[Portflio] Paul Ruffin Environment Artist ( WIP)

Ruffio718

Hey everyone! New to the boards ( well not really, I just dont post much if any lol)...

I am working on revising my portfolio and looking for critiques for what I have up.. The most recent entry on my blog is a WIP.. Anyways feel free to rip me a new one.. I need it because my school had a habit of telling the students that our stuff looks good.. but I know it doesn't. I want to know realistically where I stand and do I even have the potential to make it in the game industry as an Environment Artist.. Thanks!


http://paulruffin.wordpress.com/

PredatorGSR

I'll give you some crits on your work though. First of all, you need texture sheets, good wireframes (not screen grabs), proper normal map bakes, and the work needs to be displayed and built for a game engine. All of your stuff now is just renders of unoptimized geometry.

Goggles: Not a whole lot of value in an environment art portfolio. Character guys would make those, not an environment artist, so you are better off spending your time on relevant pieces. Also, a high poly isn't worth anything, you'd need to show the low poly with normal map & texture. Also, you forgot to smooth one of the cylinders =P

Italy: This scene has promise. The big things that are killing this scene are the lighting and the composition. I assume this was rendered in Maya or another 3D program? You need to show this off in a game engine, and spend time on good lighting. Right now the lighting makes all the textures look bland and uninteresting. The composition of the scene is also pretty boring, its basically two boxes intersecting a flat plane. To give you an example, something like this is much more visually interesting.

Alchemist Room: The lighting/render is also making this scene look bland. It needs to be put into a game engine like UDK. You aren't baking normal maps are you? That is an essential skill for working in games. Much of the geometry is too high poly, especially the vases and stuff. The geometry in the scene is way to high poly.

Your Zbrush stuff is very sloppy and lazy. Just because something has a lot of triangles and was made in zbrush doesn't make it good. Spend a lot more time on your pieces and make them flawless.

---

I just typed out all these crits assuming you were just starting out, and then I read your resume. Honestly dude, what are you doing? You've been in college/art school for EIGHT!!! years and this is all you have to show? Get off your ass and make some damn art already.

Rurouni Strife

Predator gives great advice. Listen to him. He's pretty brutal which I really enjoyed in my 'folio thread.

Suggestion. Go over this site, the Unreal Developer Network, 3DM3, etc. for every bit of information you can. Read some of the WIP threads with amazing documentation (search Evil Genius and look for a thread by Adam). Read the wiki. I spent a week just reading about game development techniques for environments before I started to redo my portfolio. If this is what you want to do, then you need to go balls out and just do it.

On a side note, your resume said you know Unreal 3. I'm not an HR or anything guy (looking for work atm) but if I was and I saw you knew Unreal and didn't see any UDK/Unreal 3 renders...raises questions.

Ruffio718

To be honest, after 2004.. I didn't get back into 3d until 2007, but that is still no excuse. I have more projects but I mainly focused on props and I havent posted all my work on the site. Thanks for the advice.