Online portfolio critique?
polycounter lvl 11
Hey guys, I'm back on the market for the first time in a while and I was hoping you guys could help critique my portfolio website.
It's available here: http://samibashir.com/
Any feedback you could give me would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
It's available here: http://samibashir.com/
Any feedback you could give me would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
Replies
One crit i can give is that personally i think that you should take your breakdown section down from the character area. Gives a strange contrast. All those awesome character sculpts with some prop wires to the side...
But that's just me
Overall, strong body of work. All the best with your future projects!
Do I need more model breakdowns? Is it helpful to have a breakdown of the whole scent or would breakdowns of individual objects be more helpful to employers evaluating my portfolio?
Thanks.
I'm applying for game companies again and getting art tests occasionally although not as many as I'd like. Any advice ya'll could give me on that front? I've done some contract work for local studios but would really, really like to transfer over to in-house work as the contract lifestyle is too unpredictable(although I guess so is the whole industry, right? haha).
Anyway, thanks if you read this far and I look forward to any feedback ya'll can give me.
Once again, it's available here: http://samibashir.com/
Also, and I have no solution to this so I'm just pointing it out, but the images load really, really slowly. It took me forever to just load the pulserifle3 image as a test, and all the others were giving me the same slowness.
Anyways, good luck in your job hunt.
EDIT: After actually seeing the images on non-mobile I needed to edit out some of my comments about the environment work. The environment work appears to need quite a lot of help as well.
remove About and Contact, all info about you should be condensed into a single "Resume" page.
Folks have already brought up the characters, and I'd remove them as well.
Tighten up the levels/props to a single "Portfolio" and remove and unfinished assets (ie, wips, non-game ready)
Resume page is awful. "-" hyphens are annoying, just get rid of them. Looks like your personal notes from a class with the hyphens. Its very spaced out and hard to read. I have to scroll a lot and read meaningless stuff.
Quit putting "High Quality" everywhere is pointless. Look at other artists resumes. Make some bullet points of software you have used, and dont double space the hell out of it so its more readable. You list the word environment like 7 times. Your skill is "high poly environments" and then you list a job as doing high poly environments. Just put the job and drop the skilled version of that.
"-High quality texture painting and UV mapping" ok...? again seems useless, your gallery should speak for itself. If you take out 'High Quality' then you have "I can texture paint and uv unwrap"..........which is like "yes that is what a 3d artist does".
My work experiences (as a programmer) I list basically 3 sentences for each job. You have too much and its too spacy to read. For instance list the projects for the company and a tad bit of info. Again for an artist your gallery shows your skills. Jobs are just to show you have had jobs and the role/basics of what you did:
Thrust Interactive (November 2012 – Current) – Technical Artist and Environment Artist Contractor
Worked on Dungeon Crawlers (Mobile Turn Based), AT&T game
(You already listed the job as environemtn artist and your description was "worked on environemnts") again maybe list how many environments or something about your job.
Again look at other people written resumes.
For your art, it's not at a professional level in my opinion and I think a lot of people would be lying to just say good luck and positive things. Your character is not very good. There are amazing people in z-brush and your character is very bad. Your portfolio is to be your best work. So if this is your best work and as other have said "Remove your best work from your website".....I'm just saying it a more clear way: your best work is workable, but not finished/professional.
I saw your degree is in Public Policy. If you don't have an art background keep pushing. It takes a while to dial in. You won't be getting a job at a AAA place at this point. You could however work on some engines and design some levels and maybe get a level design position or some other position.
I guess one point to clarify is that I know I'm not a character artist but I figured since I have dabbled in it I'd put it on there anyway. After reading all of ya'lls comments I've taken down the character section until I come up with something better.
That being said, any thoughts on the environments themselves? I've actually started to go back and clean up some weak points in them but if ya'll have any advice on that front I'd be really grateful as most of my work is in environments and level design.
The bridge is also 25K polygons. That's a huge amount of geometry for a single section of level, and given the structure of the piece it seems like it could be a lot more optimized.
Pieces like this would also give me great pause: http://i.imgur.com/CxJInPM.png
This is just some very simple geometry overlayed with some alphas, and not convincingly, just sorta dinked on there without being incorporated into any sort of design. The handle in particular seems very lazy. I know that's a negative word. An amateur doing a handle with lattice work that doesn't match up, has no mid-range detail like that, would be just an amateur who doesn't know a better way to do it. A professional doing that is lazy. I am not saying that you are one of those things or the other, but you are looking for a professional job presumably, so your goal must be to produce professional work. Same thing with the arrows on the bottom. They aren't even custom alphas they are (I believe) literally just random alphas pre-loaded in zbrush.
Finally:
This is the exact wrong attitude. Portfolios should be nothing but the best of your work. You gain absolutely nothing while applying to an environment art position by showing that you have 'dabbled' in character art. You do however lose a lot of credibility by showing off bad art. Portfolios need to be heavily pruned and streamlined for the quickest, most impressive scroll through you can give a prospective employer. Anything else reduces your chances.
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A lot of the stuff in your resume doesn't seem to match with your skillsets. The bit about 'highly optimized' seems strange when you don't seem to make a huge effort to show any optimizations in your work, and most of the low poly stuff doesn't have any breakdown at all.
Beyond that, I would prune down some of the experience. Having experience building your own game etc. is good, but when you put LOW-LIGHT STUDIOS as work experience, you should be aware that an employer checking into you is going to do a google search at minimum (if they are interested at all), and find stuff like this: http://lowlitstudios.com/?author=2 which probably won't help their image of you, and at worst it will like you're just trying to pad out your resume.
It's not that having indie experience is bad, it's a great thing, but that studio doesn't exactly put any effort into appearing professional, with a wordpress blog for a site, 1 entry of some props that literally anybody could make in an afternoon. Again, could be amazing experience for you, nobody knows what's going on behind the scenes, but it just doesn't seem like a way to put a good foot forwards since it's all the way at the top of your experience, thus likely the first that they'll check.
That picture with the hammer shows that there is a general lack of understanding how models are created
On your highpolies, nearly all your edges are too sharp. Rather do too soft than too sharp. Avoid polies where they dont contribute to the silhouette / shape
For presentation, avoid 50% grey backgrounds (god forbid grey to black gradients), if you really cant think of something better, do 85% grey backgrounds atleast, a lot more light on the eye and not as ugly.
The wirframes are very ugly, try desaturating or changing the color of the light blue per photoshop. Do not use orthographic views from your Zbrush models, it hurts the eyes and is not how we percieve reality. Do not use fonts with serifs or red text.
The WP website looks fine, I like the condensed font.
My honest advice is to not apply for jobs in your area now, youre just using your one time chance to early. Sit down, focus for a couple of weeks, dig really deep in the matter, check out tutorials and the work of others closely, push out some quality assets (Do not do your own designs!) follow references closely, try not imagining things, its really hard for everyone and just hurts your results a lot.
I learned that the hard way
You seem to be pretty proficient in zbrush sculpting hard surfaces, thats a nice trait, if you sit down a little and get a better grasp of everything, it will pay off. It is hard stuff, but the learning curve is fast and high, and before you realize you will be doing really sweet stuff, im sure
I guess one major thing that one of you brought up that I really need to focus on are the silhouettes of my meshes. Ysalex mentioned that it appears my meshes are fairly simple and everyone said my textures need work and I think that's pretty telling that I'm wasting my tri's on areas that don't need them when I could be spending them on the silhouettes of my models. When up close I guess it's a bit more apparent than from afar but I tend to model out a lot of the interior geometry of my meshes. I'm guessing that my textures are doing my geometry any favors in accentuating their form so that's definitely something I'll be looking at tutorials for.
Really appreciate the detailed feedback, I'll do my best to make sure I follow through on all of it. Thanks guys.
I wouldn't even worry about texturing right now until you can properly bake a normal map from your high poly to your low poly. Baking an Ambient Occlusion map would be useful as well.
Same. Though I don't think people remember names after a while (definitely not a year later). But you won't get the job anyway at this point so no point wasting it.
Your environments are again workable, but not finished. This for example:
http://samibashir.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/v31.png?w=1200
Textures are low res. Is this for mobile? I would list that if it is because otherwise its not "high quality environment" its "mobile/portable quality".
*The design of it isn't very good. Is there a reference? Where is the rest of the city/ the land? Its like a floating island and not a complete scene.
*The yellow wall is highly detailed and the concrete trim surrounding it are super low rez undetailed. Look at some more venice references and improve upon it.
* Red tiled roof looks flat, put a normal map on it or fix the normal map on it.
Originally the only screenshot I showed was this one: http://samibashir.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/venicefinal1.png?w=1200 as that was THE scene. It was only later that I decided to use other images from the level in my port since I made it run aroundable(word?). I can see exactly what's wrong with the closeup(and will remove that one from the site pending further work on the scene) and I probably shouldn't have included that in the lineup.
My original thoughts with the Venice scene were that I'd try and recreate a real world scene in the UDK. Looking back, maybe Venice would be a good place to recreate, however, that particular scene doesn't have a whole lot of interesting geometry going on so I should have probably depicted something more dynamic as it's mostly flat buildings with railings and balconies and some docks.
Also, although I'm still constantly working on improving my textures without using any tools like DDO, the textures in that scene in particular kept going super low-res when you get more than a few feet away for some reason. At some point I stopped trying to figure out what's wrong and decided to just put a fork in it.
Also, it's not mobile, but it wasn't originally meant to be seen up close. Couple that with the texture res issue and tada.
Anyway, thanks again. Got any more abuse for me?
From a school/grading standpoint as well as a professional critique. It is a project on Venice, you keep saying environment and high poly. So go back and finish it. If I today decided I wanted to put in my portfolio an Environment of the Mall of America, I wouldn't simply reference 1 photo showing a GAP, cell phone kiosk and Abercrombie. I'd get probably 50 some references to try and recreate it. I hate going back to old work, so you might be better off trying a different/new environment to start fresh. You want to show off
Other critiques:
-Yellow/Purple poles. Why that color? doesn't fit.
-Furthest building on the right of both images. Look at your window sill/arches vs the reference. You should make a high poly and normal map all those fancy creases. Or just keep some of the crease gemoetry.
-Your red brick is highly saturated in red. Some bricks can be that way but its not usual especially after wear. Usually they are more plain like the reference (not crazy red).
-Again the low res orange tile roofs: fix your low res texture issue, and then apply a normal map. Those roofs def need it.
-There are plenty of finished environment art examples in real games on here. Look at that and see what to expect of a portfolio environment piece of a city. Search this sub-forum for keyword "Art Dump".
"the textures in that scene in particular kept going super low-res when you get more than a few feet away for some reason" Post for some help on that. The stripes on your bars are blurry as hell when they should be crisp like the photo reference. I don't use UDK so I don't know.