[Portfolio] – Patrick Roeder, 3D Generalist

dproeder

Just put a fresh coat of paint on my website. Critiques on it and my work are valuable as always.

http://www.patrart.com/

Aerial_Knight

your front page is a little over the top, but you have really good work dude.

Serp

The texturing and lighting section is quite good. I'd redo the front page, it seems like it's from the 90's Try going for a more minimilistic look.

zakhar2

Are you serious? Clicking on the gallery link opens a popup, and clicking on a picture opens another popup????

ariofighter

There is a large volume of types of work on there. Thats cool because your a generalist, however I'm not 100% sure if giving us the option to ither:

1)Watch a video of your work based on specialization
or
2)Dig threw a huge colom of images to find the kind of work I want with no real dividers.

is a good way to present yourself. I don't see an HR Person or Art Director wanting to dig just to find your pics of characters, or watch a video.

That being said, without creating pages for each focus individually that you can link to, witch is bad, I don't really know how to tell you to fix it.

As far as your work goes, you show an amount of knowledge in many departments, and that's good, but I still think you may want to pick a 'favorite' to help sell yourself. So basically saying I am killer at characters but I can also put them into an environment. As apposed to saying I'm okay any everything.

Keep up the good work.

dproeder

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I agree with ariofighter. I do have so many concentrations, that cataloging it all makes my site look cluttered.

So the problem I'm left with is this. How do I streamline my website to highlight all my different areas of knowledge. I just not ready yet to concentrate in one area. I've been told to do that ever since I started my Masters, but my real strength lies in my jack-of-all-trades'ness'.


I'm thinking of my main/root page as being a hub to take you to the different areas of concentration.

The top part of the main page will include my title image, my resume link, my about me, and my contact info. It will remain the same at all times.

There will be a column on the left side of the main page that serves as an index that takes you to the various different parts of my portfolio. It will remain the same at all times.

The center will be the only part of the page that changes. It will include the Demo reel for that concentration, and a gallery of images specific to that discipline.

I don't want the page to be overly flashed out, and I do agree that minimalism is the best route.

Jason Young

You could just have a main portfolio page that has different sections with thumbnails that take you elsewhere or open up an image. No need to overthink it too much.

Make your gallery page an actual full-size page that has them laid out in an intuitive manner. Each category would have thumbnails, and each category could even have a thumbnail/link for that specific show reel. Make this gallery page your main index page.

maze

its too bold for my taste, make it more subtle less aggressive (please change the typo). Needs some classiness urgent! also I agree about the pop-ups, make it simple for people. And the pop ups are really small imo. Otherwise nice work there. Not mean to be harsh here, but this really needs a fix!

Shiniku

Hmm.

What I would do is have a home page that features your generalist demo reel (embedded in the page, not a popup) and several nice big shiny image that showcase projects in which you did many different aspects of the work. And then, in a navigation bar up top have a bunch of links that take you to separate pages that feature your more specialized work, a page for each specialization, set up the same way, with demo reel and images right there on the page. That way depending on the position you're applying for you could link to the appropriate page, but it's all still available if they're curious.

Lose the popups and lightbox-esque things. It's nice to see images as nice and big as possible without having to wait for another lightbox to load or page to open. Maybe have it so if you do click on the image you'll be taken to a page with a bigger image, or more details on that project, but right now your site is a bit too "Yo dog, I heard you like popups, so we put a popup in your popup".

Also lose the cheesy font and photoshop effects. That stuff isn't impressing anybody.

dproeder

After all the feedback, I've spent the last two days redesigning my site. There are still a few bugs im working out, but I am done for the day. Feed me critique sandwiches.

Dimfist

I'd 86 the robot ani that starts your reel. Its obvious that you have skating even though you cut the feet off. As what others have said maybe focus on something and get really good at it. I feel like you have spread yourself a bit thin and it shows. Hope I'm not being a complete doucher here!

Illusive

i'd ditch a lot of those tabs. keep it simple, Characters, Environment, Demo Reel and 2d. there's no need for the home, animation, lighting etc.
love the tv head watching the maxx btw

MoreDread

i agree with dimfist... less is more. better to show the things your best at instead of trying to show that you can do a bit of everything at the risk of not really shining anywhere...

i'd say that the machinegun is probably the best model.. your still life stuff looks good, too
the environments are good but not great and your props/vehicles and characters + drawing sections are probably the things you need the most practice with.

showing the latter 3 on your portfolio might not be such a great idea.

i think its great that you try to learn about a variety of things.. this keeps things interesting but it also makes learning each individual bit very slow.

so you should either decide to let something go...
or work really hard on your weak spots. (or probably a combination of both)

having just 1 character that looks really good would be much better than having 6 or more of consistently medicore quality.

this might be a hard pill to swallow, but it will help upping the overall quality of your portfolio.

achillesian

maybe you should brand yourself more as a technical artist...?

dproeder

Hey no worries guys about the critiques. A lot of the stuff you all have said I know already. I don't bruise easy....I've was a fine arts student before my Masters Program.

The reason why a lot of my environments and characters are so-so is because I opted to make a basic 3d beat em up for my Thesis. And since I'm doing all the art assets myself, I had to opt for a more accessible and simplistic aesthetic to ease up on the production pipeline. So its a double edged sword. I'll be able to say I soloed the art for a video game, but will it shine? I'm hoping that when all the elements come to together, the sum will be more that the parts.