[Portfolio] – Robert Valles, Environment Artist

XRevan23

Hi everyone, I recently graduated a couple of months ago and would like to get critiques on my website and portfolio. Just wanted to check what other artists critiques and suggestions are.

Here is a link to my website http://robertvallescg.com

All critique that could help me in any way are welcome.

Thanks to anyone and everyone for any advice, look forward to the replies.

Currently looking for a environment artist job:poly122:

AtlusZMH

everything on your website loads terribly slow for me.. anyone else having a loading issue? 0.o

That turned me off from looking at too much of your stuff.. could be my shitty internet connection though..

EbolaV

your site is really slow loading, i click a small thumb the big thumb is loading and that slow... then i click on that thumb.... loading and finally i can see the big picture. After the first pictures it gets to much on my nerves. The big pictures seems to me a bit blurry. When i visit your site, first i see is an additional Enter button but i want to see right away your work and not that much clicking. The small text about the different projects is hard to read to me and it seems to be allways the same stuff about your workflow. okay i hope you know what im talking about and it helps you a bit

Fishypants

It seems to me that instead of actually having "thumbnails" you are displaying the full resolution images, just scaled down. Am I right?

If you are then, dont do that. If you are not, then check your image quality settings, make sure it is compressed enough (without losing quality) and use that.

Either way your images shouldn't take that long to load. Your stuff looks cool, so you want to show it to potential employers as fast as possible.

Just my 2 cents.

BradMyers82

To add to what others have said, the text explaining your work is too small, and hard on the eyes. You also should simplyify what you are saying with bullet points or something, because no one wants to be faced with a wall of text.
I think if you just made some changes to the website and worked a little on how you present things, it would really go a long way.

XRevan23

ok thanks, i lowered the size of most of the images, so it should go a lot faster, if not it could just be dreamweaver junk. And I'm trying to fix the description to be more compact and readable. Should have that done soon.

Thanks for the advice so far

cholden

Stuff looks good, but most of your work reads a bit dark. This mostly is due to harsh, unrealistic lighting unaccounting for any ambience. See light bounces off of everything, so unless you're inside a cave with no lights on rgb0 usually doesn't happen. On top of that, you're hiding a bulk of the work you did in pieces by not lighting them properly. For example, that Alien Temple, with that much sky light coming in, there's no way it'd be that dark, and the level of darkness hides the fact that you used any textures in this piece. It's all silhouettes and random glowing blobs.

This is enhanced by a completely black background creating a stiff contrast between your content and it's surroundings. By using a neutral color background, your images won't be presented so poorly. In fact, if I take any of your images and view them outside of your web site, they automatically look better.

Jeremy Lindstrom

Why do you have a 'enter' page? The page should go directly to your art, there's no need for a page that just says "enter"... the less clicks your people need to click to get to the artwork the better...

kwakkie

wow man, whats up with this wireframe. Why do some simle walls have a shitload of triangles???

Talking about this shot in particular: http://robertvallescg.com/NarutoTownWireframe01.jpg

Cojax

Your site loads really slow. You also have some poorly optimized mesh's displayed in wire-frame. Also I saw nothing that really caught my eye. I agree with most of the previous comments.

One thing is for sure. When you show your stuff here people are brutally honest. Thats a good thing

praxedes

that wireframe is freaky- I actually don't know how you would get that mess of triangles- the only time i've seen that is when I've poly-crunched a ZB model!

I'm afraid I don't like the navigation system- click to close, click-drag to pan and ARROW KEYS to navigate...why can't I have a next and back button? I am far too lazy to use both hands to navigate a website- and I might by using my other hand for something-else...


~P~

PS I'll be putting my portfolio out like a lamb to the slaughter very shortly too, so I do feel your pain!

Mark Dygert

Loads slowly, the thumbnails switch up down on the bottom in weird ways, not really sure why that is, the zoomed views load pretty slow.

The lighting needs a lot of work. Konoha Street for example has a lot of yellow light and deep dark shadows, but a bright blue sky?

MoP

It almost looks like you've just used a "decimated" (automatically optimised) lowpoly for some of that environment work, which is a big no-no. It's not efficient at all.

whats_true

Kill the enter page. If your gona keep it, you need a better picture to WOW me into your site.

Keep "Alien Temple", drop "Boilerplate" and "Lytus". Temple shows an excellent example of normal mapping and has by far the best set of pieces in your set. Boiler and Lytus have such bad normal/bump mapping, I would be weary of even showing that. Lighting needs a strong pass again to. If you want to keep them, do it on the condition that you fix everything in it, other wise your just dragging yourself down with it. Same goes for "Uncharted", which is a lot better then those two, but is in the middle of Temple and Lytus quality wise. You should just focus on this actually instead of wasting time on the other two.

Your personal stuff is really good. Besides what has already been said above, I think you should show that first. Better yet, why are you separating these? Combine them together.

Also, do you really thing people have 20/20 vision to be able to read what you wrote? Bloody, its like, point 3 font! Keep it around 12 mate.

One more thing. Change your background color so that its not straight black. could be like 95-90, but straight 100 is not really good. Probably a personal pref, but I've always been told that and have to agree with it.

monkeyboy_garth

I second what Kwakkie + MoP have said. I'd fix that stuff asap coz as soon as an employer looks at that they're going to put a cross through your name. Sorry, but it's true

praxedes

Oh- when you address the font, also fix your grammatical errors because some of it reads awkwardly, and some stuff ids just plain wrong; e.g. "A Alien temple"



~P~

XRevan23

ok thanks guys, ill get started on fixing the town scene first since it will probably take the longest, then work on the lighting on the alien scene, fix the website stuff when im done

thanks again for the advice so far

XRevan23

Website updates

Made font a little bigger, at 10 right now.
Change the background color to dark gray.
Optimized some of the scenes a little bit.
Added some new environments.
Re-lit some of the scenes.

Big thanks for the advice so far and hopefully to the advice to come.

Fishypants

Just a quick critique, on your main page the "Konoha Street" scene, the lighting on the street is EXTREMELY yellow, very harsh, and doesn't really match the sky thats in there. I would say that the lighting on the buildings should be closer to what you have in your "Lytus" scene, with more blues, pinks and reds.

Just my 2 cents.

Jungsik

Get rid of your enter page!! it should show your work right away : )

Goat Justice

I took a quick tour through the site... Below are some things that jumped out at me. First impressions follow the links.

Overall this cries out for some editing. Pare it down to the best stuff you have then start adding new work to build from there. Specifically work on lighting, poly and texture efficiency, and overall texture presentation. Try to get those diffuse maps looking as nice as possible on and off the model.

Lighting Issues:
http://robertvallescg.com/LinksRoom_Scene.jpg <- yellow haze at the top dark otherwise
http://robertvallescg.com/NarutoTownScreenshot01.jpg <- Light is yellow heading towards green
http://robertvallescg.com/pagodatower01.jpg <- Back-lit or heavily shadowed one.

Model issues:

http://robertvallescg.com/z_kc_building_hellgate.jpg <- 5000+ tris?!
http://robertvallescg.com/OldRepublicShip01_Wireframe.jpg <- probably too many edges on those rafter pipes.
http://robertvallescg.com/preswalla01_wireframe.jpg <- Edgeloops?
http://robertvallescg.com/presceilingfan01.jpg <- Thats some really normally wood... also not really digging the uncharted screenshot as backdrop,since this asset is not from the game.

Image Issues:

http://robertvallescg.com/presentation%20page%2001.jpg
Seriously uneven pixel density... or maybe depth of field issues on the far left. either way pick a different shot. Crank up the settings in whatever engine (UDK?) you're using when you take folio shots.

jimmypopali

Your Legend of Zelda scene. Are you sure that's not actually from Ocarina of Time ?

XRevan23

-Ok so i should work on the lighting on the Naruto scene to be more like the sky.
-A lot of people don't seem to like splash pages, but i feel weird about going straight to a random page like that, maybe a few suggestions of a good web layout might help.
-Zelda scene gets too dark.(yes it is from twilight princess concept)
-I can't really change the pagoda tower that much, its in a engine I'm still trying to learn.
-yeah i went overboard a little with the wood gate. Needs to be optimized.
-those pipes are only at 10, but the tris in udk make it look like 20.
-the uncharted wall, don't follow the eat 3d tutorial too much.....
-the wood fan, i think it may be the smoothing groups in max.
-the uncharted shot, that's not my assets, so i will try to pick a other shot.

I will start by working on these issues and try to get as many fix as I can. Then work my way from their. Thanks for the advice so far.

Seanfac3

I noticed in the "Uncharted" scene video clip, the intro displays your team DX, whatever the name is, for 19 seconds and your video is 35 seconds. There is no need to show your name that long or at all ( we are at YOUR site). The team name DX, with the hands crossed in the BG ( I am assuming that is the 'wrAstLin' thing where they say suck it or whatever) doesn't seem very professional. IMO.

vofff

can I ask why your site is so slow?

XRevan23

i totally agree with you Seanfac3, I'm thinking with all the problems in that scene if I should just scrap the whole thing.

I don't know why its so slow, its ok for me...

fearian

XRevan23 wrote: »

-A lot of people don't seem to like splash pages, but i feel weird about going straight to a random page like that, maybe a few suggestions of a good web layout might help.

It's not a random page - it's your portfolio! It's the main event, It should be the first thing people see; Thumbs of your work, and easy access to the full images.

At the moment the thumbnail images are too packed for me to make out what's in them. Zoom in a little more on a nice focal point. Then the next problem is clicking a thumbnail just gets me a bigger thumbnail! The image that loads in the middle of the screen is too small! This makes it pointless. I've loaded up an image that's too small to examine, so I have to click it for a bigger image to get the full picture. And then sometimes, I have to click THAT for the bigger picture. KISS. Keep it Simple, Stupid. Click a thumb, get a full image.

The text is still to small as well. I would say rethink your gallery layout. You have some nice work to show, but your not showing it effectively.

XRevan23

ok ill do some looking around and come up with a different web site layout

XRevan23

ok now that the holidays have past, Ive uploaded my new website. Hopefully you guys(or girls) like this one better. Now I can get the ball rolling on fixing some of my environment mistakes. Any advice is once again is thanked in advance.

http://robertvallescg.com/

XRevan23

ok i had a quick question in regards to my website about screen brightness, on my screen some things look brighter than other people's pc, should I try to make the picture look better on what I see on others or on mine, or across the board it should look good?

ps-does anybody know any good sites for environment concept, i want to do a new environment to really push myself, but I haven't really found that one yet.

Snader

XRevan23 wrote: »

should I try to make the picture look better on what I see on others or on mine, or across the board it should look good?

Across the board. It's unlikely that future employers are going to come to your house and use that PC to check your website. Have you considered that maybe your screen is the one that's badly calibrated?

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

On the content, I think your biggest problem is lazyness. It looks like you're throwing your highpoly meshes through a polycruncher instead of putting effort in a proper lowpoly. It's also evident in the KOTOR and Zelda scenes, where all cylinders have the same amounts of sides. It also shows in the alien temple, where you don't take the time to reduce loops at all. You can get better results with less than half the tri-count:

240ish triangles.

XRevan23

Snader wrote: »

Across the board. It's unlikely that future employers are going to come to your house and use that PC to check your website. Have you considered that maybe your screen is the one that's badly calibrated?

yes I have, its not, so i guess its ok the way I was doing it then, maybe the other computers I checked it on were just bad or something

also fixed the pipes in the old republic scene, and don't think there is anything wrong with the size in the Zelda scene, most are i think the appropriate size between 3,5,6,8 and 10 depending on size of the object.

thanks for the advice Snader, i will have the alien pillar more optimized soon :poly142:

XRevan23

Website update with a new environment:thumbup:
http://robertvallescg.com/