Please Roast My Portfolio [Env Art Specific]

antonyj

Hi everyone,

As the title suggests, I am in need of some help managing my portfolio, particularly from you seasoned Environment Artists out there. I'm at a bit of a dead-end with looking at this myself, and I haven't had a whole lot of feedback lately (mainly because I haven't really asked for it), so I'd like some pointers on the following please:

1. What do you think I should take out of my portfolio?
2. What should I keep in my portfolio?
3. What could I produce to better show off a consistent standard of work?
4. Are there any techniques I could improve on from the work on show, in both practice and showcasing a little better?

I'd appreciate help from anyone that has the kindness and time to type a response, but I'm particularly looking for Environment Artists with experience and anyone that's been a part of the recruitment process to maybe shed some light on where I'm going wrong.

I've decided to just use my Artstation for this, as I'll probably be using it exclusively soon.

PORTFOLIO LINK

Many thanks everyone, I look forward to the responses.

Ant

Larry

You want roasting? I will show you roasting! Joking... I will try and give constructive criticism.All of your renders seem very dark especially your environmental pieces . In the game it might be what they wanted but for your portfolio you should change the lighting.

Also your more lit environment renders lack some interesting colors for the eye to focus. They have a rather saturated dull green and brown, and nothing interesting to focus at. In general if you have such kind of environments you should make more vibrant colorisation and do extremely good work with the post processing to catch a viewers attention.

RobeOmega

I would say the biggest letdown on your environments is the lighting. I have done some quick (albeit very rough paintovers to kind of illustrate what I mean by this.

Firstly I have moved the logo's to the bottom right corner and downsized them so they were no longer obscuring a large part of your image (excuse the bad cleanup I had to do in the bottom middle)

I messed around with the brightness and contrast of the image as well as the colours because it looked a little flat before and I slightly reduced the vignette. The changes would look much better if there were implemented in engine rather than a shoddy Photoshop paintover but hopefully you can get the jist.

I did not change the logo's around on this image but again, the same applies as last image. I messed around with the brightness and contrast once more and added some light rays which may be a personal choice for me. I slightly faded out the trees in the background to give a little more depth. I am not a fan of the celtic knots and the border of the image.

antonyj

@RobeOmega
Hey thanks for the paint overs, it's always good to see visually what thoughts people have so thank you for taking the time to do that, it's much appreciated.

Those are some good points, thanks. I must admit I had a hard time making these environments as the gameplay doesn't really dictate a lot of level design necessity beyond navigation and orientation. There's no real jumping or mantling in the game for example. I think it's a good shout to have the logos on the bottom right, and I'll get rid of the borders on all of the images. 

For sure I think my next entry is going to be a smaller, more focused diorama. Obviously as these shots are from production; and being the only environment artist/prop artist on the team, I can't afford to spend weeks at a time on a couple of assets. I think that's definitely what I need to do now, attack that higher quality level on a smaller scale.

@Larry
Thanks for the input, I'll take the notes you mentioned about lighting into consideration.