Portfolio- Matt Strutton, Environment Artist
I just got done making my first website. I would like to hear any all suggestions on just about anything. Still a work in progress (Have more work to put in) just want to see if I'm going in the right direction....Peace
Website,
http://oldkidproductions.com/
Website,
http://oldkidproductions.com/
Replies
To that, i think your not using you UV space very wisely. I see a lot of black on the texture maps. You can get a few more details into to use it better.
Also, when making the site graphics, especially if you use black stuff on a light background, make sure the edges are clean and smooth, so no aliasing (that's also the reason why; when you save the menu images with compression, they get extra jagged edges which equals ugly)
The work is good, but the presentation needs allot of work to stop making peoples eyes bleed. Avoid designs with a high contrast, so black/white.
my 2 cents!
Modelling looks solid. Your textures are little muddy and the final scene lacks any focus or centralized message. As others said, your UVs need work.
Looks like a good start. Environment artists need more than one environment, so get crackin! Looking forward to your next piece.
The work on the site is super clean textures and echoing what everyone else said a tad wasteful. Also work on defining a color palette a bit. The colors seem not well thought out. If you need help on it just ask someone on here or use a color palette website. Lighting can definitely help you define it easier.
Its composed of ridiculously high polygon models that would never work ingame from which you don't seem to know how to extract normalmaps properly for the ingame versions, giving the impression that you don't know the main purpose for normalmaps. Instead you grace them with some rather exaggerated normalmaps of wood.
I didn't look at the UVs much but it's rather impressive that you had the patience to UV map it all (that's a compliment).
I would have used those models to bake normalmaps into lower poly versions, which is the main purpose of normalmaps. Normalmapped bevels, lines, details and shapes will always look better ingame than the same modeled details (smoother, soft shading and rounded edges > polygonal detail).
Normalmaps contain angle information, while bumpmaps contain height information. Your scene makes no use at all of normalmaps, you could have just thrown some grayscale bumps on it and have it look the same.
As it is now, having modeled all the detail into the chairs, you could have almost used a tiling wood tetxure on them, there wouldn't be much difference. Besides some painted ornament on the wood there's nothing else to justify a custom texture. The feet of the chairs, the area you sit on etc would normally have some detereoration from use which you'd expect to see if you give them the custom texture.
The textures are rather simple with a very strong saturation (rather overkill) and often to asexual... I can tell the wood is wood, but most materials don't seem to resemble anything specific, they just have different colors, not properties.
Personally, i would have left normalmaps out of the scene, their use works against you, and i would figure out how to bake them properly into useable models before doing another scene.
Recapping the same mistakes wont work in your favor either.
Try to make your work look good, even if it means that you need to leave normalmaps and fancy tech out until you figure it our properly.