Introducing myself - Uni work

carlo_c

Hello all, just finished up my second year at uni and thought it would be a good time to start posting on polycount (I've been lurking for a while now lol).

Basically we had to produce a level and trailer for a fictional game within a period of 4 months. Was a lot of work for a small period of time and we were using CryEngine2 (crymod.com was our tutor lol). The trailer was the main focus of the work.

There was some trouble at the start, SDK wasn't out for the first month and we really got hindered with engine stuff like importing characters and flowgraphs which ate up a lot of our time. There were 3 of us in the group and we were all happy with our result.

Link to Trailer: http://www.vimeo.com/1082006

Vanity stills for our project (large-ish images so linked instead of embedded):
http://blog.carlocarfora.co.uk/screampark/fp-content/images/vanity_shot_1.jpg
http://blog.carlocarfora.co.uk/screampark/fp-content/images/vanity_shot_2.jpg
http://blog.carlocarfora.co.uk/screampark/fp-content/images/vanity_shot_3.jpg

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated and I'm going to be trying to post frequently here so it's also an introduction lol. Thanks for looking at this guys!

renderhjs

how many is 'we'

carlo_c

There were 3 of us in the group and we were all happy with our result

Should have probably wrote it at the start

Ott

The shots look pretty good, but keep in mind that employers are going to want to see YOUR stuff, and group projects are a bit of a turnoff if that is all you have to show. (As a 3d artist)

If you want honest critiques, post what you did by yourself

ColinR

I'm one of the three that worked on the level and the trailer. I feel that we suffered a little on the actual art side of things throughout though........as we were always pushed into the direction that the trailer was what mattered overall along with getting to grips with the engine from any of this assignment work. Obviously we've learnt from this, and next year we'll focus on our personal art assets individually, and put the level/trailer as something of little importance to us and purely for grading marks.

Ott wrote: »

but keep in mind that employers are going to want to see YOUR stuff, and group projects are a bit of a turnoff if that is all you have to show. (As a 3d artist)

If you want honest critiques, post what you did by yourself

Totally understand where you're coming from here, and I definitely agree with it.

I worked on the haunted house in this vanity still, while our character artist created the zombies for that shot also.

My other main contribution was the ferris wheel, which is shown below.



Like I said before, the assignment has been more of a learning process for the actual engine more than anything.........but overall we were impressed with how our trailer ended up on its own.

Hopefully over the summer months we can work on our own personal stuff, and put all this down to a learning experience more than anything. But any crits and words of wisdom from people would be highly appreciated.

carlo_c

Here are a couple of the things I worked on, also did a lot of the terrain stuff with the sandbox editor and some flowgraph stuff (things I didn't really want to spend time doing).

Second building in game: http://blog.carlocarfora.co.uk/screampark/fp-content/images/vanity_shot_2.jpg

TorQue[MoD]

Those are pretty good for someone who just graduated. My suggestion, find a Crysis mod you like and help them out for a few months with some environment props to build up your portfolio. Your modeling skills look good enough (without seeing wires) and your textures are good as well so you just need some more content and its always good to have a lot of variation too, so some sci-fi and fantasy stuff mixed in would help out.

carlo_c

Thanks a lot for the comments, I've actually not graduated yet I still have one year to go!

I'll be sure to include some more varied work in my portfolio and we are going to be using the Unreal 3 engine next year, we had a lot of headaches with the cryengine2 and there seems to be much more documentation available for the Unreal 3 engine.

A question I have is what kind of 2d work/concept stuff do employers want to see from somebody who wants to go into environment modelling. Theres an emphasis on life drawing at our uni but is it relevant to a junior environment position, or would landscape concepts be more suited?

System

I liked it, it was quite entertaining but the thing that was missed out was character noises like footsteps and breathing etc. Lighting looked quite moody, models were good, textures in places could do with some work but overall nice job.

ColinR

Thanks a lot for the comments, it's much appreciated........especially considering the work may be hard to crit because of the nature of the assignment given and that we tackled.

Like we've said, still got another year left until graduation, so hopefully in that time we can both individually work on our portfolios and put the assigned teamwork at the end of the year on more the secondary focus.

but the thing that was missed out was character noises like footsteps and breathing etc.

Yes, you definitely have a point about this and guessing it's in reference to the beginning shot where the character is walking into the park. This shot was actually added right at the end because we felt we needed to determine the situation that the player was in......although I admit, we did not pick up on this.....maybe that was due to the deadline we had to hit though.