Critiques/Comments Needed for New Website

m.roanhaus

Hey everyone, I'm new to polycount, even though I've been checking it out for years. I read all the great advice about portfolio websites on here and finally have one to show everybody!

www.slaybot.com

All critiques/comments are welcome and highly encouraged. Quick note: Portfolio pieces are just a few things that were put on as placeholders and will probably be removed within the next few months, but feel free to talk about them. Thank you for your time:D

-Mike

edit: Sorry about the title not being named properly, I didn't read that until after posting. I think I should also mention I'm want to be an environment artist and the pieces I have so far on the site are just finished props of a slightly farther than modern robot factory scene.

Ferg

some people may disagree, but I always say stay away from frames. Employers love simplicity. The site locks itself at a fairly small size for my monitor's resolution, so it feels kind of silly to be forced to scroll down to read a resume that could easily fit on my screen as a single page.

You could do away with the lower menu, since it's just a repeat of the top one, and I didn't even notice it the first few minutes. One menu is enough.

Also, you can totally nuke the static image on the left and expand the entire site to fill that frame.... give you work more room, it feels kind of cramped in its current state.

Solid simple design though, with a few modifications it'll be prime for showing off your work and getting jorbs.

Cody

I agree with Ferg. And your resume is kind of hard to read. The font is small and the whole thing is kind of cramped. Space it out more and give it some indents to make it more organized.

m.roanhaus

Thanks for the replies so far guys.

Ferg, what do you think is a good page resolution? It's at 780x450 mainly because I want the page to load super quick and be able to fit on every person's monitor without having to scroll (everybody hates scrolling).

I agree with you 100% on it feeling a bit cramped. The bottom navigation bar isn't needed so when I delete that and the side image frames it'll free up enough room right? Or should I make my webpage bigger?

The resume was quite rushed and I forgot spaces between the different topics. I'll definitely fix that and the font size up.

Ferg

If you get rid of the side image and the bottom menu, you'll probably have enough room.

I don't think anyone is going to be visiting your page with a screen resolution below 1024x768, so as long as you keep it within those bounds, you should be fine. (well, a little less than that, since you've got the system and browser shells taking up some of that resolution, but you know what I mean)

My portfolio really needs an update, I shouldn't really be talking about weird portfolio sizes and shapes till I fix mine heh.

Yozora

You mention everybody hates scrolling, yet cramping everything in that little frame forces us to scroll anyway!

Like others have already said, site design is nice but everything is too small. Also why are there 2 menus that do the same thing? You should remove the bottom one imo

Archanex

in addition to what everyone else is saying about losing the frames. Remember to always show your wireframe on the DVD player, and make the font less hard to read while you're at it. On the barrel you're wasting a lot of polys on the top (common mistake). It's kind of hard to tell what your normal maps are doing across the board, you may want to try to find a better way of showing them off with lights or something perhaps? Finally you'll probably want to have a few more examples, 3 is kinda slim for what you've got (I'm sure you probably knew that much though)

GOBEE

Archanex is on point. The top of the barrel jumped out at me right away. Get rid of those triangles up top and maybe reduce the amount of polys in general. Other than that, no complaints about your site. I look forward to seeing what else you post in your portfolio.

bluekangaroo

I think you could benefit from doing some hi poly models in order to generate normals...right now your props look as if you just ran the diffuse thru crazy bump. Which is OK I think for small surface details but not for larger or medium sized details

DarkAlleyEthics

Your thumbnails should show what we are going to be viewing just at a smaller size. With your first two thumbnails I can't tell what I'm going to see if I click it. The first one is a weapon and the thumbnail makes it appear to be an oil barrel, imo. Plus to echo the points made before, everything is soooooo small and hard to see. Make it all bigger, there's a lot of wasted screen space. With that said, I really like the presentation of each piece with ref. shots and flats and your UV layouts appear to be well done.

Jeremy Lindstrom

holy resurrection batman.