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Thegodzero

Well it’s come to the end of the term, and I have one more to go before I graduate and set out to try and get a job. What I need to know is what skills I need to work on the most, and what skills I should try to gain before my last term is up. What do I need to do to be a better candidate for hiring?

www.tgz3d.com

RageUnleashed

Nice simple-yet-elegant layout. I particularly like the Hammerhead from Pitch Black, you captured the creature from the movie really well. Coming from someone not quite in the industry (internships thus far), I would suggest you try really pushing yourself to the next level, make a good higher-end game character model, something around HL2, Doom 3, or Unreal 3 in terms of level of detail, a really strong piece or two showing your understanding of anatomy, as well as being able to show you can do work for the high end of games these days would defintely be a plus. A character with 5k-9k triangle count, sharp texturing and perhaps normal mapping I would think would round out your pieces nicely and really boost you in the eyes of employers. Hopefully someone here with a game job can back me up, but tis something that I would doubt would hurt.

adam

I don't have much time to write, but that black bg on a white bg is going to give me a seizure. I'd say makie it all black..

Josh_Singh

Im pretty familiar with your body of work, having seen most of it here on p.c. It's all pretty good.
I agree with Adam, make ease up on the black and white. instead of black use a grey.
"What do I need to do to be a better candidate for hiring?"
Your skills are good, but to put bluntly, there are Character artists out there that are much better. My advice to you is to work on environments. Even little ones that show you can do it. Once you get into a company and build up a reputation, You may be assigned some characters. It is much easier to get into the industry from an environment artist positon than to go head on and try to be a character artist. That would be my advice. Get some environments and props, and you will be far more marketable. Hope this helps man.

Sage

Hi. You wanted to know what skills you need to build up on to get a job. I think you need to be able to do what a Senior Artist does if you want to break in. The reason I say that is because most jobs out there are for people with those abilities.

Get better at texturing. Try to only show models that are fully textured. Of all the characters the only ones that stand out are the RTS soldier but the skin parts need a bit more work, and you should tweek the model's face. It looks a bit too square at the moment; and the alien from Pitch Black. That alien needs to be textured though or it will get dismissed. The other characters if you wanted them pick one and polish it up. They are all the same quality and style so they would get dismissed if they are not all polished. Keep in mind that art teams don't have time to look at all applicants so if you don't impress them you'll not be considered. Your props seem to be your best work at the moment but take out anything not textured.

The biggest problem I see with yout site is your presentation. I refer to how you are showing off the models. Right now your presentation doesn't help much. I suggest you also show your model without a background since they can be distracting. I liked your backgrounds though. I suggest you look at other sites of artist you really like and see what they did. www.guberski.com might give you some ideas on how to show off your work.

I hate this but it's true, modellers are a dime a dozen in the Game industry! You should make your work look like things found in Unreal 2003, Doom 3, HL2. I am mostly refering to the texture quality. Hey if you can texture like Kenneth Scott you won't have an issue getting a job. So getting your texturing ability top notch is your top priority, then if you have time you should learn to animate. Later.

Alex

Bradfordart

Hey Godzero, looking good. You're RTS soldier character is the best thing on there I think, as an 600 tri and RTS character though his map should be a lot smaller than 512x512, maybe 128 or 256 at the most. Also you're 128,64,32,16 character/objects are good but I would render those by themselves rather than on a background. The demon character needs more work I think in reguards to the texture; my eye sort of gets lost on the skin parts with all that texture/grain you have going over it. I think you should consider more where of where you're light is falling and paint shodows and highlights accordingly. It will bring out more of a focal point because right now my eye kind of goes all over the place on all 3 of them; you should pose them if you can, too. The 4 untextures models look nice, but feel like you're displaying them as finished works (maybe you are), when getting a texture on to them would be really good. I would label them as WIP (maybe even in another section) until they have gone through the whole pipeline.
The Operation Anubis Models all looks good to me, esp the AA gun. Love the 2D work.

Specific things to work on in the future, I would try to approach you're UV layouts more efficiently, it takes a little more time but companies, especially those doing console titles, hate to see the blank areas that you don't use. I think you're texturing skills are getting strong especially with the RTS guy, and I would go back to you're previous work and apply what you learned with him to those things. Modeling seems good to be, but texturing is the part where you really want to focus as it is 80% of what makes game art good (right now anyways). Really focus on painting in lighting as I think that is you're weak point.

Overall though dude it's looking good, I just think if I were an employer looking at you're website, I'd want to see everything modeled, textured, and rigged/posed. Presentations seems good to be, I'd make you're preview icons bigger to draw the eye more.

J

Thegodzero

Thank you guys for the feed back rage, adam, ghost, sage, and bradfort.
So from what I see that I need to revisit my unfinished pieces and texture them up, the demons textures and posses, and the Nazi’s face. I should change the white to grey on my website so that the site isn’t so high contrast, change the background of the renders to 50% grey, and make the icons bigger. Things I need to work on are my texturing skills, more props, and some med poly normal mapped characters. That sound about rite? Anything else?

poopinmymouth

I would agree that the nazi soldier is your strongpoint. It looks really good man in those beauty renders. Probably my favorate art test for that company I have seen. I think you should be pushing your texture work, get more stuff at that level, and try to push your contrast more in some areas, really get some dark stuff going on.

Thegodzero

I didn't even see that you responded poopers, thank you. I think when i get back i'll texture up some more dark medievil guys, like the knight. Then texture the pitch black creature. After that move back to props, and try to do a finshed prop a day for a month.

Benzer

"My name is Brandon Nobbs; I'm a 3d artist originally from Spokane WA.
I have been drawing all my life originally inspired by comic books.
I tried drafting as a creative outlet for five years until learning about 3d. Since then I've been doing 3d modeling, for the past year mostly using 3DSMax 5. Currently I'm less than a year away from getting my BA in multimedia production at UAT.


My interests are drawing, modeling, snowboarding, hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, being killed in FPS's, taking over the world in RTS's, and becoming a god in RPG's."

My name is Brandon Nobbs and I'm originally from Spokane WA. (You are obviously a 3d artist) Comic books have been the major source of inspiration throughout my life. In the five years prior to my exposure to 3d art, I used drafting as my creative outlet. For the past year I have done 3d modeling primarily using 3d Studio Max 5. Currently I'm less than a year away from getting my BA in multimedia production at UAT.

I would reword most of your intro statement. Some of the sentences you have used have bad structure and unnecessary words. I'm not in the game industry, but I would imagine that communication skills are very important when working in a team atmosphere. At any rate, it's always best to be able to communicate as accurately as possible.

Thegodzero

Thank you very much for that Benzer. I just fixed it. With that i'm off for my vacation.