[Portfolio] – jbot, Character Artist

jbot

Hi, I was wondering If I could get some feedback on my portfolio. The reel is long, sorry about that. But I'm more trying to figure out how I should display my work in the gallery. I tried a few different ideas and I'm just not quite sure how or what to show. Thanks in advance.

jbasse.com

jbot

Sukotto

For calling yourself a character artist, you don't have any finished characters, just a bunch of polypainted sculpts. You'll be a better and more hireable artist if you show you know how to take a character down to game-res and fully textured and presented in a game engine.

My advice is to retopo these characters and texture them and present them in UDK or Marmoset or something. And you seem to have mainly 'monsters' characters, I think it would be a good idea to diversify and have a normal proportionally correct human character. And character artists should be flexible in style so maybe try something hand-painted or cartoony as well

jbot

Okay thanks for the reply! Yeah all the characters are retopologized and have texture maps, the posed female character highlights that in the expandable thumb at the bottom of the site I feel like you may have over-looked those as they also show human anatomy studies as well . I get what your saying about diversifying though. So basically show more of the lo-poly meshes and plug into marmoset or udk, sounds like a plan. Should they be posed or t-posed, does it matter?

Sukotto

The way I would have it set up is have a 'beauty' shot for each character and if you click it, it leads to breakdowns of the characters. It would make it much more organized, plus I don't really like LIghtbox all that much And you should definitely have specular maps on these characters too, you have a normal map on them. The spec map will pick up all those sculpted details much better.

I would definitely pose them for a beauty shot at least, unless you don't know how to rig. Posing is a smal thing but I think it makes a huge difference when presenting a character

jbot

Thanks man, I'm making some updates now

garriola83

Try to get some costumes for your characters. It's great to show anatomy, but great design is not only showing anatomy, but also what you can add on top of it. Tell a story with the design, not simply to get it done.
And no black BG in the renders. Period.
Good luck.

Skillmister

Your images take forever to load

jbot

garriola83 wrote: »

Try to get some costumes for your characters. It's great to show anatomy, but great design is not only showing anatomy, but also what you can add on top of it. Tell a story with the design, not simply to get it done.
And no black BG in the renders. Period.
Good luck.

Thanks for the response! Good advice all around I'll keep it in mind going forward. :thumbup: I like your characters btw

achillesian

You're showing the painted high poly versions, the texture and normal maps, and the low poly mesh, but you're missing the key thing to show here:

The low poly mesh with the color and normal texture on it in a game engine.

jbot

Thanks for the reply achillesian! Yep its been pointed out, I am working on it as we speak Using marmoset with NO black background!

Dmi3

Firs off, I'd like to say, that like the quality of your models.
What I would advice is to have more variety. I know, that at the moment that's all you have, but I'd advice to start making more, so that you didn't have all the same thing on your index page and demo reel.

About UDK though: I'd advice to do it in Unity, it will take too much time to make it in UDK. The time, you could spend on making more awesome characters. Also with Unity you can make it accessible in real time right from your website, so people can check it out for themselves. Check out virtual museum on my website dmi3animation.com to see what I mean. With UDK you can only show screen capture of you playing it.

jbot

Thanks for the reply Dmitri glad to see you here actually , yeah I'm already working on new projects. I am very over these three from school and looking forward to adding more to the site. That's interesting about unity, we used a little bit of that in school. I will have to check it out more. I know UDK a lot better but I like what you were able to do with it on your site, what a cool idea!

AlexCatMasterSupreme

The demo reel really needs some work, it's bland and a lot of your folio is aliased veiwport grabs it looks like. Make it exciting. The reel lacks interest, add some excitement and don't focus SO much on one model, people will loose interest. It also had some awkward camera movement. Light ypir models more interestingly, do some post, make it stand out of the screen so fucking hard you want to shit your pants.

jbot

Thanks AlexCatMasterSupreme! The reel definitely needs some work unfortunately.

AlexCatMasterSupreme

jbot wrote: »

Thanks AlexCatMasterSupreme! The reel definitely needs some work unfortunately.

No problem.