[Portfolio] Brody Brooks

BrodyB

Hey guys,

I'm a junior at Cogswell Polytechnical College focusing on 3D Modeling. I've had my site up for a while, but I'm hoping to get an internship as a modeler this Summer, so thought I'd see if I can get some critical feedback on my meager portfolio.

http://www.brodybrooks.com/

Thanks,
- Brody

00Zero

one thing that stands out to me is how you are showing your textures. instead of having dif,spc,nrm on one thumb, i think you should seperate them into their own. because if i want to see how your diffuse looks, i can only see a small corner.

explaining a bit more about how you made your stuff would also be cool.

breakneck

well I'd say you are heading in the right direction with your modeling and optimizing(except those books infront of the bookstore -thats crazy modeling every book!!!), but the areas I see that could use improvement are the textures and the renders.
Some texture techniques to wrap your head around are using overlapping uvs to maximize your texture space. learning how to create an ao map to multiply into the diffuse map. I'm not sure if modo does render to texture stuff - if not - get your hands on xNormal, it will help with that kind of stuff.
There are some other things but for now I suggest you suck up all the knowledge you can and apply it to new projects.
The polycount wiki would be a good place to start:
http://wiki.polycount.net/

thats all from me for now. . .but good start!

gamedev

One thing that caught my attention was the work time you posted per asset. 2 weeks for a robot drone and then 9 hours for a astronaut type character. 2 weeks for any asset that size won't get you too far. And without a proper high rez, something like that should take a day (5-8 hours) or a little more if you're doing engine work (shaders, collision, lightmap, etc). Just some food for thought man.

Ditch the bump maps. Focus on normals, speed / efficiency, and textures.

Cheers,

Tyler

BrodyB

Thanks for the tough feedback, guys.

@breakneck: modo does do texture baking, including ao baking. All the models up there have an ao pass on the diffuse, but I guess I muted it too much in Photoshop if you think it's not doing anything for the texture. I'll toy around with it a bit more.

@gamedev: I suppose the Work Time read incorrectly. It wasn't total time spent on it sans breaks. I can see how people would take that the wrong way, so I nixed it from the site. Even so, I do need to work on speed. Thanks for the feedback.

Tumerboy

Hey Brody, good to see you working on this. I like the layout overall. Having the packages, and specs at the top is nice.

your bookstore is REALLY desaturated. It's hard to tell that there's even any color applied to most of it. Dunno if that was the render or the texture or what?

I agree with just showing your maps flat out. You can cram them all into the same image, just put them side by side instead.

Ditch your Bump maps, or at least convert them to normals and show those. I don't know anyone that still uses bump maps.