[Portfolio] - CG Nick - critique
Hello, I have been applying to studios with little luck of landing a job. I was hoping to get some feed back on what I could do to make my portfolio better.
http://www.cgnick.com/
Thanks for any comments and all ideas will be greatly appreciated!
http://www.cgnick.com/
Thanks for any comments and all ideas will be greatly appreciated!
Replies
But you might want to re-do how your actual website is presented.
- First off, The website takes a while to load. Not sure if it's on my end or your end (does it take a while for anybody else?). Might want to look into that.
- The design of the text on the background looks out of place and mixes in with your pictures. You'd be better off just not having any of the background text. Also, see what your website would look like if you darkened the background more and flipped the image on its horizontal plane. You want your images to stand out more than anything else.
- The pure blue borders around some of your images look weird. You'd probably be better off without them.
- The text to describe your images could probably just go under each big picture instead of all the way to the right. It was so wide that had to scroll over to see what it was.
You have great stuff on here Nick, you just need to make sure it's presented well on the website too!
2nd, agree with another poster about the background the words don't really enhance anything so I wouldn't have them on there fighting with your actual work.
3rd, Image swapper. You have an image swapper for your BMW front/rear view which works really well. If you coded that yourself(?) you shouldn't have much trouble making it into a function that could work for all your images on the page. i.e. click a small thumbnail to replace the big image... I'm sure you could imagine how that would work.
4th, goes hand in hand with 3rd really, the stark html pages you are linking to with your hi-res image... some are a couple of images, one of them had the wireframe of the bmw on it, but I had no idea it was there until I clicked through. I'd prefer to be seeing everything up front, and as I mentioned earlier either for the images to load in the same page. Or for the page they link to to have a design consistent with the main site.
5th, I'd do one of two things, either add a main nav link to your resume or rename the contact link to advertise that your resume is in there. I assumed your resume was on your contact page but that's no reason not to explicate its presence.
6th, Your logo should link back to your index on every page, it's generally an expected behaviour.
7th, if possible ditch table based layout.
I hope you don't mind me just listing these in out in this way, don't take the tone as acerbic, they are just pointers really to help dress up the site. Your work looks great, particularly the BMW. I'm no 3D artist but it looks spot on.
You could also try to create some variation within the textures. Don't be afraid to venture outside of what's "realistic" to achieve this. I know several artist who might just smack a faint gradient over that gun to make the coloring looking more interesting. Take this thread for instance, there's quite some discussion on how to make it less flat and more interesting to look at. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76673
Keep at it, you will get there.
EDIT: My critiques are referring to the first image of the guns.
I also think that the textures are too clean/uninteresting
Your two UDK renders are by far your weakest works. The beach scene sticks out like a sore thumb to me. Your lighting and shadows (or lack there of) need extensive work. Beach is bright, I get that. But it also lacks any sort of atmosphere. Some of the textures in that scene are also very low res. Overall, the scene looks bright but flat.
I'm pretty sure with some more time in UDK you'll more fully understand it, which will greatly help you out in the end.
I'm saying this so that you don't get too discouraged to continue. But even having said that, definitely listen to the other polycounters. I've gotten a lot of good advice from here too.