I grayened the bottom part of the trunk , Enlarged a bit the leaves and added 4 more leaves more or less... I also decreased the light effect on the leaves and grayened them a bit more , enlightened a bit more the green leaves and added a Subsurfacescattering texture ...
Ok seems that the BM main PC support is over and it won't further developed while gong for online mobile market , so I am wondering if I could use all the owrk I did eventually to create a portfolio as environment artist may be for frelance works , do you think I have the talent for it or not ? If so what should I improve or add and how should I eventually make a portfolio? Please be brutal and sincere...
Sorry to hear that NAIMA. Were you doing all this work for Avatar Reality the whole time? I was under the impression that this island you were working on was for your portfolio.
I think if a company was on the lookout for an environment artist to take on a bunch of foliage and/or a tropical setting you'd have no problem getting hired.
That said I think you could increase your chances getting some variety into your portfolio. Do you already have a portfolio? You'll definitely need one to land some freelance work.
Some freelancers are specialists such as hard surface vehicle or weapons artists, but if you want more opportunities you'll probably need to show more variety in your work (unless you want to be the foliage artist all the time).
I was intentioned to make also architecture and runs environment actually I was just completing the set of plants and rocks stuff .....
I will eventually port all this into the cryengine 3 wich will allow me to have more tools toplay with I guess...
I like a lot to make environemnts but as you can see I made alsosome animals , I like to make a bit of everything but I usually do not like much tomake interiors lol ....
how woudl you jusdge my work on foliage at least so far?
I made for each plants from 2 to 5 lods each as well .... maximum polycount is about 1500 at max for the more complex trees and stuff...
I'm going to guess from my own limited experience that 1500 triangles is a bit on the high end for current gen foliage, but may not be so for whatever the next upcoming generation will be foliage. Triangle counts aren't too much of an issue if your talking about high end games. If we were talking about a Wii, DS, or iPhone game this would be a much larger problem.
From what I understand most of the performance problems with foliage tend to come from the fact that they use so many alpha planes to look good which causes a lot of overdraw (when a pixel on screen has to be drawn multiple times due to multiple layers of transparency, I think.).
But honestly it all depends on so many things, what's too high for one game is not enough for another. What matters most in a portfolio is that your art looks good. Then if the stuff you are showing is made to reasonable specifications that's icing on the cake so to speak.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention that I do think your foliage is looking good and in some cases even great, but the best way to tell is to take some screenshots from a current AAA game with great foliage and compare yours to it. If yours looks better or equal to it then you're doing great, otherwise it needs improvement.
Show you can do a variety of surface types... metal, wood, stone, fabric, glass, etc. Also, that you can do well-worn vs. clean and new.
Show your wireframes, show your full texture sheets.
Look carefully at a company you want to work for, understand their art style, then make sure your portfolio clearly shows you can make assets that work in that style.
Look at other environment artist websites, see what works for them.
>> Your favorite portfolio? thread.
Avoid the common pitfalls of making a portfolio website.
>> Your Portfolio Repels Jobs thread. Tons of great advice in here!
Thankyou this is a valuable information , I was wondering if In an eventual portfolio shoul dI add all my old works as modder in severall other games , of course my work it may result less good than the most modern one what do you think?
this is a sample of one of my very first works on gamebryo engine ...
When choosing your best work, 1) make sure it is as gorgeous as you can possibly make it, 2) make sure it fits your focus (environment art), 3) make sure it is similar to the artwork style of the companies you want to work for, 4) make sure it demonstrates you know current-generation techniques.
Flash is great for indie games but for portfolios it just slows everything down and makes a dependency that might not exist on a potential employer's computer.
Another way to look at it is this: If you've got only a few seconds to impress a potential employer do you want to waste those seconds loading some flash nonsense (or java script for that matter)? or do you want them looking at your best art?
Thankyou ... I want to continue then developing this Island thing and add Ruins and ancient structures , now making it more like a portfolio and Art show than else I will probably port it to Cryengine 3 wich I think will allow me more tools to play with ...
I was eventually curious about the UDK that I never tried and the upcoming Creation Engine ...
About Flash I like working with it I may eventually make html / Flash versions ?so easy and fast html showcase and cool nice personal art page for flash ? ....
Our friend renderhjs has a Flash site, http://www.renderhjs.net
which he can be forgiven for, because he also has a HTML version very clearly available in the upper left corner. But it's only just barely forgivable. Are you trying to get a job as a Flash designer? Or as a game artist?
The biggest reason people in the game industry will tell you to avoid Flash is because they've been in the position of reviewing portfolios to hire artists for their company, and they know how much Flash gets in the way of their job.
When you are doing that job, it's often very annoying to have to weed through all the submissions you get, because many (most!) of them are badly designed.
Flash adds another annoyance to this review process, because it typically has a loading bar. Never make a hiring manager wait, we have zero patience after looking through 20 sites a day, and we are more likely to discard your website for another one if you make it difficult for us.
Also typically a Flash site has unorthodox navigation buttons, which make it even more annoying. When we are reviewing artist portfolios, we want to see the artwork as quick as possible.
Flash also prevents me from bookmarking the pages I want to (instead I only get a link to the index page, wtf!), and prevents me from saving your artwork to the "portfolio review" folder on my hard drive.
"Put the art in my face and show me the quickest, simplest possible way of navigating."
...
"Hiring managers look through dozens of portfolios every day. All the portfolios they see blend together. It’s just a job. You are either on the “Portfolios To Review” list, or you’re not. A poorly designed website makes this poor hiring manager’s job a little more annoying. Accordingly, he is less likely to invest the time into looking at your entire portfolio."
...
"Imagine that your target visitor is a tired, indifferent hiring manager whose only desire is to find the shortest path possible to looking at your art. Nothing else matters. So design your website for him. Give him what he wants. Remove what he doesn’t care about. The clearer your message, the better."
As I said, pure gold. So accurate, and so helpful.
Hi I would like someone to suggest me some architectures I coudl use to make some ruins , if you have ideas of any cool ancient ruins concept that is similar to aztec mayan or angkhor Vat like , but not the same I woudl like something similar but not the same , something cool and new , any ideas or sugestions?
Instead then going for a specific culture for the island , like Maya , Aztec , Asiatic , Hindu , Egyptian etc .....
I may try to get a more primitive look and take the common parts of each culture ... trying to use sacsayhuaman base Stone structures ...
To me seems that most of the ancient cultures built piramid like structures , most of them do have lot of intricate carvings , somecommon traits is the presence of big heads stones , circular is present mostly in asiatic , geometric in western , so I may go for a geometric rounded like octagons or hexagons , based on piramid x4 structures , also another thing very common to most cultures are the Triptych three-door enterways...
Siding everything with nice root intrusions like Angkor Vat temples and broken stuff all around ... plus carvings may be rounded up and have geometric like patterns but all rounded sort of intricate formations recalling the Jungle roots ....
how that sounds?
Now I need first make some sketches to have things more coherent together , design like walls, statues , carvings , temple and some buildings ...
There is a theory that Ancient Aztecs come from a Distant land called Aztlan , Wish sounds pretty similar to Atlantis ... Aztlan means the mythical ancestral home of the Nahua People one of the main cultural groups in Mesoamerica , Aztlan is the Nahuatl word for "people from Aztlan".
In the Codex Borturini there is an account of a migration of the Aztecs from the island of Aztl
I am not going to reproduce the exact same landscape but I will very much probably inspire a lot by those and some other concepts I have found around....
Ok Here I collected some Ancient stone heads ( apart the african one ) That have more some kind of common traits , mostly I coul dcategorize those art styles as in between a primitive one and the extremely perfect GrecoRoman ones ...
SO my idea is to Create a sort of mixed generalized face that could be plausible for most cultures ....
I noticed that in most of the ancient statues stylization is more predominant and the Eyes are usually portrayed as oblong and kind of easternlike shape , I would go then for an "egyptian" style nose since seeems the most in between western one and asian or afro one , as for the lips I woul dgo probably for the asiatic one in the picture has is enough large lips to be in between african and european or egyptian ... finally a sort of slight smile as in the same asiatic statue but this seems present also in many of the other statue heads ...
What do you think of such hybridation ?
The idea is to create a sort of protocivilization from wich the others may have developed , so pyramids , tryptics , massive stone structures , and big heads ....
Ok Since I wanted to make a Stone head , and later on pass it in zbrush to make old cracks and whatever else to make it look like a stone carving from anancient age ... I have started by as if I had to make a character face , so I grabbed a Egyptian statue face and I started edge looping it , but I am really thinking I did a crap job , now I woul dreally like some critiques and sugestions couse I dunno how to get the shape to look exactly like the face , wich I feel doesn't at all ...
I am even willing to restart it from scratch if necessary but I want to be able to make it exactly looking like the pcture and only after decide either or if to change it ...
Ok thankyou , I have been using the tut from joan d'arch just as reference but that is a puppet and doesnt have many features to respect once the head is done , I am just wondering how to make this face stick more to the original , Ithink edge loop wise all is fine as I don't even have a tri but all are quads but I am not sure how or what should I do to make the face look more similar to the statue , should I start all over again? or what?
Your shape doesn't match the reference photos. Try setting the model to wireframe only, or set it to See-Through mode (alt X), and make it match the reference images exactly.
That will get you closer, but you will still need to judge it with an artistic eye to get a good likeness. Darren Pattenden's tutorial (2nd link I posted) has some good tips about this.
btw how can I do , ( seems I forgot ) to freeze the back panels I am using to put the references but in order that they do not become gray , just unselectable?
Ok I have redone from scratch the model , what do you think of it ? Shoul dI redo from scratch again or I shoul djust fix some stuff? please make heavy critiques sugestions to improve it to reach 100% similarity to the face inthe pictures above ....
The eyes are a bit flat though. Real eyes curve around the head more. Same with the cheekbones. This is why you cannot work in ortho alone, you can only take orth angles so far, then you have to go into perspective to do the rest.
I still feel it doesnt match much withthe original also the one Idid seems too much smiling compared to the original and the head looks more bally than the original even if I cant see the original head , as for the jaw it looks smaller and doesnt fit also .... I guess edgeloop wise is fine but I am not sure how much deep should I cgo into detailing this then bring to zbrush?should Imake severall res levels ?
Oh. If you;re taking this into Zbrush, then you don't need to do all this work in Max. Just use a simple Zsphere base, or make a simpler basemesh in Max, THEN do all this matching work in Zbrush instead. You'll want a mostly-quads model anyway, if you're using Zbrush. This might help... http://wiki.polycount.com/BaseMesh
Ok here is a preliminary Alphabet I made using some Mayan style references , I plan to pass it to a Syllabic form so composing for examle Ba Be Bi Bo Bu will allhave one symbol each and different one ....
for now is just Alphabetical ....
here is the Following and after I wrote something ... who can guess what did I wrote?
tthe rule is all the letters and wovels go into a square shape to form a word , begin top down left right ....
I plan after expanding it wo create alphas out ofthem to stamp into my wall writings in zbrush in ordeer to create meaningfull writings at least ....
Atlan ^^ ... anyway its provisorial i want t oredraw them manually and make syllabic structure eventually mixmatch some egyptian reference too ...
Do you like the idea ? I thik also that the Mayan Glyphs and logograms are the most elegant ever in world ...
Replies
I grayened the bottom part of the trunk , Enlarged a bit the leaves and added 4 more leaves more or less... I also decreased the light effect on the leaves and grayened them a bit more , enlightened a bit more the green leaves and added a Subsurfacescattering texture ...
I think if a company was on the lookout for an environment artist to take on a bunch of foliage and/or a tropical setting you'd have no problem getting hired.
That said I think you could increase your chances getting some variety into your portfolio. Do you already have a portfolio? You'll definitely need one to land some freelance work.
Some freelancers are specialists such as hard surface vehicle or weapons artists, but if you want more opportunities you'll probably need to show more variety in your work (unless you want to be the foliage artist all the time).
Best of luck.
I will eventually port all this into the cryengine 3 wich will allow me to have more tools toplay with I guess...
I like a lot to make environemnts but as you can see I made alsosome animals , I like to make a bit of everything but I usually do not like much tomake interiors lol ....
how woudl you jusdge my work on foliage at least so far?
I made for each plants from 2 to 5 lods each as well .... maximum polycount is about 1500 at max for the more complex trees and stuff...
From what I understand most of the performance problems with foliage tend to come from the fact that they use so many alpha planes to look good which causes a lot of overdraw (when a pixel on screen has to be drawn multiple times due to multiple layers of transparency, I think.).
But honestly it all depends on so many things, what's too high for one game is not enough for another. What matters most in a portfolio is that your art looks good. Then if the stuff you are showing is made to reasonable specifications that's icing on the cake so to speak.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention that I do think your foliage is looking good and in some cases even great, but the best way to tell is to take some screenshots from a current AAA game with great foliage and compare yours to it. If yours looks better or equal to it then you're doing great, otherwise it needs improvement.
Show your wireframes, show your full texture sheets.
Look carefully at a company you want to work for, understand their art style, then make sure your portfolio clearly shows you can make assets that work in that style.
Look at other environment artist websites, see what works for them.
>> Your favorite portfolio? thread.
Avoid the common pitfalls of making a portfolio website.
>> Your Portfolio Repels Jobs thread. Tons of great advice in here!
this is a sample of one of my very first works on gamebryo engine ...
its like 10 years old or more ...
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/4384/narsis974.jpg
Also woudl using flash to make a portfolio be a bad idea?
Also what's wrong wih flash I have seen some use on their sites?
When choosing your best work, 1) make sure it is as gorgeous as you can possibly make it, 2) make sure it fits your focus (environment art), 3) make sure it is similar to the artwork style of the companies you want to work for, 4) make sure it demonstrates you know current-generation techniques.
More tips here from Jon Jones (author of Your Portfolio Repels Jobs, read it!) http://www.thejonjones.com/2007/07/12/environment-artist-portfolio-tips/
Another way to look at it is this: If you've got only a few seconds to impress a potential employer do you want to waste those seconds loading some flash nonsense (or java script for that matter)? or do you want them looking at your best art?
I was eventually curious about the UDK that I never tried and the upcoming Creation Engine
About Flash I like working with it I may eventually make html / Flash versions ?so easy and fast html showcase and cool nice personal art page for flash ? ....
Thanks again for the great sugestions....
http://www.renderhjs.net
which he can be forgiven for, because he also has a HTML version very clearly available in the upper left corner. But it's only just barely forgivable. Are you trying to get a job as a Flash designer? Or as a game artist?
The biggest reason people in the game industry will tell you to avoid Flash is because they've been in the position of reviewing portfolios to hire artists for their company, and they know how much Flash gets in the way of their job.
When you are doing that job, it's often very annoying to have to weed through all the submissions you get, because many (most!) of them are badly designed.
Flash adds another annoyance to this review process, because it typically has a loading bar. Never make a hiring manager wait, we have zero patience after looking through 20 sites a day, and we are more likely to discard your website for another one if you make it difficult for us.
Also typically a Flash site has unorthodox navigation buttons, which make it even more annoying. When we are reviewing artist portfolios, we want to see the artwork as quick as possible.
Flash also prevents me from bookmarking the pages I want to (instead I only get a link to the index page, wtf!), and prevents me from saving your artwork to the "portfolio review" folder on my hard drive.
Bad, bad, bad!
As Jon Jones says:
"Put the art in my face and show me the quickest, simplest possible way of navigating."
...
"Hiring managers look through dozens of portfolios every day. All the portfolios they see blend together. It’s just a job. You are either on the “Portfolios To Review” list, or you’re not. A poorly designed website makes this poor hiring manager’s job a little more annoying. Accordingly, he is less likely to invest the time into looking at your entire portfolio."
...
"Imagine that your target visitor is a tired, indifferent hiring manager whose only desire is to find the shortest path possible to looking at your art. Nothing else matters. So design your website for him. Give him what he wants. Remove what he doesn’t care about. The clearer your message, the better."
As I said, pure gold. So accurate, and so helpful.
Let me know what you think of this idea then ....
Instead then going for a specific culture for the island , like Maya , Aztec , Asiatic , Hindu , Egyptian etc .....
I may try to get a more primitive look and take the common parts of each culture ... trying to use sacsayhuaman base Stone structures ...
To me seems that most of the ancient cultures built piramid like structures , most of them do have lot of intricate carvings , somecommon traits is the presence of big heads stones , circular is present mostly in asiatic , geometric in western , so I may go for a geometric rounded like octagons or hexagons , based on piramid x4 structures , also another thing very common to most cultures are the Triptych three-door enterways...
http://www.richardcassaro.com/research
Siding everything with nice root intrusions like Angkor Vat temples and broken stuff all around ... plus carvings may be rounded up and have geometric like patterns but all rounded sort of intricate formations recalling the Jungle roots ....
how that sounds?
Now I need first make some sketches to have things more coherent together , design like walls, statues , carvings , temple and some buildings ...
I am not going to reproduce the exact same landscape but I will very much probably inspire a lot by those and some other concepts I have found around....
from:
http://dan-ka-boom.blogspot.com/
SO my idea is to Create a sort of mixed generalized face that could be plausible for most cultures ....
I noticed that in most of the ancient statues stylization is more predominant and the Eyes are usually portrayed as oblong and kind of easternlike shape , I would go then for an "egyptian" style nose since seeems the most in between western one and asian or afro one , as for the lips I woul dgo probably for the asiatic one in the picture has is enough large lips to be in between african and european or egyptian ... finally a sort of slight smile as in the same asiatic statue but this seems present also in many of the other statue heads ...
What do you think of such hybridation ?
The idea is to create a sort of protocivilization from wich the others may have developed , so pyramids , tryptics , massive stone structures , and big heads
I am kind of favouring Egyptian eyes nose , asian lips , mayan aztec patterns ...
I am even willing to restart it from scratch if necessary but I want to be able to make it exactly looking like the pcture and only after decide either or if to change it ...
http://wiki.polycount.com/FaceTopology
The Making of Moff - High Polygon Realistic Character Creation
That will get you closer, but you will still need to judge it with an artistic eye to get a good likeness. Darren Pattenden's tutorial (2nd link I posted) has some good tips about this.
right click, go on object properties and detick "show frozen in grey"
Ok I have redone from scratch the model , what do you think of it ? Shoul dI redo from scratch again or I shoul djust fix some stuff? please make heavy critiques sugestions to improve it to reach 100% similarity to the face inthe pictures above ....
The eyes are a bit flat though. Real eyes curve around the head more. Same with the cheekbones. This is why you cannot work in ortho alone, you can only take orth angles so far, then you have to go into perspective to do the rest.
how bout the nose?
http://wiki.polycount.com/BaseMesh
anyway may be i better create an on purpouse thread so that I do not have to spam this other one with allhead questions
for now is just Alphabetical ....
here is the Following and after I wrote something ... who can guess what did I wrote?
tthe rule is all the letters and wovels go into a square shape to form a word , begin top down left right ....
I plan after expanding it wo create alphas out ofthem to stamp into my wall writings in zbrush in ordeer to create meaningfull writings at least
So what did I wrote?
no, what... just give us moar vegies!!!
Do you like the idea ? I thik also that the Mayan Glyphs and logograms are the most elegant ever in world ...