[Portfolio] Brock Williams - Environment Artist

Brock_W

Hi everyone, I've just graduated from school and I'm about to start sending out my portfolio to look for work. If anyone would like to critique my content or the site itself, that would be great. Thanks.

Brockstation.com

Laughing_Bun

your presentation leaves something to be desired. The site itself is fine, I would probably go with a darker color scheme and create some word art for your name.

There is a real issue in the way you are presenting your stuff though. No emphasis is placed on lighting at all. Look into 3 point lighting and use it on some of your assets because with out good lighting it just looks bland. I don't care how good your stuff is if it's lit poorly it will look bad.

Also for your shanty scene if your rendering in 3ds max, do some advanced stuff, overlay an AO pass, do a zdepth pass, do some stuff in post. It's not in a game environment anyways, so make it look nice even if it's stuff that might not be possible in a game.

Jesse Moody

Yeah what LB said above but just another thing. A quick glimpse but you have 7 shots of the telephone pole. It looks good but 1 or 2 would suffice for something like this.

7 shots is a lot for one object.

cholden

It's confusing to me that tuk tuk and powerlines are presented in Unreal, but the scene they are in, Shanty Scene, is not. Same goes for the camera and the pickman's scene. It's a bit of a let down to see them render in default max rendering.

BradMyers82

Nice work so far. I think some of the textures are reading as overly noisey and not so much like the intended material. I think you should concentrate on making the materials read really well first when you texture, then worry about grunge later on.

Remember, try to keep things subtle and it will always work out better.

The other bit of advice I have is on your subject matter. You have chosen a lot of weird objects and its difficult to say if you did a good job with them. What do they look like in real life I wonder? See when your work is too exotic then its hard to evaluate, and that's a bad thing especially for a prop/environment guy. You need to look at your work threw the eyes of the HR guys that might hire you. It's most important that it looks good to them, and nothing else.

Anyways, I think your doing a great job for someone who is about to graduate so keep going man!

Mark Dygert

Some good comments and solid advice.

I think you need to work on your lighting. you have a lot of direct light and not a lot of ambient/ fill/bounce lighting going on. The shadows under the shack shouldn't be pitch black.

Also the texture on the terrain has shadows in the diffuse map. This can fight with the lighting you have in your scene. It also shows rocks and dirt clods but they aren't bumped or normal mapped so it ends up looking pretty odd. I think you could benefit from more geometry in the terrain and some simple objects scattered around like grass and rocks.

In the Chewing Gears scene, I had no idea what to focus on, it was a giant mish-mash of stuff and It was really hard to tell if the gears actually worked like they should. At best I could see things moving. The textures where kind of all over the place, the pixel density seems kind of random and the chain texture needs to be done. Flat textures for chains that have such an impact on silhouette is kind of a mistake. If you can't model the chains to effect the silhouette then think about switching to something thats easy to model like rope or cable. Or model recessed notches for the chains to sit in so they don't effect the silhouette.

Brock_W

Thanks for the critiques, lots of work to do still, I'll post updates soon.