folio update + first attempt at normal mapping.

Bronco

hey guys

about time I posted something again and so here we go.

Ive adjusted my folio to suit some of the suggestions some fo you have made to me at last,Ive added my name and website on the images,adjusted/uploaded some new content.

Hope its OK,the forced centre/left/right thing im aware of and havent really come up with a solution apart from sorting it all out with even more layers,any suggestions?

Ive also uploaded my first attempts at soemthing halfway towards next gen with mixed results in my opinion but im pretty happy and for once im feeling confident about the work im producing which can only be a good thing,right?

anyway my foods getting cold,heres the stuff.

http://www.hedgeart.com

feedback on the site and content much appreciated as always .

Cheers

john

Ninjas

Your work on there seems pretty solid, though nothing mind-blowing. I think the best piece is the dude on the stretcher, though your guns looked very nice.

I think the green buttons look ghetto.

On your resume I think it would read better if it said

"Objective:- To use my art skills in a team orintated enviroment, to build upon the skills I already have and improve so that I may produce the highest quality of game art.

The site layout is good. All the info is clear. I think some cool buttons and a title graphic would take it to the next level.

Bronco

hey Ninja's

Thanks for the reply...haha those buttons,someone who shall stay namless put a cain to my backside earlier today about those ill figure up some new ones for tonight.

ya im getting my dear mother to check over my resume tonight,but ill throw what ya say in there anyway..good call.

"Your work on there seems pretty solid, though nothing mind-blowing"- well all I can do is keep at it and practice and keep posting of course.

on another note,again to the anomynous one who contacted me earlier,there was a suggestion of changing the layout so evrything of one particular section is on the same page.

more like this http://www.hedgeart.com/weaponsall.htm

but im alsightly concerned about loading times?...opinions?

Cheers!,now to create some new buttons

john

Striff

I liked your artwork, especially your guns. I think that your resume section seems pretty crammed together, and not really organized. Maybe make a PDF file with columns and sort some of that out?

Other then that, looks great, good luck job hunting.

bearkub

This may be a tad harsh and nit picky, but they are things I immediately noticed and figured I would throw in here:

-spellcheck. Learnt is not a word and I saw it a couple times just glancing.

-waaaay too many images, imo. One pic of the flats, one beauty render, one wire render is about all you need and is about all that will (more than likely) be looked at.

-The info on the side of the page for each model is far too wordy. One total polycount for each, texture size and that's about it. The rest is just fluff.

-Get rid of the multi-image stuff on the main page and just have a clickable thumbnail or a single clickable image to each model.

-I also agree the green buttons look very rushed.

Otherwise, the layout is pretty solid, could possibly be simplified a bit and condensed, but not really necessary. The big issue with me is the excessiveness of some of the images and text. Good start, now just clean it up. =]

MoP

bearkub, don't wanna rain on your parade, but learnt is very much a word

Bronco, I like the layout of the weapons page, I don't think loading time is a problem there, since all the images are large, and necessary - I'd only worry about loading times if it was a main index page, I'm sure if people are clicking a link from the main page, then they expect to come across lots of images, so that's fine.

Generally the layout seems a bit haphazard - I think you're trying too hard to put all possible info in ... as has been mentioned, sometimes there are just too many images, it kinda puts people off because of the extreme choice - just throw a couple of the best renders up, with detail shots included in the side of the big images, rather than separate images for every single item and separate object.

Also it seems a bit text heavy - I think it'd be more simple and stylish if you just put the texture size and polygon count into the actual image, just "283 triangles, 256x256 texture" rather than all this text taking up a huge amount of space on the left of the images - it just seems kinda unnecessary and overwhelming.

It's pretty good artwork, your guns are the strong point, I think, but you just need to streamline it all so that it's not overwhelming to the user - just get pruning, cut out all that stuff that isn't absolutely necessary, and crunch it all down into easily digestible segments.

Hope that helps! Keep it up

-MoP

bearkub

Well, I'll be dipped. Well then the hell with me! =]

cholden

I agree with a lot of what's been said here. The buttons are ghetto, a little tough to read, and inconsistent with the rest of the site. I like the one thumbnail for each piece in the main gallery idea.

The mouse-overs may be complicating things, and I don't really notice them. If you're really worried about too much loading, get rid of them. It'll cut your thumbnail load time in half. Also, for your portfolio pieces, I'm not a fan of using mouse-overs at all. This hides your work if the user doesn't think to mouse-over your images (which they have no reason to do in the first place).

I strongly support simplifying your gallery pages. As it stands, your navigation is all over the place. Buttons here, buttons there, random mouse-overs, etc. I'm also finding TONS of broken links all over your site. Have a look at what Pior did for his quick tour or steal my layout. http://www.pioroberson.com/

Couple layout issue in Foxfire: everything is forced to the center with a large tab on the left hand side. Your welcome and info at the top are centered correctly, but everything below that (thumbnails) suffers from this. I can take a screen grab of what this looks like if you need.

I get the same problem on your resume page Everything is forced in to a very wide page, meaning I have to scroll to read it. Also, your resume layout being centered all the way down bugs me. Maybe it's because of the forced size of this page. Print Preview your resume, and be sure it's all printable on one page. Same for your resume downloads. Not to be rude, but your “Work Experience” section sounds like you're joking. One week? Three days? Supermarket? Not sure these boost your resume, but whatever floats your boat.

Overall, your work is looking good, and that's what matters. Clean it all up, fix broken links, typos, etc, and you'll be on to something here.

Jon Jones

I wrote an article about putting together a good portfolio, you can check that out here:

http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=73945&an=0&page=0#73945

I'd agree on dropping the mouseovers on thumbnails. Why do they turn from color to greyscale when you hover over them? It makes them look worse as you select them. some don't change at all because there's not color in the final image, so I don't know if it's highlighted or not.

Besides, every other website i've seen that does this goes from greyscale to color. It's weird to do the opposite, for no apparent reason.

Also, there's no spacing between thumbnails and I thought they were all big images.

Finally, the resume... wow. Chris is spot on for everything. Terrible layout, typos everywhere, irrelevant and incomplete information in the 'work experience' field... awful. Although I did think it was funny that you mentioned that you like drinking alcohol on your resume, that's probably not something that's going to work in your favor.

I'm tempted to say it'd be easier to scrap the entire website and start over from a MS Frontpage template, keeping in mind all comments here.

bearkub

Oooops! I meant to link that thread. Thanks Jon.

MoP

Heh, I didn't read your resume before, but yeah, scrap that whole thing right now, remove the link from the site, and rewrite it from the ground up - look at other professional artists' resumes for ideas and structure.

Spell check it. Then get some people to read over it for you, make suggestions etc. Then if everyone's happy, upload it and re-link it on your site.

Remove the resume until then though, right now it's making you look bad, and that's really not what it should be doing!

Rick Stirling

Piors site is one of the best portfolio sites out there in my opinion.

Your best bet is to take a bit of paper and design the layout. Have a look at various sites and see how the content is laid ou. Not just portfolio sites - Look news.bbc.co.uk and ebay.com and amazon.com and lastminute.com etc.

All of those sites are designed to present the content as forecfully as possible. 3 are designed to sell you stuff. You are trying to sell yourself via your art.

You have too much content that isn't prioritised. If you look at Piros site again you will see that he has got a lot of stuff there, but hits you smack in the face with 4 big images, then you have to scroll to another presentation mehotd. SO you get big quality stuff, then the second part looks like "By the way, this is the amount of work I can do"


If you want help with site layout and css, ask me and I'll sort you out.

Rick Stirling

And the design is TOO WIDE. I have to scroll on my 1024x768

Bronco

hey guys

thanks all for your opinions and advising me,im pretty much overhauling everything anyway so i will proberly start over.

Rick thanks for the offer of help ill be getting in touch.

heres a summary of things im doing currently:-

* merging the 3 renders into 1 image.
* adding polycounts,texture sizes,url and my name to all images.

This will hopefully enable my next effort to be an image only site.(and destroy my typoes hopefully )

ok so this maybe a dumb question but what shall i put in my CV?..I notice many of you guys start your CV at university,but im not at university,my day job IS the supermarket thing,i come home and do art(mods, for fun nothing significant),maybe go out with friends or whoever in the evening...I might be missing something but im not acturally seeing what I have to make me sound appealing to any potential employer at all.

again though ive taken a pounding here you have all given your proffesional opinions which is what I need and I thank you for your honesty.

john

cholden

Mods can be good to list, especially if it's proven work. As in, they can download/play the mod and see your work in it or at least a mod site with screens. Since you don't have any real professional experience just be honest about it. A smart way to handle that without degrading yourself is say something about seeking an entry-level position. That asys you've never worked without saying "I've never worked" (in the game industry).

Jon Jones

Bronco, reading your response, I have to say that that's one of the best responses I've ever seen to a critique like that. I'm honestly blown away by that.

Most people would have disagreed, become defensive or thrown a tantrum, but you took it like a man. I REALLY respect that, and I hope others do, too, because that demonstrates a winner's attitude. Good luck, man, I mean it.

danr

you've tagged yourself on the index page as "Enviroment Artist" (sic, you've missed an N out) ... few places would see producing vehicles and weapons as the responsibility of an Environment Artist ... and although you've demonstrated many of the appropriate skills, you should have more examples of level geometry, props, dressing on there before you apply that specific description to yourself.

If you're saying you want to be, or at practising at being, an environment artist you could do with briefly explaining that ... maybe get some WIP stuff up in the meantime as a statement of intent?

Bronco

howdy guys

Ok,spent the weekend doing this.... http://www.hedgeart.com

new site,perhaps a more diplomatic CV and I threw a WIPS section in there as danr suggested.

Hope its answered most of the crits of that bad previous effort

Cheers

john

cholden

Big improvement, and nice to see you're working on a next gen mod. That one scrolling/wasted area issue still seems to hold strong, so I took a pic of it so you can see
http://chrisholden.net/areyoulookingatmyheadgeart.jpg

Rick Stirling

^^^^^ You see what he just said?

The site is MASSIVE in size, twice as big as it needs to be with scrolling that it doesnt need.

I still do quite a bit of site design, and will still not design for a bigger res that 800x600. Yes people do have big screens, but that is for max and photoshop, not web browsing. It's not comfortable to read when bigger, and having to scroll is jsut a NO-NO!

Also, those iframes are not a good idea because they break the flow of the site - you have multiple scroll bars. Google on Iframes are Evil.


Also, then I went to the torture victim, I couldn't see a link back the site home page.