Please give me some portofolio feedback

andreygheorghe

 Hi guys!Long time I haven't posted here,I've finally got my first job in the industry Anyways,I've decided to work a little bit on my portofolio as well in my spare time and I would like some honest opinions on what I can improve,what do you think I should focus on next(i.e. what should I create next) as a props artist.I would really appreciate your honest feedback!
 Have a great day!
https://www.artstation.com/andreygheorghe

Alemja

Hello! Congrats on the first gig! Here are my thoughts on your portfolio:

• You have pretty good modeling skills, as shown with your latest 3 pieces especially. The 2 guns and the Maz 537
  
• However the textures and material read really leave a lot to be desired. I would either polish up those 3 assets with a good texture pass, or really focus on textures for your next piece
• Your character is the weakest piece, and it's clearly not what you're interested in as your hard surface stuff has way more care and attention to them comparatively. I would probably remove it.
  
• Only a couple of your assets have UVs, and based on what I see, it looks like there might be some auto-unwrapping going on without a lot of additional work (correct me if I'm wrong) The truck in particular really flags that for me with how many pieces it has in the UV sheet. I would probably put focus on making smarter, cleaner, easy-to-read UVs on your next piece. It will help you a lot with texturing too, there are probably a lot of pieces that could share UVs.
  
• Something that can help take your props to the next level: creating a scene or giving the props context. It can help make pieces a lot more memorable compared to sitting them on a grey background.

Those are my thoughts, keep at it!

andreygheorghe

 Thank you very much for your feedback!Based on that I think the next piece should be a less complex one from the geometry point of view and more focused on texturing and like you told me,the reading of materials.I won't redo the current assets because I don't like to work on a piece I've considered done .Also I completly agree the character should go.
 About the UV's,they were made by hand but I've used a plugin for packing them,so probably that's why they seem auto generated.Also,I've thought about putting the assets in a context,probably the next one would have an environment.
 Thanks again!

Alemja

Ah yeah! I can definitely tell they are auto-packed. That is fine for some things, like if you're using a bunch of tiled textures on an object, however you really need to make sure that there is space for texture bleed in-between your shells. This is for LOD creation, which are frequently automated, having space for texture bleed makes sure that you don't get any funky seams. I also imagine that auto-packing doesn't really respect overlapped UVs and that's why you have so many shells. I would definitely focus on doing the UV packing on your next project mostly by hand. It isn't the most glamorous thing, but it will teach you a lot, plus UV and texture space are a couple of areas where game dev can still be surprisingly crunchy. You could possibly even challenge yourself and try to pack everything into a 2048 or smaller texture size and see how much quality you can keep. If you can make things look just as good on a 2048 or smaller as you would on a 4096 texture sheet, it puts you in a good place.