[Portfolio] - Steven Skidmore - Environment / Prop Artist

Progg

This thread is old... see the last post.


Steven Skidmore
Environment/Prop Artist
www.stevenskidmore.com

Justin Meisse

Hey Steven, I know you've asked to look past the flash site but it's a bit of hindrence. It loads fairly slow for me and there is no way to save images.

If you haven't seen this I highly recommend a read: Your Portfolio Repels Jobs

I've been on quite a few interviews recently and I've gotten alot of compliments on the ease of use of my portfolio. So be aware that potential employers are aware of that article.

aesir

Personally, I don't hate flash sites, but I do hate 'slow' flash sites. You need to compress your images enough so that they load nearly instantly. I'm worried that your 4-5 second wait between images will cause a possible employer to not go through all your work (which is rather good). Use the save for web function for your jpegs in photoshop and drop the quality down a fair bit.

Progg

Yeah. Thanks for the comments. Maybe I have put so much time and energy into other aspects of getting a job and overlooked the layout aspect. I feel at this point the site has grown to a bit of a monster... I originally had an html based site, but it grew so tiresome trying to update it I looked for an easier method. At this point... do you think I should completely scrap this site?

Ps thanks for the link Justin... I've seen that before and even went to a conference that guy was giving at GDX last year at SCAD. I've gotten so many different responses from visual effects people vs. game design. I guess I should focus on rebuilding a primary game design site for ease of use.

nrek

I just want to agree with Justin and aesir, the site is too slow. Your game work looks really good but I had a hard time looking through all of it just because of the load times. Also if you take Justin's advice and change things around so ppl can save images (do it) I suggest you put your name on all your images. If ppl save your work to an inspiration folder chances are that a few months down the road they will forget where it came from, and thats no good.

Justin Meisse

You could probably create the same website without flash, have it go straight to your portfolio section though, no need for welcome pages.

I prefer JS Highslide for gallery popups, but use anything that lets people save your images, also put your name and contact info on every image. Some studios may prefer to save your images and put them in a folder on their internal network for ease of sharing.

DarthNater

I like your work, but your site is very sluggish and it took forever to load the images.

If it were me, I'd lose the flash. You could pull off a very similar website by just using CSS and Lightboxing (but everyone seems to hate lightboxing hehe).

Progg

Alright. I'll get busy working on it. Thanks a ton guys... that's why I wanted to suck it up and post this out there. I guess the most frustrating thing is having to get the work out there :-D ... not actually doing the work.


Another quick question while we're on the topic... Say I've submitted something before with this old site... would you guys suggest resubmitting an application after I optimize it?

Xoliul

If you use something Wordpress-based, updating is a breeze...

electric_geisha

I agree, just a bit slow... the work is great! Keep it fast and in your face, don't forget we live in a "nano" second society people want info fast and results yesterday.

Lee3dee

You have some great work on here but I am having the same issue as others, slow loading of images. Why not put the asset with a texture sheet next to it, with the option to click on it to make it larger. Quality over quantity.

any reason why you breakdown sheet is 4.4mb PDF?

I watched the tech market video, it was very artistic in the beginning then went full one RAWR! which I was a little surprised. Ok, you can do kActors, you know kismet, scripted events, the whole flashing of the 100 assets seemed a little much. I would of just kept the slow moving camera sequence for about 30 seconds at most. Sort of like a sneak preview, then maybe allow the viewers to download the map and try it out for themselves.

The particles fx seems a little fast, I didn't see any rotation/rotation rate in the sprites, everything was very linear, didn't have any randomness to it.

anyways just a few suggestions

Progg

Thanks Lee. Yeah that Tech Market Video was done that way on purpose by request of the department during my senior year... so I really had no choice over that and I agree fully :P. I am currently redoing my site. I will update soon

Progg

/Bump for new site layout. Updated the original post!

nrek

Huge improvement! Bravo on taking everyone's crits to heart and banging out a new site so quick. :thumbup:

Progg

Thanks! That's what I come here for, great feedback from people who know the industry

Acumen

wow yeah what an improvement.
after reading your first reactions i thought "man, what a pity, another guy with the flashiritis" but now you took all the comments into consideration i thought i should post and tell you !

hands down, now your work can shine and it shines well ! that's just how a portfolio shall be and look like - show your art stuff and nothing else !
since i liked the word i go with nrek and say BRAVO to you

Progg

Thanks for all of the positive responses. Now I don't feel quite as sore from sitting in front of photoshop and dreamweaver all day :-D

Lee3dee

site looks 10X better

on your reel, the part with the statue pan in the engine, its really dark. Its a shame because you next segment shows the high poly in all its glory. Would be nice to recapture that scene with better lighting

Progg

Lee3dee wrote: »

site looks 10X better

on your reel, the part with the statue pan in the engine, its really dark. Its a shame because you next segment shows the high poly in all its glory. Would be nice to recapture that scene with better lighting

Yeah.. that has been bothering me for a bit now. I don't have access to After Effects at the moment though . I'll get to it someday! Thanks for the suggestion

roosterMAP

god, I LOVE the walrus. You should completely finish it... but add an old army jar head to it... im serious. it would look cool.

Progg

roosterMAP wrote: »

god, I LOVE the walrus. You should completely finish it... but add an old army jar head to it... im serious. it would look cool.

What .. like a helmet? Hahahahaha

ES_139

big improvement. Thumbs up!

Progg

Lee3dee wrote: »

any reason why you breakdown sheet is 4.4mb PDF?

Thanks for pointing that out... No idea why, except maybe the images. Its much smaller now thanks

Progg

Bumping this really old thread instead of making a new one.

Would someone do me a favor and check if some of my image galleries on my site are loading within reasonable times for you guys. It seems to be slow for me for some reason but my net is always weird.

vcortis

Hey man it took me about 12 seconds to load your homepage, but once I did that all your images popped up fine with no problems. So it seems like the initial load is fairly slow but after that your galleries were fine.

Progg

hmmm.. that's weird. The galleries take a bit for me to load but the first page loads pretty quick. Damn GoDaddy.... It's weird because everything is compressed for web. Thanks for checking.

vcortis

I'm using GoDaddy too. Honestly it seems like their hosting varies dramatically. Sometimes my site loads super fast, sometimes slow... sometimes it doesn't show up at all like it doesn't exist (but if I refresh 2 or 3 times it will finally pop up). Kinda weird.

Progg

Yeah. I get that a lot as well.

Honestly I should probably just remove the gallery and make it open to a blank html page with all of the work centered and you can just scroll down through it. Might make load times easier.

Progg

The site has been updated / optimized for faster viewing... hopefully. I also added my final project from last year on the demoreel page (The Tech Market). It was never posted by myself or my partner Mike Button here. (Mike works at Ravensoft as a midlevel artist... he doesn't troll here like me unfortunately but we are long time buddies and we roomed in college for 4 years.)

... also added some Technical Director stuff for Renderman that I experimented with.


www.stevenskidmore.com

or a link directly to the Tech Market HD video