[Environment Art] Beginner looking for portfolio critique!

Inno

Hi everyone!

So I finally managed to post here. I still consider me a beginner to environment art and I've been working on building my portfolio for about a year right now.

A few things I feel are necessary to mention:

- I'm constantly torn between showing how much things I made or only showing off the best. That being said I already cut it down a lot, but I really want to keep some early pieces because it shows progress imo.

- I keep all my projects sorted, at the top are the best ones, after that the earlier stuff, gamejam projects and my 2D art last. I'm really proud of these things so I really don't want to remove them either.

- I wanted to try out as many settings as possible, interior/exterior, scifi/fantasy etc. I'm not targeting one specific studio, so I didn't focus on a certain style/topic.

Here the link: https://www.artstation.com/lisagraf

At last, have some pictures for an immediate impression. Looking forward to your opinions!

RobeOmega

On the "Hideout Reloaded" scene I personally don't feel like those DOF shots add too much, the first DOF shot does not have too much in focus, and the second could look cool if we got a better shot of what was on the desk, rather than the from below shot currently in that means we don't get to see much of what is on there.

Inno

RobeOmega said:

On the "Hideout Reloaded" scene I personally don't feel like those DOF shots add too much, the first DOF shot does not have too much in focus, and the second could look cool if we got a better shot of what was on the desk, rather than the from below shot currently in that means we don't get to see much of what is on there.

Thanks so much for the advice! That's a detail that I haven't considered yet, I'll take another look into the DoF settings of the project later.

RobeOmega

Okay, I have a little more time for commenting. I would personally remove (or move them to an old folder on Artstation) the following pieces:

Strom Caller Triumph (I assume that was meant to be spelt "Storm")

The Gamejam stuff

Barrel Cart

The Hideout (old one)

The Village

Wolf Shrine

As I don't think they are as high as quality as your other three environment pieces.

The Village (night) cools quite cool, but I would rather focus on refining the other three pieces than having a fourth environment piece.

The Storm Caller Trimph also is quite cool, and could look much better if rendered not in Iray and with some material tweaks, so you could polish that one up and put it in as a prop to suplement the three environment pieces.

Quality > Quantity, especially if you are including those other pieces just to show how you have progressed.

Inno

RobeOmega said:

Okay, I have a little more time for commenting. I would personally remove (or move them to an old folder on Artstation) the following pieces:

Strom Caller Triumph (I assume that was meant to be spelt "Storm")

The Gamejam stuff

Barrel Cart

The Hideout (old one)

The Village

Wolf Shrine

As I don't think they are as high as quality as your other three environment pieces.

The Village (night) cools quite cool, but I would rather focus on refining the other three pieces than having a fourth environment piece.

The Storm Caller Trimph also is quite cool, and could look much better if rendered not in Iray and with some material tweaks, so you could polish that one up and put it in as a prop to suplement the three environment pieces.

Quality > Quantity, especially if you are including those other pieces just to show how you have progressed.

Thanks for further commenting!

Oh dear the typo is awkward, I changed it ASAP!

I'm thinking a lot about setting up different folders for a more organized view, but I always prefer to see everything at once when browsing through other artists' pages. The more clicks it takes to reach their stuff, the less interested I imagine potential employers to be. Does that make sense?

I'm really surpised to hear that you'd remove the single assets (Shrine, Storm Caller Triumph and the cart) since other people told me exactly the opposite. Could you elaborate on why exactly you would remove the pieces you mentioned above?

Also would love to hear some more opinions on that!

RobeOmega

From what I can gather, a fair amount of people have their portfolio in their Artstation website page rather than their profile. E.g. yours at: https://lisagraf.artstation.com/

This means they can just display their best pieces for their portfolio, without having to worry about posting pieces that are not so good on their Artstation.

It also means you can have a custom URL on there and there are several themes to choose from.

This would mean you would not have to put any of the other stuff in a folder, just only put the portfolio stuff on the website.

In my opinion the Barrel Cart does not stand out that much, the wheels being very low poly and blocky does not help either.

The Wolf Shrine also has the same issue of having a low texel density and not a lot of polygons, as it was made for an MMO.

The Storm Caller is interesting, hence why I said you could keep it, though it can be pushed a little further.