Portfolio crit/feedback

vividly_pathetic

Hey guys, was hoping to get a little feedback on my folio. Especially on loading times (my internet's a little iffy so I'm not sure if the loading times are acceptable on most connections).

Anyway, here's the link:
www.freewebs.com/shadhaque (can't afford my own domain yet... )

cholden

If you specifically want to be a character artist, you should have a character artist portfolio. Though from looking at your site, you might have a better chance as an Environment Artist. With this in mind, why not make TWO portfolios, one for for your character art and one for environment art. This way you can apply as a character artist, but if that doesn't work out you can fall back getting an environment job.

Your portfolio has 2 intro/start pages, it requires none. Take the user directly to a page of thumbnail that best represents your work. For example, this page would be better suited as the start page
http://www.freewebs.com/shadhaque/environment.htm

Some of the character work looks promising, but is rendered so dark and small it's difficult to tell. I'd redo the lighting/presentation on your characters before getting feedback. But from what I can tell, the first two and the fourth (realistic head) looks like the best stuff.

The environment work is hit and miss.
1, 7, 9, 13, 14 and 16 are pretty good. I'd revisit or remove the others. You can post them on this forum for feedback.

The quality of the 2D work is not at a level that will help. I would remove it from the presentation.

Work on overall presentation. I think you're a better artist than you're showing yourself to be. Bigger, brighter images. I'd also get rid of the flash or whatever for viewing images. Classic html and jpgs are better so that the employer can download them for further review if they wish. Also people can send you images around. By watermarking them (site address, your name and/or email) is like a digital business card.

alexk

I'm a newb but from all the portfolio crits I've read here, the general concensus is never have an "entrance/click here to enter" page. Also, your blurb says you want to be a character artist, then perhaps you should focus on presenting that instead of keeping your environment gallery

doh! cholden beat me to the punch

danr

there's no reason to have any loading times whatsoever, other than the tiny blip of time it might take to load onscreen images. I'm looking at home on a 16mb connection and i had to *wait to go onto the next page? It might not seem like a long wait, but the wasted time isn't really the issue - a portfolio is about how you present yourself as someone who can carefully consider the task at hand and apply your choices properly, which is going to be a vital skill when you land a job. All this shows about you is that you chose to present a handful of 2D images with loads of dead space through seriously bloated flash. Why? What other bad choices are you going to make at work?

character work shows a classic mistake of recent years, that you've run headlong into normal mapping before nailing the mesh itself. Your femme fatale mdel has no knees - ie, she's not a model that can be used for a game or even a posed render (is that why the knees are off shot in the first image? The elbows suffer likewise)

environment stuff needs seperating between the CG scenes with volumetric lighting etc, and the game-orientated stuff. They rarely go together. You'll need more of the game stuff to make a solid portfolio though, otherwise it just looks like a dump of stuff you did at uni. That's okay for a start, but you'll need to work at it - first step is to acknowledge that you know the difference between rendered scenes and game assets (assuming a game artist is what you want to be)

you'll also need to get a CV up there, even if there's not much on it except uni. This is standard and totally expected - interested people would be looking to either download it or copy/paste the text into their own document. Your one liner suggests borderline arrogance (though i suspect it's just another basic mistake)

[Deleted User]

The word "attempt" appeared a few times in your descriptions of your work on the site. That kind of carries the connotation that you aren't 100% satisfied with the results; which may be the case, but if so, then you'd probably want to trim those pieces from your portfolio until you've got them to a level where you feel they represent your best work.