Looking for some portfolio feedback, purty please

GavinUnit

Hellooo Polycounters.

I recently posted this on my couple-week-old thread, but as I had feared, it was too deep within the bowels of the internet to garner any interest (except Toxic_H2O's thanks)

As of now I am a fresh-outta-school 3D artist looking for work, specifically, game environments, and was wondering if the greatest game artist community in the universe could give me some feedback on my website and work in general.

Of the four main pieces on my site (and reel), everything is meant to be "game-standard" art except for the Duchess. Having said that, do you think it would be beneficial to write a brief description breaking down the different pieces?

here is my website along with my reel. I'm fully open to crits, tho I definitely can't guarantee I'll go back to change anything on my now finished projects, as I want to keep moving forward, but I would most definitely like to be aware of the things that I may be doing wrong so as to correct them in my future workings. The imbedded video it ultra super-duper low-res and you need to link over to Vimeo's website to see the "HD" version, so I'm thinking of possibly making a higher quality H264 and putting that onto Youtube, then imbedding that. What do you guys think is best?

...and for the record, my website is loosely based off of Jonathan's (one of my favorite artists I've seen round these parts). Better I point it out than someone else!

Thanks

alexk

Well, hello there fellow Vancouver artist. I think your folio looks pretty nice. Good solid work. I would of liked a few more mid/closer shots in your Caldeum and perhaps some texture sheets too, but that's nit picking. I think you've got a pretty solid portfolio, time to get on applying!

GavinUnit

Thank you kindly
I'm happy to be in this great city!
The past couple of days I've been sending out the ol' resume to a variety of places around these parts.

I get a liiittle bit more up close and personal in the Caldeum scene on my reel, but as you can probably tell it starts to fall apart up close do to its simplicity as it was made to be more of an "overall environment" type of thing, with a Diablo-style camera in mind (sort of...).

I tried to hit multiple styles in my reel in order to (hopefully) gain interest from a wider variety of companies, but doing so I didn't leave myself much time to delve particularly deep into any one "style".
If you were looking to hire a modeler such as myself, what aspect of my portfolio would you say is most disappointing? What am I missing that you would have liked to see?

I don't mean to throw these crazy questions at just you, Alexk, but anybody who reads this as well.

I reeeeeeally appreciate any feedback

sltrOlsson

I really like you site. It's personal but still very clean. Easy to use. The only thing is that it loads kinda slow, but then i'm pretty much on the other side of the globe.

Really like you work, looks solid. The only thing i'm missing is HP shots and flats from the bigger scenes..

letronrael

how did you render the Duschess scene, what is the texture/shader on the skin ? SSS ? or simple texture?.... vray?

thanks in advance

good work there

EMC3D

Haha nice showreel, love the style!

Website is nice and easy to navigate, showreel is nicely put together. Good stuff.

Only crit is you may want to specialize towards environments unless you want to try and go into a smaller company as a generalist.

Cheers

mr_ace

I think this is perfect, the works excellent, your website is really well laid out and professional, everything you need is there. Your showreel is also really nice, shows everything you need to see and it's great to see everything in motion.

Start applying for jobs! I can't imagine you'll have much trouble landing one

GavinUnit

sltrOlsson- Thanks I didn't really feel the flats were anything particularly impressive aside from the painterly style Windmill environment. My next piece, whatever it may be, will be sure to give textures the love that they need. Similar to the love that you seem to give your textures. Doing this process should also yield nice HP shots for me to show, yet another thing that I am currently missing.
I was afraid things might run a bit slow. I know next to nothing about optimization for web, or anything web for that matter Hopefully it wasnt slow enough to make you think twice.

letronrael- Duchess was a loooooot of trial/error with Mental Ray's SSS. The tutorial I used for ref was using a little elf looking character bust as an example. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it, but if I come across it again I'll be sure to shoot you a PM. There are other tutorials out there tho, just a quick Google away. Good luck

Mr Bear- Yes, I was worried about taking the Duchess thru to the end and using it as a portfolio piece, I didn't want people to think of me as a character model (no disrespect, I just prefer enviro's). During my portfolio show I had numerous people asking about my interest in character modeling/rigging/animation. Uuuuhg! I've learnt my lesson for now. Strictly enviro's!

mr_ace- Thanks. I've been shooting out resumes all day! On a side note, your CA model is gorgeous!

Thanks for the comments much appreciated

c0ldhands

Good textures, you have a good eye for colour and you know your way around modeling too. Nothing much to criticize here. Pretty sturdy for a out the door 3d artist, you should land at least an internship pretty easy

GavinUnit

Thanks

Weeeeeeeeeeell,
I've dug thru my "reference/inspiration" folders and collected a bundle of purty images that I'd love to work on. It seems 90% of them are nature-y, all outdoorsy with trees and lots of foliage and whatnot, and a few of them are more urban.

SO,
I ask you, fellow polycounters, which end of the spectrum do you think would benefit my 'folio best? (Keeping in mind that either end I go with, I plan on doing somewhat stylized) A more urban environment, or something more foliogy and nuture-y. I enjoy working with plants and whatnot more, just because you can by a bit more "free" with it, but I ask you guys because I'd like to know what you feel would benefit me best.

Robbyh

Great Work on the Diablo 3 Environment ! Verry well done !

Cooljay

Excellent job on the portfolio here. Nothing wrong with your work :P

jmt

I would like to see more large, clear images. The ones you have up are relatively small and the details in some of them are hard to make out.

For some reason, when I first saw your website, the windmill caught my attention, so I clicked on it first. All I saw were over-bloomed wide shots. I started to quickly scroll though the images looking for a more detailed render of the building, but I got to the texture sheets and thought "that's it?". In the closest image, the windmill is only about 2 inches on my screen. I know that it's the style you were going for and it simplifies the background, but I found the bloom effect makes the sky very distracting and washes out the details of the island and building. Employers don't really care about the post-effects or the way you cut around the edges of the images (I'd say remove that - It's also distracting). They are looking for modeling/texturing skills and a good overall artistic eye. I'm glad you showed the closeup of the fence and barrel, or those details would have been totally lost. It's better to show cool stuff like that in your full renders if possible.

Caldeum seems to be suffering from similar things as the windmill, but not as much. This is really cool design. Great style without being overly cartoony.

It seems like the focal point of the bar scene is supposed to be the gun, but I didn't notice it when I saw the first image. There are much more eye catching parts of the scene like the sign, bottles, posters etc. and there's a lamp right behind the gun. The composition isn't the most important thing for a modeler/texture artist, but it seems like the cool parts are partly lost in your presentation. I can tell that it's good, but I want to get a clearer view.

The Diablo stuff is cool. I want to see more of it.

GavinUnit

Thanks a bunch, JMT.
I'll definitely be taking all of your suggestions into consideration, and plan on executing on a few of them soon.
I guess I underestimated the importance of images. I figured nobody would care about them and would just check out the video then bolt.
On a side note, I was actually at the EA Burnaby building earlier this week. Wow. I knew it was big, but... wow. I kid you not, I got lost before I even got into the building.


I decided on what project I wanted to work on while job-hunting. I'm doing a "Christmas Carol" street shot, based from an image I found in my "ref/inspiration" folders. I figure It'd be a good place to learn some HiPoly-LowPoly workflow, something that I've only scratched the surface of. I'm not sure if this is the place to post, so I may just make a new thread for the project tomorrow.

erwilly

Amazing style!!

My advices
-Out some kind of data in every screenshot
-Install Google Analytics to you know what the people does it

Jeff Parrott

I like the portfolio. Work is great. My main crit is the video on the left at the first page isn't needed. Just put that with that work page.

The windmill scene could use some texture work. The scene itself is nice and the modeling is solid. The textures are missing a good polishing.

GavinUnit

Thanks for the comments, takin notes

So do you guys think it's fine if I make my website wider in order to get in larger images? I was told to stay at or under the size that I did (don't remember what the exact size is, probably 900 or something.) due to not everyone have large monitors.

jmt

Maybe you could make each of those images link to a larger version or something. I've found that most people prefer images rather than videos. You can look through an image portfolio in however much time you want to spend and look closely at things without pausing/replaying it. Videos are cool too, though.

One thing I forgot to mention is that some of your scenes could use more clutter to make them seem more realistic.