[Portfolio] - Jeremy Mathes, Environment Artist

mathes

Hey everyone,

I don't exactly feel worthy of posting here with some of the amazing talent I've seen, but I need to put my work out there and get some critiques.

http://www.korylla.com/mathes_portfolio/

Back story, I've been working in architectural visualization for 6 years (I crash landed into it after my schooling), but I really want to break away from that and get into video games.

I've really simplified my portfolio site, so hopefully it's fine in that regard. Any critiques, advice, applause (yeah right) you can offer is greatly appreciated.

Jeremy Mathes
Canadian environment artist in training.

Ark

Id say your shield/axe and the scupted stuff are your best pieces. The arena building is also quite good but the textures look a little blurry, this may be due to UE3's compression. Try setting the LODbias to -1 when showing off stuff for your portfolio.

Your site design is quite simple and plain, maybe jazz it up a little, although it's easy to see your artwork.

Id personally lose the arch-viz stuff from your site though.

toren3d

I think you could add in quite a bit of elaboration (a texture unwrap for all game pieces, and a wire/model view of the rendered pieces), and basically enlarge every thumbnail and full size image two-fold. I felt that the 'full size' images were quite small.

mathes

Ark - The building rendered in Unreal was looking pretty bad. There was an issue with the normal map on mirrored UV's, so I fixed that and updated the image.

I should take down the Arch-viz work eh? I'll consider that.

Toren - You're correct that some of the images could be larger. I'll go through and change a bunch of them. They look nice on my laptop, but a tad too small on my work computer.

Rojo

Maybe select some the architectural visualization pieces and get them running in-game, it would be more impressive.

Goat Justice

Nice simple site. Easy to navigate, and all the work and contact info is in front of me the moment I load it up. Architecture work does overpower your game assets in both quality and quantity, though.

It looks to me like you've got the right idea about what sort of things you need to make, but there are a good number of rookie-ish mistakes in the game assets. Your unwraps could use some work, as could the textures. The Angkor project in particular suffers from a screwy unwrap and iffy diffuse texture.

mathes

Tim - The thought of trying to take some of those buildings into a game engine is a frightening one indeed. That said, I think my next project will be to model a modern building to work in a gaming engine (would be superb practice) so I may consider this option since it would help to have all of the blueprints.

Goat - You're definitely right about the Angkor UV's. It was nothing but a relaxed cylindrical mapping I used while learning the Maya -> Zbrush -> Maya pipeline. I removed the normal map for the time being until I can go back and do it properly, I probably should never have included it in the first place.