[Portfolio] SarahFaber, environment artist
Hey everyone!
I've been working at my portfolio website for a while now and I'd like to offer it up to you, the good folks of polycount, to critique and cast harsh judgement upon.
http://sarahfaber.com/
Let me know what you think. Thanks guys.
I've been working at my portfolio website for a while now and I'd like to offer it up to you, the good folks of polycount, to critique and cast harsh judgement upon.
http://sarahfaber.com/
Let me know what you think. Thanks guys.
Replies
Put both your name and contact info on *every* picture.
You may as well remove "polys" from your model stats, because everything gets broken down into triangles for rendering (some exceptions for planar convex quads on mobile devices, but you don't really have any mobile work so...) Whenever someone asks how many polys something is, it's safe to assume they mean triangles. Vertex count is probably more relevant.
Your "home" page with the slide gallery is really redundant since all the work is the same as on your page as your portfolio. Personally I'd prefer to see large screenshots in a long column rather than a slideshow gallery with navigation arrows I have to use instead of just scrolling down.
I popped a couple of your shots open in photoshop and it looked like you were really only using about half the range in the levels. by tightening it up a bit you get a bit more pop from your brights and it adds contrast to the image/focal points. just adjusted the levels on these images and played around with color balance to get a bit more color variation in them. by bringing up the levels the images appear a bit more vibrant and pop a bit more, hope this helps a bit.
cheers!
Adjusted
original
Adjusted
original:
PixelMasher: Wow! What a difference! Definitely going to have to go back and make adjustments. As for studying lighting, do you have any good references that you could suggest?
Thanks guys.
I definitely agree with the critiques so far.
There were a few things in the pirate scene that also jumped out at me. The pirate flags appear to have been sitting on a white background, which on the darker lower half results in a white halo from the alpha channel. If you can, pad the island with a few pixels from the flag itself, so when the alpha bleeds like that, it won't draw the white background.
The cargo net on the pole is very uniform in the way it's hanging, like it was mapped to a single triangle. Don't be afraid to add some geometry to make it feel more organic and believable. The texture on it also seems to be tiling a small amount, making the loops appear larger than the windows of the building.
The ground texture is extremely low res compared to the rest of the scene. It looks like you're using some DOF in the images but even in the top down view, it looks pretty low res next to everything else.
It looks like you're not taking advantage of the fact that you're not using non-tiling textures on things. The castle gate for example. It's got the same (obvious) tiling brick on it, but the texture itself isn't tiling. With completely unique texture space like that, you shouldn't see any kind of tiling at all.
Last thing that really pops is the palm tree trunk texture. I understand it's mean to be stylized, but it doesn't really look like anything other than beige notepaper. A little bit of tweaking and it could really pop nicely.
Lots of promise overall though. Some little nudges here and there are things could really come together nicely.
after learning the basics behind lighting it really comes down to looking at images and trying to replicate that look a lot of the time. find examples of really awesome lighting and anylize why it looks so good, the colors in the image, the shadow/highlight temperatures and the overall contrast in the image. looking at photography is an awesome way to quickly start picking up what makes the image appealing to the eye. look at different games that are inspiring and try to figure out how they went about getting that final look.
lots of games have decent lighting, but the ones that have amazing lighting really stand out. I would look at : crysis 2, dead space 1 and 2, the witcher 2, battlefield 3, mirrors edge and most current gen racign games like gt 4, and forza as games that would be great reference for top notch lighting.
Another thing is that you have a couple of spelling mistakes in your resume, as far as I can see:
transperancy -> transparency
dinning -> dining
Premire -> Premiere
Masher: Fantastic! Thanks for nudging me in the right direction. I really appreciate the tips.
gregs: THANK YOU SO MUCH. I went back to make those changes and noticed I had also made a typo on my phone number! NNNOOOOOO Total derp moment on my part. :poly135:
I've gone back and made some minor changes on some of the images and whatnot based on some of the previous comments. I will continue to work on it, so if anyone else has any crits please join the party!
yeah i would take that noise off your page, like now.
Art looks nice, but it all feels very buried, especially the props.
uhhh what? i have seen tons of assets with crazy n-gons like that in games, its a completely flat surface and shouldn't matter at all. I dont get why people still think ngons are horrible, I cant even remember the last time the triangulation got screwed up from max to unreal or any other game engine.
the one thing in the props that jumped out about that manhole cover to me is, its a lot of geo when in most cases it would probably be a decal with some nice dirt around the outside to blend ontop of a road, or if it was soemthing the player could pick up to throw or interact with, it should be way rounder like 30 sides or so. right now it falls into that middle ground of tri count that it is confusing.
also, the mailbox has a ton of un-needed edge loops. dont be afriad to triangulate the model with the insets just connected to face corners. it might not look too pretty but it would easily shave about 150-200 tris off the model i think. for what is essentially a box, it shouldnt use so much geo. nice texture work on it though for sure!
did a quick sketch of what I would lose and then the green is how i would connect the verts.
anyway since its a folio work, i dont think it should get bumped. give it a chance, some better geo and texture variety, and youll get a nice folio piece, and quite different from the usual crate/barrel you see in every folio around the net
DDuckworth: I'm sure I can go in an optimize some of the geo... Thanks! Hoping to hit "champ" status eventually. Or at least get hired.
Oiban: Thanks!
Firebert: Yeah... like I said... derp. lol. When you say "noise" I'm assuming the weaker pieces? Are you referring mainly to the mahole cover?
Pixelmasher: Once again, thats for the in-depth crit. I'll re-vamp those pieces and get 'em up as soon as I'm able.
yodude: thanks man. definately looks like the sewer cover's gonna get re-vamped. Trying to stay away from the standard crate/barrel/cargo cantainer stuff as much as possible.
Hoping to get some new content and stuff up soon. Cheers!