[Portfolio/DemoReel] - Andrew Welbig

Welbig

Hey guys, I'm an environment artist and just graduated back in December and here is my reel. I've picked up a job pretty quick doing texture work at the Adler Planetarium for their next theater show. It's a nice place to start but I'm looking forward to continuing my work and finding something after this contract work is done. Critiques would be awesome and very welcome. I realize I need to get my work into an engine and I'm trying to get started on a new project to showcase that. I'm still too tired of looking at my old work to put it in engine right now. At the moment I'm working on making a tile set out of the textures I painted. The work in progress for those is being posted to my WIP Blog on my website. Thanks all.

www.andrewwelbig.weebly.com

Welbig

Hey guys, just going to bump this. Technically its my first post to the forums so it took a while for it to get ok'd and it looks like it started off a few pages back. Thanks a ton for checking it out.

ajr2764

Welcome to the forums. Your website is clean and nice layout. I'm really digging the work you have so far. The quality of your work/presentation looks very professional. Especially like the hand painted texture work would really be cool to have a environment reflecting that style. I don't really have anything negative to say about what I see so far so good luck to you man.

tristamus

Hey buddy (This is Antonio).

I've always liked your work, and like ajr says, it'd be sweet if you made a handpainted env like we were talking about!

Welbig

Thanks guys, that's the plan. I've starte work on a "tile set" based on the textures I already have and in the same style. I'm going to implement the pieces in UDK but base a lot of it off of the pieces from Runic Games' Torchlight. It has been fun playing around with TorchEd and seeing how they rearange things and how they use their textures tiles to create variation. I'd like to make the tile set higher poly and with normal map and specular details because there is room for improvement there. I need to learn more about Zbrush, UDK, texture painting, and modular modeling so this should be a fun project to learn from.

iconoplast

I do have one critique for you -- your portfolio says it was last updated on 2/21/10. I'm hopping out on a limb to say that's probably not right. Other than that, though, I quite like it!

Welbig

haha, nice find Icon, I'll have to fix that one. I know of some typos in the images at the bottom of the website that I still have to fix too lol.

achillesian

Most of your stuff is fairly par. The hand painted wow style textures are by far your worst pieces, it's clear photo reffing, or sculpting is more your style/skillset. The reel had a nice presentation and flyby and stuff, one thing turning me off to the whole portfolio is not showing your assets in udk, unity or another realtime setting. Environmental artists kind of go hand in hand with hard surface high poly modelling, so some samples of that style might benefit you.

As for more specifics on why your hand painted textures are bad, here is what I'm seeing:
1. Not enough line width and value variation (like you're painting with a mouse)
2. Too much contrast and saturation on most of them.
3. No visual brush strokes (oversmoothed, over photoshopped)

Jet_Pilot

Welcome to the fourms. The only critiques I have is your lighting in hurting your work.
.The exterior of your Avalon scene is decent, that is your best one.
The interior, not so much. Try just adding point lights in the windows and openings to the sky. remove the rest of the lights you have in there that don't have a light source. (ie, keep the lights around the flames)

the mountain outpost looks too dark. Don't be afraid to go higher than a value of 1.0 for your sun. Your sun color should be a white, but with a Little touch of yellow. Your sky light should be a very VERY light blue. you should try and match the bottom reference pic you have in your third image. Stronger and more dynamic lighting will really make your normals pop and give depth to your scene.

i cant really tell whats going on with the zombie house. weather its supposed to be day. night, dusk. Try and find a "real life" reference pic with the kind of mood you want and then try and match that a close as possible. I would stay away from CG pics, you should try and stick with natural/ realistic lighting at first.

What are you rendering this stuff in? Mental Ray? UDK? Crysis?

Good luck!

Welbig

achillesian- Thanks for the texture painting tips. I worked mostly based off of JFletcher's tutorial. The smudging was pretty intentional based on the tutorial. I did use a lot of image reference and unfortunately that does come across and my line weight doesn't change enough. As it was the first time I had actually painted textures I just felt I needed a little help laying out the the textures so I could focus on getting used to painting. I ended up using a number of pictures to get the look I needed for each texture. As I get more practice I hope to follow reference so closely.

Jet_Pilot- Thanks for the welcome to the forum and for all of your advice. Unfortunately I rendered each scene in 3ds Max MentalRay. I've been dabbling in UDK and have been trying to get a scene started in it. I hope by hanging out in this forum I'll be able to learn more about it and learn from others here. The lighting in MentalRay was hard to even get as close as I got it at my school's facilities and at this point I think I'll invest my time in learning UDK instead of beating my head against the wall again with MR. Any scenes I do from here on out will be in an Engine and perhaps after Brawl challenge I'll start putting my old scenes in UDK as well.