Looking for portfolio feedback and career advice
Hi everyone!
I'm currently a freelance character artist, but I want to take the big jump and start working as a junior character artist in the video games industry.
I'm also interested in hard-surface modeling, mostly because of robots. Sadly I missed some important hard-surface rules when working on those in my portfolio. I'll work on something new. because those are a little dated.
So, I'd like to know what you think! What I should improve, what pieces should I remove from my portfolio... any feedback is very appreciated.
Here's my portfolio: https://guder.artstation.com/
Thank you for your time.
Cheers!
Replies
I guess it depends on your goals. I really like some of your stuff, such as the robo bunny that looks super clean. By the way, if you want to really improve in that area (like robots), I highly recommend some pro topology courses such as Elementza/Arrimus, so you can get really detailed and clean. But in the end it seems you are aiming for low poly game type models. For example, your hard surface models seem to lack supporting loops. Because of this, you get far less highlights in render. But of course, if you are aiming for low poly, who cares! Either way, your models look nice and clean and the marmoset viewer is always a great touch!
Also, to me, your most recent piece doesn't jive with the rest of your work (the guy on fire).
(i'm in the same position as you, career wise, so consider this an unqualified critique)
Hey Victor! The (chronologically) first five models in your portfolio look really good, very aesthetically pleasing and I could see them appearing in a videogame. The topology is nice on those five as well. They do look low-poly and with lower texture resolution as well, almost like you're deliberately going for a PS3/360 era artstyle---there's nothing wrong with that and it's still very relevant because of the Nintendo Switch and mobile games, VR, and indies. Still, personally I would be interested to see you try to approach a mechanical/robot style of character like these with a lot more geometry and detail.
I think your human characters need work. I had a somewhat negative first impression of your portfolio because of that sculpt of David from cyberpunk. It looks like a work in progress, but I think most people reserve their artstation for finished art that represents their highest bar of quality. People are going to see that and their first impression will be that that's the best you can do, and some of them won't stick around to prove themselves wrong. I think you should either remove it or finish it. Totally fine to put stuff like that on instagram or twitter or whatever. Also, you should consider heavily reworking the materials on the piece titled CiberKnight. (am I losing it, or did you accidentally swap the albedo and metallic channels?)
The next piece, titled "Stylized Character" is a big improvement! The hard surface stuff looks good, the jacket looks fine to me except for something weird going on with the normal map around the collar I think, you could probably fix it manually in photoshop or otherwise bake your maps with the collar pulled up a little. The face sculpt is good, but the material looks off to me. Jared Chavez has a really great (free!) tutorial on sculpting and painting skin and setting up skin shaders here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. It helped me a ton and it's pretty short. (He also has a tutorial on stylized texture painting that I think you would benefit from.) The hair sculpt is kind of blobby and unfinished looking. I can't help you much because I don't know anything about stylized hair myself, but I would look into stylized hair brushes, VDMs, or IMMs. The material also makes it look like it's made of glass. Overall I would keep that piece up but rework the skin material, hair and eyebrows.
Candleman looks good. I think the presentation of your portfolio overall would hugely benefit from playing around with the PBR material settings, render settings, and lighting set up when you do your rendering in Toolbag. A better render of a character would take 1/100th of the time and effort it took to make the character, but might double its perceived quality!
Overall you're obviously confident when working with hard surface, robotic type stuff, and I can also see that you're making big leaps in quality with every human character that you've done. My only career advice is that when you're applying to studios you should look for studios whose games match your art style. (or tailor your art style to the studios you want to work at)
Hey! Thanks for the feedback, I had no idea this post had received some comments, sorry for the late reply.
I knew of Arrimus and he´s awesome for hard surface, Elementza is new for me but I will definitely check it out!
Yeah I went for a very low poly approach haha, but maybe it would be better to go for something more detailed and get those cool highlights, that would look more impressive on my portfolio.
About the guy on fire, I agree with you, I wanted to try something different and say "hey, I can do this too!", but I can see it's a big change of tone from the other models.
Thank you for taking some time to check my work, you've been a lot of help!
Hey! Sorry for taking too long to reply, I had no idea that someone noticed my post hehe.
Yeah for the first models, I went with a very low-poly approach I used to work like that, but now I'm trying to add a little more to my models, one thing that I forgot at that time is how good baking is from a high-poly even for non-characters assets!
About the David model I finished it in a rush haha, I enjoyed doing the face but the body not so much, I did hide it and maybe I'll show it again once it's finished. And the Ciberknight thing was something funny, I was pretty new to Marmoset, so I had no idea I was working with specular/glossiness, instead of metalness/roughness, how embarrassing hahah thank you for pointing that out.
Those tutorials look very helpful! I'm relatively new to working with the skin but Jared makes it look so good, about the hair is another story, it's a bit daunting to me because I never get it right (my first characters with hair cards looked like they were going through alopecia).
I'll work on my final renders and hopefully make my work look better! Marmoset has definitely helped me with my renders, it will be worth it to learn more and exploit everything it has to offer.
Thanks for the tips and the advice, you have been a lot of help!
Wish you the best in your career, you are very talented!