[Portfolio] - Sylver
Hi All!
I know this is only my fifth post on the forums, but I've signed up specifically because my college career is nearing its end and still want to be tapped into the 3D community, even when I may not be active in it.
Which brings me to this portfolio reel. It only reflects maybe the last year of work and development, but in that time I've made considerable advances and feel adept enough (aside mandatory) to present my demo reel.
This is the only piece of submission work I have completed, as I need to continue doing some work before I start distributing my blog info.
This demo reel is designed for the mandatory placement in my college course. Please be aware that the course I'm in is a jack-of-all trades course, and I've done my best to dive into 3D with everything else on my plate.
Without further adeau: [ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPo3XalChvs[/ame]
I know this is only my fifth post on the forums, but I've signed up specifically because my college career is nearing its end and still want to be tapped into the 3D community, even when I may not be active in it.
Which brings me to this portfolio reel. It only reflects maybe the last year of work and development, but in that time I've made considerable advances and feel adept enough (aside mandatory) to present my demo reel.
This is the only piece of submission work I have completed, as I need to continue doing some work before I start distributing my blog info.
This demo reel is designed for the mandatory placement in my college course. Please be aware that the course I'm in is a jack-of-all trades course, and I've done my best to dive into 3D with everything else on my plate.
Without further adeau: [ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPo3XalChvs[/ame]
Replies
"Jack of all Trades" will unfortunately not land you a job at a AAA studio. Find something you really want to do and focus every waking moment towards improving on. If it is game and environment art, get OUT of software rendering. Pick up a game engine and get familiar with the asset creation pipeline.
The elfy green character looks good, but I have no idea what your contribution to it was. Did you model it too? If so, why aren't the textures done?
3 seconds of an "over the shoulder" view of you looking at a rig doing nothing spectacular doesn't tell us that you know anything about motion capture.
I take it you didn't model that ship in Unreal, but no credit is given, and the object you are showing off is clearly unfinished as well.
The first couple environments and props look a bit dated. The clock at the beginning is the sort of props you need to be able to master FIRST, and then these giant environments or characters.
At the end you show off a "Normal Map Test", which essentially translates into "I really hope this turns out well, because I don't know what I am doing". If a studio lead is looking at your stuff, you don't want to sell yourself short by showing unfinished "Work in Progress" stuff or "Render Tests".
Find a passion. There ARE jobs out there for people with a "little of everything" sort of talent, but this industry is getting cutthroat and difficult to break into. You need to figure out what it is you want to do and focus.
Next, the motion capture segment isn't showing me that you actually know motion capture, only that you've probably used Vicon before. But for all I know, that could be someone else sitting next to the screen. Maybe you could apply some of the motion capture data to one of your characters.
Good luck to you!
so, as Ott's feedback suggests, showing a reel like this, others will think you're all over the place with what you're showing here in this reel, that you want to be a "jack of trades". a jack of all trades isn't what you want. i think you know that. the way i read it, was you were disclaiming that the reason everything looked so disembodied in subject/role, it was being directed by your course's structure. This reel isn't aimed at potential employers (but if someone liked it enough, you wouldn't complain, right?) in fact, it is aimed at pleasing the school's graduation reel requirements. am i close?
i've held the opinion that "good students", the ones that do what they're told, do their assignments, end up getting screwed, in a way. i mean, once out the gate, they are left with a mess of work to organize, with not much substance for the portfolio they want to have. say you wanted to be a character artist, instead, 80% of your week had been devoted to working on anything other than that.
my advice to these students, is to make the necessary time you need to create the pieces for the portfolio you want outside of school. speaking from experience, school stuff is important, having good grades really does help when you don't have industry experience. but, don't go overboard on it. your instructors may take offense if they find this is what you're doing, but what really matters is your success outside of school. not impressing the nice teachers with working your ass off on a project that would never help you achieve your goal. do what needs to be done, the quicker you can get those obstacles out of the way, the more time you have learning and creating the things you need to show you can do what it is you want to do.
if you're working on your reel, that means you're pretty close to wrapping things up and being booted out into the real world. gleam what you can from my advise for your situation. pick something to specialize in, and start busting ass on the work you'll need to showcase to get a job doing it. if the projects you're pouring your heart into aren't going to help you achieve what you want, then you need to wrap it up and start working on something that will help you.
regarding your reel, it isn't very impressive, most of it is incomplete. but it should be enough to get a grade that isn't embarrassing, if so, works for me. what your reel is missing for the employer audience, is a single focus (animator? model/texture? character? environment? level design?) and more completed work.
good luck, hope that helps.
thanks for the bluntly honest opinion. Seriously, this course is still quite small and its left me with the impression that I was a large fish in a small pond; I wasn't even quite aware how large the ocean was!
you all basically got it, but Killing really put it into words; the course teaches a lot of "things", but no substance. I've been left with a mish-mash of stuff that I view as mediocre to okay, and the course applauds me for it.
to be honest I've always been passionate for characters and props; seeing as the industry gives seniors the spotlight on characters, that leaves me with props, which I guess is environment modeling. I'm happy with that clock in my reel, and definitely want to produce more of that with better quality.
So I suppose I should ask all of you since my course has failed to teach me; how would I go about making a demo reel that would be eye catching that supported prop modeling? should I do more scenes like the den and then do focus on specific prop models? or should I take a different route? I'm not worried about doing more work, I'm fine with that. Just tell me how to get things to work.
Firstly, familiarize yourself with a game engine. Unreal3 Engine or CryEngine would be my recommendations. A more specific recommendation would be to pick up a copy of UT3 (ideally the collectors edition with the training DVD's) and also Jason Busby's 'Mastering Unreal Technology' book. Play around with the engine a bit, see what it can do, and what you can do with it.
Then start working on simple assets. It sounds to me like you want to do props or characters, some studios would class that as the same job. From my experience, a Character Artist is a separate role to and Environment Artist, but both do assets as well. As I said though, simple assets, get fully familiar with the whole process of concepting, modelling high / low poly meshes, sculpting if necessary, UV'ing (all aspects; good unwrap, good placement, smoothing groups etc), baking maps, and texturing.
You could check out Eat3D's awesome tutorials, the 'Old Damaged Pillar' is a great walkthrough of the whole game asset pipeline.
cg.tutsplus.com also has some awesome game related video tutorials, one good one on creating a dumpster, an awesome combat knife series detailing the whole workflow, and Racer445s excellent video on normal maps.
Of course there are many others, but these are some that I have found especially useful.
And just go from there, keep making assets, anything you like, doors, boxes, weapons, rocks, anything! Simple sounding objects can be surprisingly impressive, I've seen some brick walls on here that have made me go 'woooah' and that's the kind of work you should be producing before putting it in a reel.
In relation to the reel, I kinda see less requirement for an artist to produce an animated reel. Obviously it's nice to have, and of course if your assets have been used in games then it's better to see them in realtime. However, for entry level openings, I would have said a reel is really only necessary for animators/riggers. Get a good looking portfolio, and some good quality prints when you have some work you are happy with and you should be able to showcase your work well.
What you have in your reel from a technical point of view should be a good foundation to translate that knowledge into a more specific area of game art.
In short, have a good browse around the threads here, start an inspiration folder and save every image you like, maybe watch some game-related tutorials and get started!
Awesome.
the "stuff" you've learned that you don't see as very valuable will start to show when you begin to create the portfolio you want. i honestly don't think it will take much, if you have the skills a college graduate has. you really only need a few nice assets to make it happen. make use of your resources, you definitely don't want to burn any bridges with negativity. stay positive and friendly. also, consider this: just about every job offer i had seriously considered was from the members of these boards that i've gotten to know over the many years. networking is important. it's important to give as much as take with these communities. there are many more out there that have the same type of help to offer. i'd say being active and liked in an art community like this is pretty crucial. post the work you're working on as you're working on it and consider the feedback you get.
i feel that you're right about more senior artists getting character positions. it's actually a pretty complex role to own. if it really is what you want, without compromise, don't settle for anything less. you've sacrificed a lot already to get where you are now. but, consider that you could continue to work for that position once you were in, gaining marks on your resume that whole time.
I think, despite what you school may say, that unless you are an animator with moving characters and such, that you don't need a show reel. If you going to do props then all you need is kick ass prints or still images of those props.
NO need to waste time on a show reel is your not going to be an animator. I mean it is a nice bonus sometimes to see, but only if it is AAA material and will blow you away.
So turn the show reel in and graduate, then go do as many prop design tutorials you can find, then go sign up for a mod team as a prop designer. Learn the pipeline and work to help produce an actual game. You can also try and find freelance 3d work to bolster the portfolio. Once you have some skills worth showing off you can start looking for real work as a prop designer / environment artist. just my 2cents
texture your fucking models for the love of god.
Stop hiding behind cartoony styles, make some realistic stuff, aiming for photorealism. If you can hit photoreaslism then you can usually hit a specific non-photoreal style.
pick characters or environments, you're not doing either one well enough.
there is literally nothing demonstrable in the rigging/mocap portions of the video.
You've done enough modeling to show that you are knowledgeable in the software, but nothing shows a mastery of the techniques and artistry. You really need to throw out everything you have in your demo reel and make new assets. Assets that aren't class projects, assets where you are honing your abilities rather than learning new software features.
I've put a bit of thought into what other resources I'll want to make and begin construction soon. hopefully the people that have seen this thread will continue their critique in the threads that will follow them when the
creationtwentytwo: I've just begun working in the UT3 environment and fortunately I do have the special edition of the game. UNfortunately one of my friends lost the DVD, but I'll definitely be following through with that.
Ghostscape: thanks, I appreciate the harsh criticism. although I do feel I that some of the pieces can be salvaged. Seeing as I do intend on doing props and assets I will be keeping the den scene and cleaning it up. the rest of the reel are just me trying to show I know more than how to use a cylinder and make stuff spin (which now I know is completely missing the point of what a reel is for).
killingpeople:thanks for the kind words and advice, definately will be sticking around here and hopefully build up a good repore with people and a better portfolio.
I think that mod's can as you said be un-needed stress and BS, but they can also be very helpful, I'm an aspiring character artist, I joined a source mod as a character artist and learned massive amounts from the other artists who were in-fact industry artists themselves.
OP:
I understand this is a UNI demo reel, but don't rely on your UNI work to push you forward, your career is in your hands, how you handle it is up to you
I've decided that I'll end up doing asset modeling. Initially, I was thinking of going into low-polygon modeling, but have been told against it. However, I still have a bit of work done with this in mind and will hopefully be posting some of it soon for c&c.
Also, upon talking with someone about my content, it was stressed that I show that as a modeler that I can model and do anything; including hard bodies and soft bodies.
with this in mind I've begun to plot out some ideas regarding these; a character (warhammer 40k orc with power klaw) and a fairly detailed scene (a blacksmiths shop).
I will be creating separate threads once I start work on these projects, but I thought I would generally ask the people who have been following this thread for input into this. A lot of what I've picked up from the comments is that I lack a clear direction and am wanting to solidify this before I start running down the wrong track.
And again, thank you to those who have helped me with getting this far in trying to turn a bad education into something that I might have a chance with.
How long were you in school?
What was your main goal in school?
If you went to school for 3d / Game stuff and after 3-4 years this is it then you spent / wasted a lot of money.
Well I went back and watched the rest. Nope nothing changed from what I expected. I mean even in your UT3 level you have the error message. Lighting needs to be rebuilt.
HUGE NO NO for a demo reel. Nothing is presented nicely.
I hope you plan on working your ass off. You are gonna need it. Pick something and focus on it.
The hard truth be told, your clock that you spent an entire turntable on is a cube with a couple of extrudes that would take not any more than a few minutes.
Like everyone else said you're best bet is to really just scrap this entire reel. Things like normal map tests on your reel are pointless, as for anyone in a game art role that should be common knowledge.
keep at it man.
Your next step is to show you can model and texture things in a realistic fashion. Check these tutorials out. Like the clock you made for example, get some reference for a grand father clock and make as realistic as possible with a small texture, 256 x 256 and use 500 tris.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_home.php go under free/ show all/ unreal
Model a low poly car for example and practice texturing with just diffuse. once you have that try using diffuse, sec and normal maps.
Good luck, you are competing with artist of the caliber of Jesse Moody, that got layed off, so your work has to be as good as theirs if you want a job.
As a current student and aspiring game artist I too found myself in a similar position a little over a year ago. I was very ambiguous and couldn't see myself focusing on one aspect of game development; it was all so interesting.
While I won't sit here and tell you how you should go about determining what you wish to focus on, I will say that you should be completely honest with yourself through the process. You can't force talent (and by that I mean don't try to be a programmer if you demonstrate a natural ability to animate).
Now as for your reel, yes, it sucks. That's the honest and blunt answer you've already heard from the folks above me. However the way I see it from your reel, it seems you delved into a little bit of everything: level design, environment art, animation, and character art. That's something positive you can take away that will help you in your decision making process. Look through your reel again and try to recall what was the most fun and interesting to work with. Then set about and DO IT!
Also, say you choose to be an environment artist, register at a forum that contain like-minded people. polycount is obviously one of those places, but there are plenty of other sites where you can gauge the quality of your work next to other talented individuals.
I kind of started rambling a bit there, but good luck!