[Portfolio] - CG Nick - critique

Mr.Nick

Hello, I have been applying to studios with little luck of landing a job. I was hoping to get some feed back on what I could do to make my portfolio better.

http://www.cgnick.com/

Thanks for any comments and all ideas will be greatly appreciated!

JonathanF

hey! great looking stuff you got there. From what it looks like though, is that you have some really nice high poly modeled renders mixed with a couple low poly game assets. I think you need to figure out for your self what field you are wanting to apply for... movie or games? and then focus on building a portfolio around that field. But all in all, great looking stuff! and I hope you find a job!

Burrill

I can agree with JonathanF, you have very quality stuff (I like the lobby scene by the way).

But you might want to re-do how your actual website is presented.

- First off, The website takes a while to load. Not sure if it's on my end or your end (does it take a while for anybody else?). Might want to look into that.

- The design of the text on the background looks out of place and mixes in with your pictures. You'd be better off just not having any of the background text. Also, see what your website would look like if you darkened the background more and flipped the image on its horizontal plane. You want your images to stand out more than anything else.

- The pure blue borders around some of your images look weird. You'd probably be better off without them.

- The text to describe your images could probably just go under each big picture instead of all the way to the right. It was so wide that had to scroll over to see what it was.

You have great stuff on here Nick, you just need to make sure it's presented well on the website too!

Mr.Nick

Thanks for the Feed back! I have made some changes to the layout of the website, and hopefully its loading faster. If anyone has any other Ideas on what I do to help its presentation plz don't hold back.

grimmrobe

1st, Main issue I have is that you're forcing horizontal scrollbars on my laptop, which is widescreen resolution. You could lay out your smaller images beneath the main big image and solve the width problem.

2nd, agree with another poster about the background the words don't really enhance anything so I wouldn't have them on there fighting with your actual work.

3rd, Image swapper. You have an image swapper for your BMW front/rear view which works really well. If you coded that yourself(?) you shouldn't have much trouble making it into a function that could work for all your images on the page. i.e. click a small thumbnail to replace the big image... I'm sure you could imagine how that would work.

4th, goes hand in hand with 3rd really, the stark html pages you are linking to with your hi-res image... some are a couple of images, one of them had the wireframe of the bmw on it, but I had no idea it was there until I clicked through. I'd prefer to be seeing everything up front, and as I mentioned earlier either for the images to load in the same page. Or for the page they link to to have a design consistent with the main site.

5th, I'd do one of two things, either add a main nav link to your resume or rename the contact link to advertise that your resume is in there. I assumed your resume was on your contact page but that's no reason not to explicate its presence.

6th, Your logo should link back to your index on every page, it's generally an expected behaviour.

7th, if possible ditch table based layout.


I hope you don't mind me just listing these in out in this way, don't take the tone as acerbic, they are just pointers really to help dress up the site. Your work looks great, particularly the BMW. I'm no 3D artist but it looks spot on.

kodde

Looking at your artwork I'd improve on materials and textures. Your guns for instance look very pale to me. The bolt action rifle is the better of them since it has some clearly defined dark areas creating some contrast across the rifle. The lighting on the other two is pretty much straight on which make them flat. Set light directions/positions in some more interesting angles. Make that specular pop better.

You could also try to create some variation within the textures. Don't be afraid to venture outside of what's "realistic" to achieve this. I know several artist who might just smack a faint gradient over that gun to make the coloring looking more interesting. Take this thread for instance, there's quite some discussion on how to make it less flat and more interesting to look at. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76673

Keep at it, you will get there.

EDIT: My critiques are referring to the first image of the guns.

P442

definitely fix the website so people don't have to scroll horizontally. The first time I looked at it, I did not even notice the right half of the site. Only after reading the comments and looking at the site again did I realize there were more images and contact info. That is a huge issue.

I also think that the textures are too clean/uninteresting

Rurouni Strife

You have a mix of quality work and not so quality work here. I think your modelling is solid for the most part. Those who say your textures need work are correct, but my feeling is that you know what your doing and it just will take some extra work.

Your two UDK renders are by far your weakest works. The beach scene sticks out like a sore thumb to me. Your lighting and shadows (or lack there of) need extensive work. Beach is bright, I get that. But it also lacks any sort of atmosphere. Some of the textures in that scene are also very low res. Overall, the scene looks bright but flat.

I'm pretty sure with some more time in UDK you'll more fully understand it, which will greatly help you out in the end.

Mr.Nick

Thanks for all the critiques. I have updated the site again. I was unable to recreate the horizontal scrolling problems people were having, but went ahead and made the page layout slimmer. If anyone still has any horizontal scrolling problems plz let me know what browser you are using. I also reworked the textures and presentation of the guns. If anyone has any other ideas on what I can do to make my site better I would love to hear it.

pangarang

Holy CRAP EA Tiburon looks way better than EA Burnaby! I echo the critiques of everyone who posted before me, but I thought I could provide a more little insight as to why you might not be getting a job - the market sucks. Given the layoffs of the last 18 months there's a LOT of experienced talent out there you are competing with. I've seen artists with *incredible* work get laid off or hired as temps simply because of budget restrictions. And with restrictions, companies are gonna want the best money can buy and a lot of the times, experience will win out over quality of work.

I'm saying this so that you don't get too discouraged to continue. But even having said that, definitely listen to the other polycounters. I've gotten a lot of good advice from here too.