Environments: Stills vs. Reels?

Will Faucher

Hey,
I have a question regarding two methods of presenting an environment. From what I've gathered here, stills are preferred over reels. Why is that? I would assume a video would better present an environment, wouldn't it?

Please enlighten me.

Thanks!

Justin Meisse

Images are easier for the viewer to browse through at their own pace, with a video you are setting the pace. I've seen people's portfolios reviewed before, usually the art director just saves all the images into a folder so they can breeze through the images with windows previewer (or a similar program).

Leave the demo-reels to the FX artists and Animators

AlecMoody

I find videos irritating because I can't get a good sense for the quality of texture painting. On top of that they are cumbersome to navigate quickly and I feel like I can't look specifically at the work I am interested in. Also keep in mind that they people coming to your site don't have the entire video in the cache so they cant just scrub it as they please.

Tumerboy

Pictures. Most artists want to analyze your work (ha ha, I said anal!) which is easier to do with stills. It's a lot easier to hide shit when the pictures are moving.

Images are also better because JPGs work pretty much everywhere. Fuck, I can load them up on my phone if I wanted to. Movies mean codecs, which means a pain in the ass.

Stick to pictures.

adam

Pictures, pictures, pictures. Once the viewer has seen those, you can show them a movie if they want.

Raider

I was going to update my folio soon and was deciding if i should go through the major pain of redoing a reel, but tbh pics seem to fit characters as well over turn arounnds.. i mean hell i already show front / side / 3/4 and back in my stills + lambert -> normal > textured with a high res shown as well. What you guys think for a 3d character artist... great stills or turnaround reel?

PredatorGSR

I think pictures are just fine for characters. The only time I can think of that video adds to the presentation is if you are demonstrating deformation, but you can usually get a good idea from the wireframes anyway.

vofff

Raider wrote: »

I was going to update my folio soon and was deciding if i should go through the major pain of redoing a reel, but tbh pics seem to fit characters as well over turn arounnds.. i mean hell i already show front / side / 3/4 and back in my stills + lambert -> normal > textured with a high res shown as well. What you guys think for a 3d character artist... great stills or turnaround reel?

Both if your character turn out to be a badass godlike, worth putting into your portfolio.

Raider

Judge for yourself, basically if it increases the chances of landing a job I'd do a reel, but like most people have said the guys i know all just do a quick browse of the webby, look / save some images.

Eric Chadwick

Images are best. A video helps if you want to show the asset in action in a shipped game, if it shows off what you did better than an image can.

The character needs work IMO. Eyes are too white. Spec map should be in color. Cloth texture looks like stone.

gsokol

Images are what employers care about. In my most recent job interview, the employer was going through my website asking me questions about my work, and completely skipped the reel, just looked through pictures.

I have a reel available on my website just in case....but the gallery is on the home page so its immediately accessible, then the reel is a click a way on a different page if somebody wants to go through the effort.