[Portfolio] - Michael Barnes, 3d Artist
polycounter lvl 9
Hello fellow polycounters, here is my new portfolio.
www.mikebarnes3d.com/
I can now start looking for work as my university studies have ended.
I originally focused solely on character creation, however I wanted to develop my skills in other areas such as vehicle and weapon creation.
I did have a sculpts page in linked to the navigation bar, however I decided to remove it as my sculpts were fairly dated and did not match up to my newer work. That is why there is a lot of blackness going on.
Any comments are suggestions are welcome.
Thanks for looking :poly121:
www.mikebarnes3d.com/
I can now start looking for work as my university studies have ended.
I originally focused solely on character creation, however I wanted to develop my skills in other areas such as vehicle and weapon creation.
I did have a sculpts page in linked to the navigation bar, however I decided to remove it as my sculpts were fairly dated and did not match up to my newer work. That is why there is a lot of blackness going on.
Any comments are suggestions are welcome.
Thanks for looking :poly121:
Replies
Don't use flash.
Can't comment on site, if you wish to keep the flash side of the site then have options on the main art page click> HTML / Flash <click but everyone might just go with the html, you can be the judge by the stats/hits on your site.
I have made a new HTML version of it which seems to be much faster
http://www.mikebarnes3d.com/#!portfolio|mainPage
I still need play around with the character bust portrait. I was also thinking about adding titles to the pictures.
www.mikebarnes3d.com
There is the new website with a additional vehicle
How is it for load time?
In Cornwall everyone's internet speed seems to be different so it is hard to get a average as to how long it takes to load.
Also, I am torn between 3 choices at the moment.
A - keep the previous work section
B - Remove it
or
C - Convert it to a art dump showing , leaving only a dump/list of the keep parts of each of the old pieces of work that I would like to show.
I am also thinking of adding a new blog section to the portfolio to show daily sketches/studies etc which I do not actually want to put in the main portfolio itself.
Thats a pretty cool signature, the word punting just reminds me of Anchorman where Baxter gets punted off the bridge lol
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Then get rid of the old ones. Weakest link, etcetera and so forth.
I mean, if you hardly have any work and want to show some diversity, you can keep older pieces. But you've got 5 fairly strong and reasonably diverse pieces, so you don't need to hold on to the past.
Its important to state this.
The layout is good, I personally expected to click on "Michael Barnes 3D Artist" at the top and have it take me back to the main page.
I think you should put a beauty image right at the top of each page you click on, instead of text. People want to see cool and impressive before they want the texty details. If you have to qualify your art with text explanations in order for it to be impressive, it might not be as impressive as you hoped...
You use youtube for your turn arounds, which its nice that you provide turn arounds that's great, but I think you need to provide them in a scrubable format that like quicktime .mov or .mp4. youtube is horrible for scrubbing, trust me people will want to scrub it, pause and look at specific sections then rotate it back and forth.
You might want to include your phone number in an image or in the contact email or embed it in your resume. There are bots that crawl the web and you will end up with a lot of people trying to sell your voice mail a lot of useless garbage, its just a matter of time.
Drone:
The format of your turn around is a little frustrating. Cut the first 10sec out of it, make it like the others where there is a brief title and then goes right to it, the info in the first 10sec is redundant, I know its a drone, done by you and I'm already on your site. In demo reals you have 10 seconds to sell the viewer on the next 10sec, you waste the first 10 seconds and lose your viewer before anything starts, not good for the first piece in your folio...
The background in the still shots is noisy and distracting. With some better lighting in the scene you could really put the focus on the drone and make it stand out a lot better. Or cut the background all together.
Natalie:
There are a few issues with this model that I think you could tweak and really bump the quality up, (most of these go for the male character also).
Del - Ahhh thanks! I have added that to a new about page along with a brief summary of my CV
Mark Dygert - Thanks for the in-depth feedback. You gave me a lot of things to think about which has kept me busy for the last few days.
I have moved the videos to the bottom so the viewer can have instant feedback with the images. I have also linked each of them to the higher res versions.
I have tried to incorporate as much of the changes as you suggested with regards to both Natalie and the Drone.
The small changes you pointed out have made a huge difference in my opinion , especially the eyes and the hair line, oh and the stubble shadows lol
On a side note I have changed the thumbnails for both Natalie and the Nobleman.
I am in the process of starting a new hand painted project, creating the concept in Photoshop.
I am torn between 2 choices at the moment. Should post the finished concept as a WIP or should I wait untill the final 3d model is finished :S
I have found that people seem to advise that you do not post WIP's on your website as it suggests that you do not finish projects etc. However I am in a pickle as I do not seem to be having any luck with my job hunting and I really need to get a job. I feel that I might be lacking in low spec characters so the concept I am working on is pretty unique (I hope...it is a Penguin Soldier/Cyborg!) low spec character which should hopefully wow potential employers.
Should I put it on my portfolio and put 'coming soon' over it or just leave it out?
I am contemplating adding some small bars with headings to separate the game assets from the sculpts as I am not sure if the sculpts writing fits in with the rest of the page at the moment.
The bar on here is set very high so I am guessing that either my work isn't up to par or I am doing something very wrong when applying.
Can anyone see a major gap in my work or suggest any type/style of character/creature/asset that would potentially better my chances?
Its not that easy, you may have to wait until some seasoned game artists have died of old age before you get an interview.
Like the website, love the drone, but 2 things:
Your sculpting strokes need to be smoother, you need to practise more.
If you're going to use SSS, do a better job of using colour and detail.
I recommend you take your characters and build maquettes around them and focus on telling a bit of story and giving some context to them. As it is now, they don't tell me anything about your ability to be creativity. When companies are looking to hire someone, they're looking for someone who they can invest in for their future.
So, here we go:
Learn to rig. Rig their faces, get some facial expressions.
Build Maquette environments for your characters that are focused on bringing context to them.
Posing, and story in your art will make it feel less technical, and way more artistic.
You can get away with T-poses if you're Kolby Jukes. If you're not, you should be spending time posing and showing you have an understanding of musculature in motion.
And as I tell everyone - Ask more questions on polycount. Be more active within the community and learn. Don't give up, just because you have a portfolio doesn't mean you should stop producing art for it. This is a craft that demands perfection, and honestly, the competition here and worldwide for character art positions is mind boggling. You're on the right path.
Would you suggest the speed sculpt route to produce lots of likeness sculpts or to focus on full body sculpts?
I just checked out your sketchbook thread and dammmmmm! Your sketch a day's are amazing. I really want to improve my 2d painting but I must sort out my 3D first lol
After following some of the links I found myself on a Russian website looking at a abandoned submarine base, I thought to myself "Only on bloody Polycount"
Ravanna - What?! are you serious?! If you can't get a job after a year , what chanced do I have? I looked at your portfolio and your work is crazy good! Have you just been looking for character artist jobs or have you been looking for 3d artist, junior artist and QA jobs?
I think us aspiring 3d artists need to lynch some of these seasoned artists to make way for new blood, jokes!
Seasame - Thanks for your encouraging words and feedback, I will apply it to future models.
I haven't rigged the Nobleman character as another member of the mod was tasked with rigging and implementing the character. Once he is implemented to Chivalry I will be able to get some pics of him being chased by knights lol
I have rigged the Natalie character but like you say, better use of posing and facial expressions would really sell the character more. I will consider that in future projects and spend more time putting the character into context.
I spent a good 2 days re vamping the Natalie character and shouting at 3ds max and premier, I don't think I can put myself through that again lol I think my time would be better spent working on some new sculpts with some cool poses and musculature motion.
Philip7 - Thanks dude!
If you choose to keep it that is, personally I think you'll want to remove it because it's like the Eat3D pillar: people have seen it and know the tutorial, so it doesn't show much about your ability to work independently; it just shows you know how to follow a tutorial.
For that reason I have removed it from the portfolio and added another sculpt.
I'd say really try and push the lower subdivision levels much further, and try and be more observant, for example, that cowboy hat looks real small, and those stitches don't look like any stitches I've seen on a cowboy hat, and that collar doesn't really look like a real collar, it looks more like what you think a collar looks like in your head, but if you got some collar reference, you'd find it didn't really look like that at all, and so on and so forth
EDIT: also that surface noise on the shirt is far too much, a shirt doesn't really have much in the way of obvious texture, wheras your's looks like it's made out of rock or something.
Don't get too disheartened that you're not able to jump into a job straight out of university, just realise that you've learnt the skills and the techniques and the thinking behind creating game assets, you just need to practice it a bit more and that's the stage you're at right now, so just keep bashing out sculpts and models and see where you get in a month or 2...
The Cowboy sculpt was a rework and is over 2 years old now. That was when I first started learning ZBrush and I was like "Wow , this stitch looks cool, I will put it on everything that is fabric". Since then I have started paying more attention to refernces etc.
I thought that I could just tweak the anatomy in places to bring it up to scratch, but like you say there are problems that go deep into the sub div levels. I think I might remove it from the portfolio or un-link it to the high res image xD. I don't think that will make many people happy though lol
I checked out your portfolio and you have some nice work, especially the Capt. America!
nick2730: Thanks man , I am sure we will get there in the end! Are you looking for multiple positions or focusing on 1 particular position?
- Update -
Here is a new speed sculpt, all together it took about 5 hours to complete from a simple ZSphere setup.
I decided to modify the concept a little bit and throw a tiny bit of Avatar and Ork in there. Sadly I cant credit the author of the original concept as his name isn't on the file or picture itself.
Hopefully some low spec assets will increase my chances of getting a job
Should look at racer445's texture tutorial, this should help you a lot for improve the textures and make them "wow".
http://www.nextgenhardsurface.com/index.php?pageid=racer445
One last thing, you can also work the facial proportions to give a personality to your characters.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GpVrJkeXjT4/TSsQkfHrglI/AAAAAAAACu4/I1jBU9c3Xaw/s1600/face.JPG
I'll see what I can do as the compression hasn't really helped matters. I was going to link each of the images to a higher res version, but if the descriptive text was clear enough they wouldn't have to waste time waiting for the bigger images to load.
I will make the borders bigger so that I can overlay the title on the top and the website address on the bottom.
Thanks for those workflow links, they will help in future projects.
I am going to add more poses along with some facial expressions. I am also playing with the idea of modelling a expensive sword for him.
I am having a issue with the floor clipping. I have the global opacity set to 0 so that the eyes can have just the spec, but for some reason it results in a strange harsh shadowing artifact beneath the nobleman.
When I change the transparency from best to simple it resolves the issue, but, I lose the transparency on the eyes
Can anyone suggest a way that I could get both the eyes and floor to play nice?
Thanks
There seems to be a layout error of some kind. You have overlapping of your header and buttons. I am using the latest google chrome release if that matters.
keep it coming man, if you keep showing progress like this, you should find a junior position without a problem. Just keeping working on human anatomy and life studies, since they seem to be your weak points right now. Keep doing speed sculpts but do not avoid doing humans. Try females, faces of all nationalities, arm and leg studies, etc etc. Studios want people who are not afraid and avoid certain areas. To be your full potential as a character artist, you must be comfortable with everything organic first of all, that includes monsters, all races, and most importantly anatomy of all kinds. Character art is dog eat dog, so to stand above the rest and to get a job, you must really excel, work on your 2D as well. Great 3D artists have 2D abilities as well, especially 3D character artists. Dont let this scare you! Its all here to help. Keep it coming man, and good luck!
I am thinking of re rendering some things like the transformer , and adding them to a old work section, with like 1 beauty render for each asset etc.
---UPDATE---
Here is a new render of the Nobleman, along with 2 new poses.
I have noticed that some people seem to post only a presentation sheet for their characters containing a render of the character, a wireframe render and each of the textures.
Is this a good idea or should I stick to the way that I am doing it (beauty,construction, wires and textures in seperate images)
Let me know what you think
But great job dude, and keep it up!
edit/ looking closer that might not be it. I don't know... possibly someone can chime in an better explain why the skin isn't reading so well.