Looking for some Portfolio critiques

MagicTurtle

Hi, I'm an aspiring 3D environment/texture artist and I've been working really hard in the past three years with the goal of joining the industry as soon as possible. I started out as a 3D character artist only to wipe out all of my portfolio's works to transition to environments and textures a few months ago.

I'm quite happy with all the progress so far, but my portfolio still looks very amateurish to me and I kinda feel a bit stuck about what I could improve.
I'd love to step up the quality of my work and be more appealing to game studios, what advice can you give me?
Be brutal if you feel you need to, I appreciate harsh but honest critiques. Thank you very much!

https://www.artstation.com/francescocolivicchi

RookieRay

Great looking stuff so far!
I opened the rusted metal fence prop and got a nice simple breakdown which is great but when I opened the window prop and the RE2 door there aren't any breakdowns, it's just a single image which i personally think is a little unfortunate.

You could maybe benefit from putting some of these props together in a single post called something like "props from X"

Your RDP Environment looks great but I think it's missing breakdowns, they love to talk about that kind of stuff in interviews! Maybe beef up your description too there's not much there. How long did it take, how big are textures and so on, provide some detail!
I'd also recommend putting in what software you used to create it. 

Same with your substances, I think your work is absolutely great but I'd love to see maybe a segment of the graph.
No one wants to see a big peice of spaghetti but maybe just a snippet of how you made a certain pattern or something like that.

I hope that helps! Breakdowns are super useful both for yourself and in interviews!

MagicTurtle

@RookieRay Thank you very much for the reply and for taking the time to go through my portfolio, really appreciated!

Your suggestions are also really helpful, I actually never thought breakdowns were that relevant in smaller projects as much as showing to be able to create good looking ones, I'm definitely going to add a bunch of screenshots more, and as you suggested, some more information in the description.

Regarding the RPD environment, it was my very first one and I'm actually not really proud of the technical side of it as much as I am with the renders I posted, which is the reason why I haven't put much more information or breakdowns, but I'm working on the Bi-Monthly Polycount challenge right now, and feeling more experienced and confident I'm focussing more on optimization, assets reusability, and more appropriate practices such as using homogeneous and correct texel density, trimsheets etc... so I'll definitively doing as you recommended with this one! Creating a project to showcase all the props I use for an Environment is also a good idea!

Again, thank you very much for your insights and suggestions, really helpful!

Joseph_Bramlett

I agree with @RookieRay. What i recommend doing is going on artstation and finding environment artist portfolios of people in the industry doing similar work and analyzing what they put into each portfolio piece. DO they show all of the textures in a break down? What information for each texture do they write out? Do they show wireframes? 3D viewers? How many renders per piece? Basically find like 3 or five great portfolios and make a list of what each of them do, then cross examine all of your findings. This should then give you a good idea of what should be included in each of your portfolio pieces. It might sound like a lot of needless work but if you make a check list for yourself you can then make your rendering more efficient as you know at the start all the things you need to have prepared for your model for its final demo. 

MagicTurtle

@Joseph_Bramlett thank you for the tip, I will definitely put more effort in what you suggested.