Art Station FV portfolio review
polycounter lvl 9
Hi, I have a personal Art Station portfolio focused primarily on 3D Prop Art but also demonstrated some of weapon art gigs.
Link: https://fvportfolio.artstation.com/
I would like to hear if there is any critique or advice I could withtake to make it as professional as possible. If you consider it's already good enough then advice whether to remove anything is more than welcome because - less is more!
Thank you in advance.
Link: https://fvportfolio.artstation.com/
I would like to hear if there is any critique or advice I could withtake to make it as professional as possible. If you consider it's already good enough then advice whether to remove anything is more than welcome because - less is more!
Thank you in advance.
Replies
I recognize most assets on the portfolio are boring and lack the artistic touch, and yes, this would get fixed by doing objects / scenes I would genuinely love to do.
I jumped into environments before but never via concept art. They were composited using real life photographs as main reference.
Youve made some pretty good models but you need to work on the base geometry more, several of your pieces have hard-edges and bad shading. Try to make something more complex for your next project, its tough but I think quality > quantity will improve your portfolio.
Good luck!
You need to work on your use of Normal Maps and topology, and study when is it convenient to have more geo vs normal mapped detail. At the moment there is detail in the geometry (i.e the vertical ridges) that is too fine to be noticeable in geo and would be perfectly fine, or would look even better in NM. There is also a lot of flat surfaces with too many edges that serve no purpose, and rounded parts where the polygons are too visible.
In the UV's you need to work quite a bit. You need to straighten your islands where it makes sense, instead of having the wobbly and distorted mess you have at the moment. You also need to pack the islands tighter, there's too much wasted space. This will be much easier to do once you straighten the islands.
My final advice would be to take on an asset similar to the fire hydrant (in shape complexity, avoid very rectangular or basic shapes like the dumpster or data tape you have ATM), maybe even do the fire hydrant again if you want, and go back to the High Poly. Then ask for feedback on every step. You can ask for feedback on a dedicated thread here on Polycount or in one of the many Discord communities that work really well for this purpose. When you have asked for feedback on the high-poly and people have given you meaningful feedback you can move on to the low poly, and do the same. Ask for feedback and follow it.
The problem I'm seeing right now is that you don't have a solid foundation supporting your finished models (proper topology, proper UVs...), so you're carrying mistakes done in your HP to your LP and so forth.
The UFO scene is ok-ish but there are a few things that stand out. First of all the lighting could have much more work, right now it is a bit of a mess composition wise, so I think if you work on that you can be onto something. Maybe making the UFO beam much brighter could help, but you will need to work on the camera angles and maybe the position of some objects... Or maybe it'd work better in the day? just dropping some ideas but you will have to experiment a bit...
Another thing that caught my attention from the UFO scene is the asphalt on the road and the material transitions between the surrounding materials like puddles and sidewalk. ATM it is very obvious that it's just a decal on top and it is not well integrated. The grass could have much more love also.
Apart from that I think you should get rid of all the individual props in your portfolio, they are all way too simple to stand on their own.
You could have some props breakdown inside of the environment it is used in as an extra tough...
Also, for the environments... You need to break down the scene a bit to show how the scene was constructed. A few things you need to make very clear on the breakdown:
Make sure to clearly show that it is done in a realtime engine. You don't need to put the logo or anything, just something that screams game engine, like a lighting breakdown or a short "cinematic".
Make sure you use techniques that would be used in a production like trimsheets and modular assets, and break them down to show how you used them.
Take a look at other real time environments in Artstation and take notes on how they are presented.
TL:DR Get rid of all the individual props and make proper breakdowns of the environments
Things that are missing and are holding all your assets back are PBR understanding and UV layout cleanliness.
You need to pause and look at real world materials, how are they composed, what kind of detail is part of the roughness, what is part of the color and so on... Also why are things dirty/clean in the places they are, what cause paint to chip off or get scratched at a specific place...
To better understand PBR you can take a look at the PBR guide:
https://substance3d.adobe.com/tutorials/courses/the-pbr-guide-part-1
https://substance3d.adobe.com/tutorials/courses/the-pbr-guide-part-2
You don't have to understand everything down to the equations on that guide, but make sure to skim around it to see the things you can and cannot do if you want to stay physically accurate with your values.
For the cleaner UVs the main thing you need to focus on is straightening up your islands. You need to avoid curves and bends as much as possible, even if it means adding a bit of distortion. Using the space efficiently is better than having completely undistorted UV's, especially nowadays that all the texturing is done in 3d.
I recommend you to publish the process of your next work in as many places as possible (polycount, discord, Artstation blog) to gather feedback during the process and make the necessary changes early.
I think for your next work you could pick a concept art for an environment and try to recreate it. Polycount bi-monthly challenges are a good place to look for cool concepts that are not incredibly complex. If you do make sure to document the process from the beginning.
There have been many updates to my portfolio since I last posted here, so I'm looking for some expert feedback again. I'm curious on what could I take out of the portfolio for quality improvement / better impressions? General feedback on improvement is welcome too.
Here's the link: https://www.artstation.com/fvportfolio
Please feel free to reply if you have any thoughts about this.
The current situation is definitely very challenging. Layoffs not only mean less job spots available, but also more experienced people looking for jobs.
Environment and prop art being one of the roles with the most applicants doesn't help either.
I'd suggest you to work on a few outstanding complex props, don't bother too much making them optimised, but rather make sure they look as good as possible.
In that advent I have been working on a new environment project based on a New York city street. I let myself combine two Manhattan locations and make a new rendition with my own artistic flair added into it. I am now actively seeking feedback on it to determine what I can do to improve it and make it portfolio-ready. Screenshots and a small part of references I used are included below: