Portfolio help. Pls
Hey will be looking for an internship program soon. So thought Id make a portfolio to send. Tips on layout would be appreciated. Copied alot of other portfolios I liked (domain is temporary)
http://www.billtruran.com/finalweb/home.htm
http://www.billtruran.com/finalweb/home.htm
Replies
Some are also dark. Black background hurts everything for contrast. Pick a neutral color.
With a black background and no ambient light going on, it is hard to tell where the model ends and the black background begins. With a neutral color as a bg, your lights still pop, as well as your darks.
also, your texture for the double pistols could be a bit sharper at 512x512, try adding some metal texture overlays and look at some other well done gun textures to see what makes them look good, there are plenty of cs: source replacement weapon download sites out there
good luck dude!
But site layout is ok? should I have another page for contact spacific?
you misspelled following, also, I almost missed that little block of text all together
and yeah, everything is SUPER dark
i really don't know if employers will care about your carrier choice. I mean, i favour the HMS Ark Royal, but i don't go shouting about it ...
O and im glad im not trying to get work, danr.
Question/Comment about education; basically states:
"Home schooled from 4th-12th grade
Self taught in Maya
Currently working on Bachelors"
Most resumes don't list elementary or high school education. Home school is also one of those things some people can be iffy about. While personally, one of my best friends home schooled and turned out great (after spending some years trying to become socially acceptable), but he did receive some backlash on it during an interview. Again, not my opinion.
Self taught isn't really an education, I wouldn't list this. Personally I reckon I'm self taught in all programs, but there's no need to list it since you've already recognized it under Applications.
What does "Currently working on Bachelors" mean? Are you studying for it at some school? You'd be better off listing it as "In 1st year of study for Bachelors at University of School of Arts" Or whatever the specifics are.
First impression was good for me. Nice big icons that clearly show the contents of the link. Name at the top with job description. Perfect.
Home school is often linked with having poor social skills. Try not to take it the generalization personally.
Renders are too dark. Cheap solution would be to histogram it. Proper solution would be better rendered lighting.
I'm not an environment artist but I didn't get why you displayed the texture flats of the cottage style house. It seems inefficient to me.
"...fallowing the source engine restrictions" - following spelling.
When writing any text on your site, or doing anything for your portfolio, imagine you are your favorite artist. How would they speak? What decisions would they make? Probably something I should do more of too.
Nothing on the tutorials page, and frankly I think it's going to be awhile before we see any. Remove the link altogether.
The entire demo reel needs to be re-rendered / redone. There is almost no lighting in anything, you have no way for anyone to scrub through your demo-reel (Edit - The player function doesn't appear to be working in Mozilla Firefox, but works in IE...might look into this), no place for anyone to actually download it, and frankly the pace is too fast for anyone to really get a decent look at anything, and even then, most of it appears super low-res.
Lay off the normal maps until you get the very basics of modeling, texturing, UVing, and lighting / rendering.
Then move onto specs and normal. You have to crawl before you can walk - and you have a bit of crawling to do.
Or series of points I mean.
By the way Mtg_Kerin, how much longer do you have until you graduate?
At first time I visited your site, I couldn't register your name correctly. It looked alike 'illiam ruran' due to colored initial of your name.
I'd consider change it as your name is most important thing you should sell out.
Read up on 3 point lighting don't just look for 3D specific sources but check photography sites, especially semi-pro sites that have users that like to build their own lighting set ups. Make note of light position intensity and work around they come up with. We have the luxury of not having to fight lighting and we can bend it pretty much to our will if we know how, getting to that level is hard but not impossible. Learning to light a scene is a very valuable skill especially for enviromental artists which is something most first time enviro guys are pretty bad at. It's one of the main reasons would be enviro guys end up working on just props not scene building.
Still google 3 point lighting but heres a quick run down how I use it.
- Key lights:
Your main light set this to cast shadows, the shadow should be slightly transparent, don't leave it at the default of 1.0 that makes dark nasty shadows. Shadows are washed out by light bouncing off everything, look around you try and find a 100% jet black shadow, its hard to find. Mimics the sun or overhead lighting.
- Fill lights:
These are ambient lights that raise the overall level of light in your scene, set these to NOT cast shadows. Use these lights to mimic light bouncing from other sources. Light bounces off everything in the real world, in 3D it doesn't bounce unless you fake it, or start using advanced lighting. In dark or night scenes use cool colors, blue, purple. This is very important in games because there are tons of areas that need to be dark but players still need to navigate. You can also play the key lighting off the cool dark ambient lighting by using warmer colors, yellows, light browns, orange, light green.
- Rim lights or Back Lighting:
Try to get a thin line of sharp bright color that outlines your model. It will help separate it from the background which is something you need to work on.
You have some good Key lights but you need Fill and Rim/Back lighting.
I wrote up a pretty detailed Beginners Guide to Direct Lighting which might help you light your scenes and objects for max effect.
Now, lets talk about your site layout and color choices.
Contrast:
Your work is going to be viewed on all kinds of monitors in all kinds of different situations. What looks bright and colorful on cheap LCD in a dark room, might look really washed out and dark on a nicer high end flatscreen in a well lite room. You need to aim to make it work well on as many screens as possible. If 4 out of 5 dentists ask you if you've ever thought about whitening your teeth... guess what its time to think about it. I see a few posts here complaining about everything being dark.
Colors:
They indicate and represent a lot of things to different people but there are some semi-universal truths that are working against you.
Black -- As mentioned a few times the black background is killing your work. Render out a dark object on a pure black background, then render it out on pure white and then try a mild gray. White will assault your eyes and make it hard to read details but you'll get a good sense of the silhouette. Black will also wash the details out as Black also signals the absence of detail, a void. If and when you get to the point that you have to stare at a few hundred portfolios you'll start to see a few things that stink of armature, the black background being one of them.
Red -- Bleeds/blends into black really well and you should be using a contrasting color. Check your site by stepping back and squinting at it. What major color blocks do you see? If its a dark blur you need to work on it.
Layout:
Perfect! Just what it needs to be, easy to navigate and zero "emo, my cat ran away the world hates my life" blog stuff. Kudos on NOT falling into the classic trap of trying to impress with your web designer flash skills by making us sit through a load screen, then a slash screen then a load screen for each gallery. Nice simple quick effiecent I really like it. You might want to consider changing the font like danr suggested, because its a little stiff. If you talk to Hawken he'll suggest Impact or Arial (HA thats a joke don't do that). Personally if I was to do my site over (which its time) I might pick a blueprint font to emphasized the building/technical nature of what we do. Or do like what I did last time and just draw up buttons and graphics. Either way there are a ton of highly readable fonts out there, do some exploring and at least dig up something that isn't a MS system font =P
Why not put a next button on the images? Kind of silly to make them go back to the main page. I think 3 buttons at the bottom would work. <Back [Main] Next>
Standardize where you put the info, texture sheets and wire views. I think you could fit a beauty render on the left, wire/shaded view in the center, and textures on the right side, with the info running along the bottom.
The Content:
The alley--
I think your at a good level for geometry and textures its just the lighting and composition that need work. You might benifit from doing more research and digging up ref images to help fill in some of the detail holes. Alley ways have a lot more then just your standard fire escape and random dumpsters.
RTS Cottage--
Given the top down 3/4 view nature of most RTS games you might want to punch up the roof texture. Right now it kind of looks like paster, concrete or maybe burlap. The dirt/grease/water mark on the roof doesn't really match standard weathering. Think about what dirt and water do when it rains, its kind of the same effect that a river has with silt, it picks it up and delivers it somewhere else. Think about what causes that dirt, pollution? Plant life? Use? Age? Rot?
Double Pistols--
Err you mean one pistol copied two times... Same goes for the spec and defuse, they look just about the same and the way the scene lighting is set up the spec doesn't appear to be doing much. I take it these are First Person Perspective models that are viewed from the back? How do they look from that angle since thats really the only one that matters. Its all fine and good to model something and make it look good from the side but you have to keep the end result in mind. You say you followed the Source Wiki as a guide what stopped you from putting them in game? Showing final art in game gets big points in my book. But reading comments about a half hearted attempt to follow some guide kind of sends up a flag
Desk--
Nothing really wrong here except maybe the over use of un-retouched photos as textures. Some better lighting, spec map improvements and some different angles or close ups of props would help.
Roman Assets--
I actually thought this was a pop can before I read the title, which actually takes up a large chunk of the viewing area. All that blank space could have been used to provide a bigger image, different angles and more proof it isn't a pop can being impaled on half buried spikes.
Swat Assets--
Awesome, your strongest work, but its hard to see. Revisit the lighting using 3 point lighting and really sell it.
http://willtruran.com/
http://apsentertainment.com/
Alex
http://willtruran.com/