Portfolio Review

Ryper · Nov 2013

Hey Folks,

So I'm now at a stage that I think my portfolio is in good enough shape to show off to the world

.

I'm looking for any crits you guys can throw at me, Good and bad points, what I need to improve on, and most importantly, do you think I could get my first job in the industry from this?

Personally, I'm aiming for my next piece to be a hard surface environment, as so far its mainly organic scenes.

Thanks in advance, any comments are more than welcome

www.SeanLively.co.uk

fayesmith · Nov 2013

Hey, just commenting on your site design rather than your work:
Site design and colour scheme is nice.
Your images are really small, I know you can click to make them bigger but a lot of people won't want to keep clicking.
I'd also move the white band that has the name of the asset to touch the bottom, giving you more space.

(:

Bruno Afonseca · Nov 2013

2.8mb images...

Ryper · Nov 2013

@Fayesmith thanks for the site design crit, i'll take the white band into consideration, and to get to one of the large images it takes 2 click from the homepage, the thumbnail ones are just intended as an image that showing you an idea of what your clicking on, is that an issue? interested to see what others think on this.

@fonfa thanks for pointing that out with the image size, I have just converted them to jpgs, but they are losing a lot of the colour quality, they are png's at the moment, would it be worth sacrificing the quality for image size?

Ryper · Nov 2013

Anybody else?

JamesMeader · Nov 2013

Have you thought about making the thumbnails of the renders a lot bigger therefore minimizing the amount of clicks?

joeriv · Nov 2013

Your images are really small, size those up imo, your site is like 80% grey, and if you want to actually see your work you have to click around/go back all the time.
So go to something like 1280x720 instead of 500x281, and save as jpg.

For your resum

cholden · Nov 2013

You need more content. The three presented items are essentially the same thing. The Island and The Cave are both presented as caves that open up into a scene with trees, and Assets are just props from those scenes. Technically, you have one scene presented with a few very basic props. Don't worry about this site and put together new pieces.

That said, "bar staff" in resume/cv is pointless to this industry, and about pages are redundant to resume/cv pages, remove it.

ng.aniki · Nov 2013

As Cholden said, you could merge AboutMe And Resume page together.

Also you could remove this page:

Click HERE to view my CV in PDF
Click HERE to view my CV on the website

Just show your online cv directly, and add a link on top of the page, or PDF icon to download the file. One less useless click.

I also agree with the others> Use larger thumbnails. Right now their use is only to make people click on them. They are not used to really show the art.
So make them bigger so the visitors can directly see the scenes, and so that they would only click on them if they really want to see the details.

beefaroni · Nov 2013

Way too many clicks/waiting on your site to see your work. With that said, it's a good site (design-wise) that just needs a small amount of improvement.

I guess I'll just write out my experience with your page. Overall the max width of everything should increase to between 900 - 1000px. It's too small now. Also reduce the file size of everything.

1. Open the website, content is easily accessible (good); however, the thumbnails are small.
2. Click on a project I want to see, scroll through. Your thumbnails are too small though. I can't really see much detail in anything.
3. At this point, I have to click on every single image to get a bigger version of it. Images take too long to load and after I'm finished I have to go back and repeat the process a total of 14 times to view every work in your portfolio. I've stopped browsing and am now writing this.

____________________

Also, some CV things

Remove your birthdate and marital status from your CV. Age is irrelevant in this industry and I've never seen marital status on a resume on here yet.

Under Key Program Skills the formatting is inconsistent. Either write 3DS Max and Mudbox or Autodesk 3DS Max and Autodesk Mudbox. Don't have it just in one spot.

There is no reason your resume needs to be 2 pages long. That means that a potential company has to go out of their way to keep your resume/CV together and not lose a page. Your name and Environment Artist can go on top, push the content left a little. That will make room for your work experience to slot in next to your Personal Details and Key Program Skills.

I wouldn't sell yourself short on the Environment Artist position. Remove the freelance as well as the worked from home bit.

Ryper · Nov 2013

Thank you very much guys, all really useful comments. I'll work on this when I get chance over the next couple of days, seems like the things I need to work on are:

- More Artwork! (this is something I'm currently working on at the moment)
- Either remove or re texture the campfire, as you said, its not up to standard
- Larger thumbnails, give the option to click them for a large image, but make the thumbs big enough to see all the details
- Reduce the file size of each image
- Merge my resume and about pages
- Cut down my cv to one page, and remove things that are irrelevant to the industry.

Again, thank you for the crits, its much appreciated

Portfolio Review

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