Feedback for my portfolio?
vertex
I've been designing stuff for quite a few years, but I've been too nervous to show anything really outside of friends until now. I'm hoping this is gonna be my year. I'm currently doing a 100 days of level design challenge.
https://oblivious212.artstation.com/
https://oblivious212.artstation.com/
Replies
1) House in the field: The images which have the fence in the foreground look good. There should be something breaking up the trees in the distance as they get a bit monotonous. I think you should work on your vegetation a little more because I see a lot of flatness and lines in what is meant to be organic. Check out the drawing I did on one of your images. With the grass, maybe try a bit of rotation on your mesh so there isn't a really obvious line, or add some slightly curved trees. You don't really need this many renders of the distant house, I'd cut down on how many there are. I would give an up close render of the house in the field because right now I can't tell how well that was made.
2) R1D9: Delete this from your portfolio. Lighting is far too dark to tell whats going on. You can also tell you've used a lot of the same meshes.
3) These 2 images seem to be exactly the same. I like the composition. It would be cool if this was in the same project as R1D10 (the house in the field).
4) R1D7: Your environments should be telling a story. This just looks like you drew a few lakes and filled the rest with trees. I want to see a field to explore, some cliffs, a river, somewhere in the distance where I want to explore! Your water>ground transitions need to be worked on. Are you using the same tree prop for each project? That won't get you a job, or pre-job experience. I'm not sure about the water either; I can see patterns in it and its throwing off the realism.
Are you using premade materials and/or props? It's really important to show breakdowns of how you've achieved stuff. If all you're aiming for is level design, and not art, there should be a lot more story to what you're doing, and an explanation of what you've created in the scene.
Thanks again I appreciate the feedback!
Hey Robert,
I agree with Ashervisalis here and I also feel your portfolio is lacking actual level design. If this is what you’re trying to go for then your work should tell me that, but all I’m seeing is levels created for the sake of looks. Great if you’re focus is on environment artwork, but design needs to go deeper.
There’s no information on why things were put where, no story, nothing to go on. When you’re designing a level you rarely ever start with any art. Even if you’re just working in Unreal and you have no game to base anything on, just make something up. Start with a template and design for that and show that. Artstation might not be the best place for that stuff, great for showing off beauty shots, but you need room to talk about your designs. Even if you just wanted to build something cool, I want to know why. I would think about looking into your own website if this can’t be done with Artstation, I haven’t used it really so idk what Artstation allows you to do.
My other criticism would be that 100 days of level design might not really help you take your level design skills to the next level. All levels need to go through iteration and often a lot of it. I would think about taking it slow, make a post about the level your making and get feedback on it early, rather than later. This is something I learned the hard way.
And last thing Just looking at the names in your portfolio tells me you’re just trying to spit something out and it’s missing your personal touch and details that could make them unique to you. And again I agree with Asher, and you’ll hear it a lot in interviews, quality over quantity for sure.
My website also needs updated with my own criticism, but take a look through here http://level-design.org/?page_id=56 Idk if you have already and idk if everything’s up to date, but there’s some solid examples in here.
Also, what would be better to show; an environment built in a day, or one built over the course of a week/month/year?
As for the second I don't see how producing things at a slower rate would make a difference if the quality is the same. How quickly you can produce content is irrelevant as long as it is good. Of course, I would put more time into each scene if I had to lay out AI paths and encounters and triggers and everything else, but I don't because that isn't the purpose of this type of thing I'm doing.
If your focus is to get better at making cool looking environments, then you'll want to be building all of the art assets for an environment from scratch. Start with a concept you found online, or make one yourself. Don't go overboard, but you'll want to show off a mixture of hero assets, miscellaneous props and then things like the walls and ground. Get it to work in a UE4, environment artists have to make sure their work is optimised and runs smoothly. Try and get the scene lighting to look good too. Take us to a place and tell a story, make us feel something.
If your focus is level design (which I admittedly know less about) then you'll want to be making a functioning level designed for a game. Art will probably still play a role, you could show an understanding of making some modular pieces that you can slot together. But the more important thing is making something fun to play, something that achieves the desired emotions out of the player interacting with your work. Show your grey-boxing, development, etc. Maybe making a few smaller games or prototypes of gameplay ideas. There's probably some more technical requirements that a level designer needs like coding, but again I don't know enough to speak about this with confidence. Go ask a level designer.
If you want to do a challenge like this (which can be a great way to learn, I admire Mike Winklemann's dedication to his 'everydays'. You can really see his progress over the years) then up your time-frame. A day is not long enough to make something meaningful with game environments. Try completing a project each month instead, then you'll have a few really cool pieces by the time 2019 rolls around.
I think the reason single person teams generally do not make large or very good looking games is because they focus on assets and self art creation which takes a long time. I protest that if I can find something online that fits my vision and then I can buy the rights to it and incorporate it in my own way into a scene that is enough. I do have a grand vision for a larger project that I am continuously working on and I know it would never get done if I spent months or years creating all my own meshes and textures. I'm not getting any younger time is very finite.
The entire point of this I believe is to get better and more efficient at how I iterate maybe call it micro iteration because it takes place over the course of an hour or so. Also to get ideas out of my head to share with the world of course art is subjective, but I do think that what I have created so far is beautiful even if it never makes it into a game, and if someone sees it and thinks the same and offers me a job, as unlikely as that is, its all the more helpful.
I have to say I do appreciate all the feedback I don't want to seem ungrateful, but I think maybe its just a miscommunication.
If all you want to do is placement and level design, you've gotta be able to make games fun without the beauty of everything. Try making grey-box levels. If you can make something fun without focusing on beauty, that would help you on your path to level designer.
as for your portfolio i think all of your pieces all have the same over arching problem. It seems that most of these are really really flat, and none of them really look complete.
i'd suggest
-Taking more time on these. You will see an appreciable difference in something you spend a litte more time on, than something you "complete" in a day.
- For the layout of these environments, I'd suggest breaking up the monotony in some of them. FOr example, the grass in R1D11 looks like a big swatch of green stripes, ultra flat. Theres no depth to it. Maybe some dirt patches, or something.
-I also dont know what these closeups are for, these aren't your meshes, so unless theres some dope lighting/effects youre trying to show off, i wouldn't put those closeups in there.
If youre trying to make your own environments though , id' suggest making your own assets from scratch.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Lighting
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Environment
design, envirometn art and lighting are different disciplines, i'd agree with ashervasalis, you need to figure out what skillset youre going to need.
In less time I created this, just needs to be edited to be more detailed.
I think what the others are saying is that you should focus on creating an environment from start to finish, finding a concept, blocking, building assets and getting it into unreal in an optimized state to show you have the core skills of a games artist.
The whole point of blocking for an environment is to test whether the scene works the way you want it to before building it and getting scales right, if you are creating assets from scratch you don't want to waste a few weeks building stuff that then doesn't look right. If you are a level artist it would likely be for testing out gameplay, does this box correctly work as cover, does this pillar get in the way etc.
take this project for example, they started with a blockout to test how the city would work before they went in and built the structures in final art:
http://polycount.com/discussion/192103/the-resistance
If you want to learn about level designing for gameplay purposes, TF2 level designers on Youtube are really interesting. They show how they take a really basic blockout and use this as the basis for an environment. They spend weeks play testing a design to make sure that players react the way they expect them to. A blockout kind of serves two different (but intertwined) purposes depending on what role you are focusing on.
EDIT: What others are saying is that if you want to get hired you need to show you can do more than just place assets in a scene. You need to show you can make assets, modular pieces, tiling materials etc. The whole point of using your own assets is to show what you can do on your own. Even if the assets exist already, you won't be much use outside of a very narrow job role unless you can do the rest of the work.
They way levels are usually built in game studios is as a collaboration; level designers will use greyboxes while they are first building the level, since their priority is how fun it is to play, not how beautiful it looks. By only using grey boxes they can quickly make drastic changes without wasting any assets.
Once this greybox level is mostly done, and no more major changes are going to be made, the artists get involved. They take the layout of the level and make good looking assets to replace all of the grey boxes. (There was a good video by Blizzard recently showing off the early versions of Overwatch. Skim through that and you'll see what I mean).
You felt the greybox thing was a waste of time because you already have a bunch of assets ready to go. But a game studio would start with zilch. So they use greyboxing as a way to give the level designers maximum freedom as well as not wasting time and money designing a bunch of assets that end up unusable. They don't bring in a 3rd party to take all of the assets and arrange them (what you're currently doing).
Once you know which direction you want to pursue, you'll be able to get more focused feedback for your portfolio and advice on what you should be doing to improve your skills as an artist / designer. Polycount is full of people who wanna help others, but right now all your work exists in this strange middle-ground. You're doing the worst of both worlds, since you're neither making your own assets nor making levels with good gameplay. Thus we can't move forward with our advice until this issue is resolved.
I hope this helps, since if it doesn't we'll all be going round in circles. My 2 pence is that you would prefer the environment art side of things, since you seem most concerned with making your scenes look good. There's plenty of resources on the internet to help you get better at 3D modelling / textures as well.
Whatever the case I appreciate the criticism.
Think of it this way, who's better to keep around, the guy who can do initial art blocking, modular planning/construction, asset building, set dressing or the person who only has quality experience set dressing? You have to make yourself as valuable as possible to a company, so you have to be able to fit into multiple areas of development.
Anyways, learning how to make your assets is still a good idea, you can add your own unique touches that aren't in 1000 other peoples scenes, if you only stick to marketplace assets your work will always have elements of other peoples creations. Maybe what you want just isn't in the marketplace for some reason.
Nice progress on the scene, the weird light blue tint to the water is distracting, I assume that's just some transparency bug.
Richard, take it from someone else who’s lived in Virginia, what you’re hoping to jus do right now is NOT going to get your foot in the door. Seriously take Satoshi’s advice.
Theres so so much weird implicit experiential stuff you learn when you’re finally developing a game to finish and shipped. And it’s clear that with the way you’re talking about this, you haven’t finished making a game of any scale.
The musician analogy is a flimsy one. You’re not anywhere close to being able to play music technically well, let alone construct instruments. Or not even that, understanding that music involves sound engineering and marketing and audience feedback, etc.
Seriously take Satoshi’s advice seriously. The world builder we had at InXile was still expected to drop into 3dsMax and model stuff, make textures, etc instead of always going to another artist to get something new made.
i don’t know what you consider editing, but the polish you’re doing is far from done for what we expect a playable environment to be.
Also who is Richard?
And please don't come saying that it is too much to compare your work with top level work, because if you are not doing that you are simply destined to end up beeing mediocre at best.
I've modeled stuff in 3ds max before, but I noticed how long it took to complete anything. With that in mind I realised that it wasn't feasible to make all my own assets. Purchasing assets and even commissioning them when need be is a core part of my strategy to develop larger scale things as a solo team. I will defend using modular assets forever. If companies like Bethesda can do it so can I.
I have a working knowledge of texture editing software such as photoshop and have created my own textures before. I have looked into substance designer and it is currently on my back log of things to learn just because it looks so interesting.
I have an understanding of a few different programming languages. My most comfortable probably being python not that its really of any use in the unreal engine. I do most of my game code using blueprints.
The current version of my game has working HUD and journal system, frameworks for skill increases and player leveling, a map, and I'm working on one of the cites now as well as various other systems and things.
That is concerning for me as a fellow developer and someone who's worked on prototypes before that there doesn't seem to be an elevator pitch beyond that it's a medieval fantasy RPG. Are you hoping to be a very action oriented RPG, or a narrative dense one, one about systems interacting and impressing on the player, or something else entirely? I know getting an MVP on an RPG is magnitudes harder, but are there specific features that you hope players really glom onto?
I want it to be rather action oriented, but not so much that the game feels rushed. Exploration is an important part as are all the many systems in the game. I have hundreds of cards on trello with my design.
Now if that's not the goal here and you just want to make your own game with store bought assets then that should have been stated from the start.
While I think every person here can remember that spunk and huge drive to create a bunch of stuff, like what you have now. They are giving you feedback on things they have learned through their times failing, and learning along the way. They are passing on their guidance to you in hopes you don't waste your time and make the same mistakes.
Satoshi works at Amazon and knows his shit. He's well respected in the video games community. If he gives you feedback its probably because he sees potential in you. What you're doing is being too butthurt to take his critiques because it doesn't align with your initial view. This is bad and you will not last long if you ever get in games because you have to keep your ego at the door. You might say you appreciate the feedback but then say it's a waste of time.
I will tell you that the reason you greybox (blockout) a level without using premade art assets is because when you're designing a level, you give zero fucks about art. The level MUST work. The game MUST play well. The art comes after a strong layout is established.
If you just use premade assets because they are at your disposal that is not what happens in game production. Trust me, i work in games too and level designers do not just pick from a library. They block out something that works with the game.
A blockout is not meaningless. You use blockout or greyblock models because they give a very high level intention for a level or mission. Once a playable area works with how a designer wants a game or mission to play, thats when the greyblock models are replaced with art.
Dont look at it as wasted art. Look at it as being able to convey intent or meaning with simplicity. It costs a studio a lot less to quickly iterate through a blocked out level than it does to have a bunch of assets created and added and then have to redo it. I hear your point that you've made a few times that if you have assets then why not use them. Here's why you don't use them.
1. A studio doesn't work that way.
2. You want to try and create your level and give yourself as close to studio experience as possible.
3. You want to show a potential employer you understand the process of level design.
I hope you reread what people have already said because they are pointing you in the right direction.
Cheers dude
I understand the process of level design how it's truly about creating a fun playable space. This is not lost on me, that being said there are companies that front load the art schedule and don't do gray boxing at all like Bethesda for instance their tools don't even have gray boxing possibilities.
Maybe reach out to some Bethesda members and try and see what they're designers and artists are doing.