Reel and Content
polycounter lvl 7
Reel: http://vimeo.com/19378848
Just wanted some critiques on my reel edit, i am still a student, and was looking at how i should present me work, and what has worked for others out there.
I have gotten some feedback from a couple of guys at EA and Lucas as far as critiques on what to do so i editted it once and got this, and would like to know more of what to do.
Also, any critiques on the content itself, whats working, what isnt, what should i do to change things to look a little better.
I am an evironmental artist btw.
The reel consists of three levels, all of the third level (Lucifer) is hand painted.
Any critiques and feedback please and thank you.
-Ant
Just wanted some critiques on my reel edit, i am still a student, and was looking at how i should present me work, and what has worked for others out there.
I have gotten some feedback from a couple of guys at EA and Lucas as far as critiques on what to do so i editted it once and got this, and would like to know more of what to do.
Also, any critiques on the content itself, whats working, what isnt, what should i do to change things to look a little better.
I am an evironmental artist btw.
The reel consists of three levels, all of the third level (Lucifer) is hand painted.
Any critiques and feedback please and thank you.
-Ant
Replies
First off, your work looks pretty solid for the most part, I just think the presentation needs work. I didn't see the link to your website until the end of the reel, but what I (and probably a lot of other people here) would say is that showcasing your environments in still images on your website is probably the best way to go. If you want to have the video reel hosted on the website as well, go for it. But a lot of employers want to take a good long look at some nice high resolution images of your work. Even though you do have slow flythroughs, which is good, it is difficult for people to really get a good look at the work in a relatively low resolution video. Get some nice high resolution stills from each of your environments, and I would also think about showing off some individual assets from each scene and include things like triangle counts, wireframes, and texture flats. You want to give employers as much information about your work as you can.
As for the content in your scenes, here are my impressions for each one:
Paradise -- It looks like some pretty good work on the foliage. I think the weakest point is the lighting. There isn't much contrast in the scene, and as a result it ends up looking kind of flat. I would suggest rather than going for a mostly overcast look with the lighting, you try using a strong light source to get some nice shadows and light pools. I would also add a skydome of some sort (it looks like there is no sky, just a gray backdrop? Or that could just be fog, i dont know).
The Pit -- This scene suffers from the same problems as your Paradise scene. There doesn't seem to be any real strong light sources, and as a result there isn't really a good focal point. A lot of the scene just sort of gets lost in brown and black muddy details. Overall I think you have a lot of good elements, and I think if you work on the lighting a bit it will look really nice. But right now it is very hard to read. It's also possible that some of your textures are just too dark, but it's hard to say without seeing a breakdown of the models and textures that went into the scene.
Saint Lucifer -- I think this is your best scene in regard to lighting and contrast, unfortunately a lot of the scene is still quite dark. In this case I think the problem may just be too-dark texture work, because your grayscale/lighting-only shots actually look pretty damn good. But when it switches back to full textured, it starts looking very dark and the details get lost. I should say though, in some of the shots where you get up close in the flythrough, particularly the shot where you fly down the center (with the hands reaching out) it looks really cool and its easier to see things. But in the shots where you show the full scene, its very hard to tell what is going on.
Overall, you're definitely on the right track, the work looks solid and I think with some revisions these can all be great pieces.
Also, I wrote this up as I was watching the reel, and looked at your website afterward, so I realize now that you have some of the stuff that I mentioned (still images of the scenes, etc) so please disregard if I said you needed something that is already on your site