Critique my portfolio :)!

Leinad · Feb 2015

Hey guys, I was hoping to get some feedback on my portfolio.

I would love to hear some advice on ways to push my work to the next level. Granted, I'd take whatever I can get since it all helps and I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to guide me in the right direction.

Here is a link to my portfolio: http://leinadirabka.blogspot.com/

redvanda · Feb 2015

Looks good! I like the enlarged images when you see them to begin with, however there is not much organisation.

I would specialize in one area in particular so in your case it may be characters, then have the environments at the bottom. You want to navigate, not just put everything you've got in one space. Also be selective, you don't have to overwhelm your portfolio. Have your Best piece first, your third best piece next then your second best last and work in that order so it appears as if your work is consistent throughout, and will keep potential employers interested.

I would also advise on being selective so when you do go to an interview, and if you have a quiet or awkward moment with your employer and you're not sure if its going well, you can then go '.....so wanna see more work?'

And they will think, oh, more I haven't seen for someone I may hire...'Yes please!'.

My advise would be to have one more character with your main portfolio, and put the gun and environment at the bottom if they are still interested, then remove any unnecessary things that aren't contributing too much to your portfolio but are just.. there. You can always move them to your blog section and put them in as work in progress.

AgelosAp · Feb 2015

Hey man, your site is pretty straight forward and simple, I much prefer sites like that to flashy and distracting ofcourse.
You should check out weebly too as it is a more standard provider for
portfolio purposes and has some sliders etc. for a more comfortable view.

Regarding your work, the architecture piece seems out of place,
and isn't up to par with the characters, I see no reason for it to be here.
Other than that I 'd say its good and coherent.

Hope I gave some help, good luck!

edit: I got thrown off a bit from the last too tabs that are links outside your site,
just because they seem like tabs and I wasn't expecting to navigate elsewhere.

BagelHero · Feb 2015

I dunno man, everything I have to say is the same as last time you posted your portfolio, and the time before that.

I can't tell what your focus is, none of your areas are entirely strong
All of your stuff that's finished kind of looks half baked, while all the clearly unfinished stuff shows far more potential (seriously dude why you have the buff goblin hidden down the bottom instead of finished by now, and the still centaur there at all is beyond me).
You aren't showing any realtime character work since those old pieces, all of which seem unfinished, or not polished from when people gave you feedback on them last (except the girl, which would be a very good piece if her polycount/topology matched the level of detail in her textures, which is to say much lower and smarter), but you still have "character" in your title.
A lot of your textures have a low value range and lack of definition.

Sorry, dude, wish I could be more productive with this, but there's only so many times I can see you doing the same stuff and have anything to say.

On the new stuff:

The rock is weak. Ditch it.
Animation and UI work seems dated/irrelevant. Until you have more of that (enough to make an entire page worth of it), maybe just leave it out. If you need to show a client who wants that stuff, have a separate page or file ready to send them. On your general portfolio, it's bringing it down.
Update the Gaara, Girl and Owl-- In fact you know what?

I said this all last time.

Literally, I could go back and cobble together replies to your old threads here and a lot of them would still apply.
Both here and here.

It's been months. If it's been months and I can still reliably just re-post what I've already said-- you need to re-evaluate what you're doing.

If you still really want to be a generalist, for the love of god, break your site down into categories so upfront it's easy to tell what you do. With labels;
Characters / Props / Environments / Animation&UI
Then under each of those have a list of projects, or just have those link to one long scrolling page with everything you've done in that category, even.

On the singular newer pieces;

The orthrus print is kinda cool but has some weird anatomy quirks. The feet and "hands" specifically, but... his balls kinda look odd, too-- not that everyone wants to spend the day staring at dog scrotum but I digress. You should also have a link to the Kickstarter (I hope it was successful)/project page.
The girl's face is really weird. Looks even freakier in the clay render. In the painted version you could pass it off as "goofy". The nose area seems under-defined, there's a severe lack of ears, the painting of the eye area is lovely, but it's in stark contrast with the under-rendered neck and shirt areas.
The environment has some really obvious tiling textures (which makes me wonder how you even did that-- is the floor 2 planks wide, 10 planks long?), and has some kind of odd scaling and composition for an indoor scene-- keeping in mind of course it's a WIP, with a big COMING SOON.

If you're barely going to do anything but add a project or remove one or w/e, there's no use posting a portfolio crit thread every 3 months. Use that time to do more personal art instead, or update your old stuff.

You can clearly do better, so it's a shame to keep seeing you post your portfolio and have it come across as a bit of a mess. Sorry for being a bit harsh.

redvanda · Feb 2015

BagelHero wrote: »

I dunno man, everything I have to say is the same as last time you posted your portfolio, and the time before that.

I can't tell what your focus is, none of your areas are entirely strong

All of your stuff that's finished kind of looks half baked, while all the clearly unfinished stuff shows far more potential (seriously dude why you have the buff goblin hidden down the bottom instead of finished by now, and the still centaur there at all is beyond me).

You aren't showing any realtime character work since those old pieces, all of which seem unfinished, or not polished from when people gave you feedback on them last (except the girl, which would be a very good piece if her polycount/topology matched the level of detail in her textures, which is to say much lower and smarter), but you still have "character" in your title.

A lot of your textures have a low value range and lack of definition.

Sorry, dude, wish I could be more productive with this, but there's only so many times I can see you doing the same stuff and have anything to say.

On the new stuff:
The rock is weak. Ditch it.

Animation and UI work seems dated/irrelevant. Until you have more of that (enough to make an entire page worth of it), maybe just leave it out. If you need to show a client who wants that stuff, have a separate page or file ready to send them. On your general portfolio, it's bringing it down.

Update the Gaara, Girl and Owl-- In fact you know what?

I said this all last time.

Literally, I could go back and cobble together replies to your old threads here and a lot of them would still apply.
Both here and here.

It's been months. If it's been months and I can still reliably just re-post what I've already said-- you need to re-evaluate what you're doing.

If you still really want to be a generalist, for the love of god, break your site down into categories so upfront it's easy to tell what you do. With labels;
Characters / Props / Environments / Animation&UI
Then under each of those have a list of projects, or just have those link to one long scrolling page with everything you've done in that category, even.

On the singular newer pieces;
The orthrus print is kinda cool but has some weird anatomy quirks. The feet and "hands" specifically, but... his balls kinda look odd, too-- not that everyone wants to spend the day staring at dog scrotum but I digress. You should also have a link to the Kickstarter (I hope it was successful)/project page.

The girl's face is really weird. Looks even freakier in the clay render. In the painted version you could pass it off as "goofy". The nose area seems under-defined, there's a severe lack of ears, the painting of the eye area is lovely, but it's in stark contrast with the under-rendered neck and shirt areas.

The environment has some really obvious tiling textures (which makes me wonder how you even did that-- is the floor 2 planks wide, 10 planks long?), and has some kind of odd scaling and composition for an indoor scene-- keeping in mind of course it's a WIP, with a big COMING SOON.

If you're barely going to do anything but add a project or remove one or w/e, there's no use posting a portfolio crit thread every 3 months. Use that time to do more personal art instead, or update your old stuff.

You can clearly do better, so it's a shame to keep seeing you post your portfolio and have it come across as a bit of a mess. Sorry for being a bit harsh.

Looked back on past posts that you showed and it seems I just repeated what was already said... ><

Leinad · Feb 2015

Please note that I am not upset or angry or (fill in emotional response to critique) before reading further.

It would be quite unnecessary for me to go through all of your feedback point by point and illustrate how I have taken into account past feedback (it is simply not noticeable to you or perhaps many others). The only thing I have yet to get around doing completely is separating my portfolio into different sections. The reason why I had not done so yet was because I only had 1 prop piece. Now that I am doing my first environment I will be getting to it. In the past critique it was regarding the 2D pieces I had in my portfolio, I have removed those a while back.

Everything except the Goblin has been modified since the feedback that I have received. This includes the gun (texture/PBR material update), the owl (it now has a scene), the centaur (it now has a pose and updated texture/material). It may not be obvious, but I have put in a solid amount of my time to take in the feedback that was given. I take that stuff very seriously, so I am a bit dismayed that it isnt so obvious in my updates. This is an issue on my end, and I'll try to do a better job.

I dont know the magic number till its ok to ask for a portfolio feedback but Ill try to wait a bit longer next time. I have added 3 new pieces and revisiting all of the old assets makes it seem like not much has changed even though everything looks different to me.

The reason why I havent updated the Goblin texture is because what I ended up doing did not pass the kind of quality I was looking for. Granted that was a few months ago and I dont do character work for personal projects anymore. Everything that is new that is character is not personal work.

Ill make a Character section and environment section tomorrow (technically today). Ill also remove the animation, rock, and UI right.

Also, regarding the female headbust, the reference I used matches quite well with it, sadly I dont have permission to share the reference used.

It's past my bed time almost 4am

, thanks guys for your time! I really appreciate it.

BagelHero · Feb 2015

Hey Daniel, I know a was a bit harsh, but bare with me.

The point of my post wasn't that the changes you made weren't there at all, more that you approached them in a way that didn't fix the issue people had, like you don't understand the problems. Since seriously, I could still just say all the same things-- yes, you made changes, but I didn't notice a couple and some of them just didn't fix the actual issue/introduced more.

On the girl, I figured you had a photoref with a goofy face and that's chill, but the values in and detail the polypaint get weird after the eye area. It's just not defined, and looks about halfway there, just like the Owl piece and the Gaara Piece. You have a continuing theme of not using lower values to their full effect, instead opting for mild colors and midtones. It lacks impact and weight.

And it's not like you're incapable in that area, that eye area totally nails it, but you'd notice it's much darker than the neck, which should be the same if not more occluded than the eye area, if the light is coming from above. You need to give that same love all over.

Also, that Gun? It may use PBR textures, but they're kind of... wrong...
With the wrong inputs, the materials aren't working so well.

The albedo you have is suited for a metalness map, not a spec map-- albedo for spec maps have metal areas at black or very dark grey, and all the color for that metal should be in the specular (otherwise it comes off looking plastic-y). The gloss map should also be greyscale, and have all that variation that is in that spec map right now, since the spec is really just controlling reflection, and reflection values really stay more or less the same regardless of material, so it can stay fairly flat (except for metal and some other weird, uncommon material values).

More reading:
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-conversion

This is a piece you could really learn a lot on from doing right, so maybe you could post a thread here and fix it up with some help from the community.

And there's no magic number, of course, if you've redone your entire portfolio or like 20 new pieces in one month it's fine to repost quickly, but perhaps when you're just adding one or two pieces, make a review thread for those. Not your entire portfolio. Just be like "I added two portfolio pieces, whaddaya think of them?" and post all the specifics there.

This community is fairly responsive and very helpful, but often the people who look in certain threads are the same, and have certain "types" they'll help-- if you have 3-5 portfolio review threads in a small timeframe, and they can't tell the crits you took from the last ones they gave... they may just have a look and not bother. If you just post and say "have a look at this NEW thing/change I made" they'll be able to pick up on stuff more easily and see progress and be more willing to catch up.

Granted that was a few months ago and I don’t do character work for personal projects anymore.

That seems like an oddly acute statement. Do you not enjoy it?

Also, hope you have a good rest. 4am? I'd be entirely loopy.

tynew · Feb 2015

I'm just curious reading with what is going on with the replies here. One thing I want to know is what exactly is your focus? You've got yourself down in the title as a Character Artist/Generalist. Logically you can only be one of them.

I personally think your work is strongest in character art. It's already far more advanced compared to your other areas. The environment that says "coming soon" pales in comparison to the Goblin.

Leinad · Feb 2015

The gun was my first PBR model, so I can see a lot of the issues now. All of the PBR work, except the room I am working on now, is done incorrectly. Almost 90% of the stuff is dated and they don't represent what I know now. But part of me just wants to move forward and not constantly be going back to the old pieces. I will most likely revisit it and some of the other easier fixes soonish.

Tynew, part of the title of my focus is mainly geared towards freelancing (granted, I don't enjoy working from home at all). Characters was the first area I had interest in, but after a year of job searching it became clear that I'd have more success branching out (Polycount feedback and the constant rejection during my job search). It's all fun to me, so it's not like I am down-grading doing environment and props. It all improves my artistic ability and that's what matter to me most.

I like characters, but I also like all aspects of 3D, including animation. I just don't see myself being a character artist as my first job given the lack of skill and the insane requirements for entry level character art positions for someone who has 0 connections. I don't really care what I do in terms of 3D, as long as I am a productive member of the team. I feel like the more skill I have the less "luck" I need to do it for a living inside of a studio.

The female bust was an 8 hour art test, but the position I was applying for had their funding changed so they were only able to bring me on for part-time work (I couldn't do it since I would have needed to relocate with no external support).

I really don't care what I do, it's all the same to me. I say this because my main goal is to be a better artist. I'll get to separating the portfolio today and removing some of the stuff in the bottom.

Thanks for the advice, I will specifically ask for feedback on new projects rather than the whole portfolio from now on.

tynew · Feb 2015

If you've got your title as a generalist then that covers characters. Generalists are known to cover every field not just environment/props. So like I said, logically you can only be either of the titles. I wouldn't label myself as a character artist if I've got other types of works in there.

BagelHero · Feb 2015

The gun was my first PBR model, so I can see a lot of the issues now. All of the PBR work, except the room I am working on now, is done incorrectly. Almost 90% of the stuff is dated and they don't represent what I know now. But part of me just wants to move forward and not constantly be going back to the old pieces. I will most likely revisit it and some of the other easier fixes soonish.

Then you really have two options here, update it ASAP or take it off.
In all seriousness, you've gotta self moderate. If you don't like something, remove it. It brings the portfolio down, and if anyone looks at it, they will assume that is your level of skill. You will be judged by your worst piece, because no one can afford to assume that your best piece wasn't a fluke if you have significantly worse stuff on there.

I look at that and I immediately think that you don't know PBR, so could an employer. A lot of people wont take the time to ask, they can just respond by rejecting you.

I understand not wanting to infinitely loop and do the same projects over and over but if your old stuff is sub-par, then remove it. Cut it. Do something different, better.

I still think the gun specifically is a rad piece, modelling wise, and would look awesome if the textures were stepped up, so I'd implore you to keep at that, but yeah. If you think for a moment that anything else is shite and not representative of your current skill/standards, replace it ASAP (just cut it if you don't need your portfolio to be chock-full immediately).

Good luck, dude. Also, I'm sure you do to some extent, but remember to have some fun once in a while! So much work focus (which I totally admire and understand), but sometimes you just gotta so some work that helps you learn and relax as opposed to big portfolio pieces...! It helps the mind stay fresh.

Leinad · Feb 2015

Thanks guys I really appreciate it.

Tynew, I changed the title to "3D Generalist" for now. Once I have a bit more environments and props I'll change it to environment/prop artist.

BagelHero: Thanks a lot for the feedback, I really appreciate all of the advice everyone has given. The gun is definitely something I'll revisit and update. I'll do it while working on this current ArchViz scene. It's a pretty none intensive process so it should be no biggie. I'll most likely condense my portfolio further. I may combine all of the hand painted stuff into one thumbnail.

Also, the journey to improving has been quite rough but I am used to it now and I am sure it's like this for most people. The older I get the more emphasis I find myself putting on making a living doing this stuff (27 years old). I feel like my best work will come when I don't have to worry about basic finances. When I am creating only for myself, rather than a portfolio piece for employers. It is something I do think about since when I was younger I only drew for fun, I don't think I've done that in a long time. (most things I have done over the past year have been mainly directed towards pushing the quality of my portfolio [I do have fun doing it though, that's just not the main focus])

Quick Edit: Thanks Firith, I removed those tabs and added an external link tab. I also got around fixing all of the tabs, there is now a character tab and an environment tab. (I'll be placing the gun in the environment tab once I redo it).

Critique my portfolio :)!

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