I'm iffy about bio's, maybe keep that information in your resume? Nobody reads bio's. Short and sweet!
www.veezen.pl
I have question to you all. Do you think that could be good idea to arrange these banners in other way? For example at the bottom should be weapons, then vehicles, etc.? Because now is arranged by date - first on top is latest work which I have made, but last on the bottom is first which I made. Maybe even should I make a different categories such as: vehicles, weapons, props etc?
@edit I hope you don't mind that I asking you second time
The layout for the pages look fine to me. Could probably group them a little better. Vehicles with vehicles and weapons with weapons.
The only new problem I could find was that the Scar is is mislabeled as a Spas 12.
Lastly I would also make a default english about page with an option for a polish version to open yourself up for more positions. I don't see much sense in just limiting yourself to one geographic demographic. I get that you might not want to move abroad, but I think you run the risk of deterring freelancing opportunities if you don't have some information available about yourself in English.
It would help with keeping the site more consistent as well, as the rest of the site is in English.
[Edit] I've fixed most of the mentioned problems on my portfolio at this point as well so I'd love some new feedback on it:
RobinKarlsson3D.com
Changes:
- I improved the textures for the machine gun. The textures might be slightly exaggerated now, but they look a lot better IMO.
- I've switched out the camo shotgun with an older project that I still liked (tentacle gun).
- I switched out the plague doctor attire for a new model (gullivers sword).
- I added an underlining to the page you're currently on in the navigation bar.
- I updated the resume to be easier to get a quick overview of.
- I still need to make some more relatable vehicles. I'm thinking of revisiting this old piece of junk that I never finished and redo the textures as they are quite horrid. Would it be worth it or should I just go for a luxury car instead?