Demo Reel Critique

RyanMarsh

Hey everyone!

This is my first post on polycount, so let me give a little bit of a backstory on myself: 
I am a recent grad of the Digital Animation & Visual Effects School and have just completed my first finalized demo reel. I have a desire to be somewhat of a generalist, but specialize in modeling and texturing.

Any critique and insight is welcome and greatly appreciated! 

Demo Reel: 
Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/ryan_marsh

Feel free to be rip it to shreds!

jose.fuentes

Hey Ryan,

My only crit as of right now is that its too long.  IMO its better to have it quick, leave them wanting more, than giving them too much.  

slosh

I scrubbed through ur reel and to me, your best asset is that house diorama...why don't you have proper screenshots for that on your artstation?  It's your strongest piece and should be the first thing you show off.  Your hearthstone card and table are pretty solid but I am not a fan of the weapons.  They don't look quite stylized enough and the textures look super flat.  The crates are ok but let's face, its a pile of crates which is neither interesting nor anything to be really proud of.  Unless you are really going for animation or fx as a generalist, I think the demo reel is not helping you.  You should do proper hires shots of your house dio and if you want to give people the ability to rotate around it, drop it into sketchfab or marmoset viewer.  I would nix the stylized sword and staff and look at some of blizzards weapons to see what direction to go for those sort of assets.  The hearthstone stuff is much closer.  One thing to keep in mind is what your preference in work would be and maybe focus on that.  If you want to do stylized, make a couple more stylized pieces.  If you want to do realistic, do a couple assets at uber high quality.  Right now, you are riding the line and it's going to hurt you going for either type of job.

RyanMarsh

Really appreciate the critique Slosh, and I agree it feels long as well Jose.

As this was a graduation reel, there are some filler assets in there for now that were a requirement, so for example scrapping the crates I fully agree on as they are also featured in the building turntable. I am in the works of dropping my building into artstation ASAP as well. As for shooting for realistic or stylized, I could go either way. I am a fan of stylized work and agree that it is something that needs some more work put into to improve.

Thanks again for the critiques, I'll update my demo reel soon to reflect that!