[Portfolio] jagedgamer - Joshua Glass
Hello, this is my first post at Polycount and so here is my portfolio:
www.jagedgamer.com
I recently graduated from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh for game art and design and am currently looking for a job, so any critiques on my work or my site would be helpful. Thank you.
www.jagedgamer.com
I recently graduated from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh for game art and design and am currently looking for a job, so any critiques on my work or my site would be helpful. Thank you.
Replies
a few things i noticed.
your unwrapping is wasteful. lots of examples of this. Your red arrow shooter has all these sides that could have been layed over each other in the unwrap. That thing could easily have been done to the same quality you have with one 512 texture. having two 1024 textures definitely wouldnt be done at a real job unless it was a super important asset.
another example is the bridge texture. you have like 10 pieces of wood there in your unwrap each has a few sides. that takes up SO MUCH texture space and there is no reason to do that. they all look EXACTLY the same. what im trying to say is that you should have made 2 or 3 wood pieces that actually look different from each other and then reused them to make your bridge. unwrapping everything uniquely might work for the film industry but it wont work in the game industry. Im saying this because if you get assigned a prop to make at a job, and you do it the way you did, youll be texturing your asset and then your boss will come by and look at it and say , ok make it a 512 texture. and when you make it a 512, your hundreds of little pieces that are identical would be so small that the texture resolution would go to hell.
what im saying is reuse textures by overlapping your UV clusters. Or, if you insist on having everything uniquely unwrapped, at least go through the effort to make them look differnt from each other because right now i can clearly see tiling bits all throughout your textures.
random tip: if you dont want to have your gun visible in UT, open the console (either tab or ~) and type showhud to hide the hud and then type physicsgun to hide the gun. I know there is another proper way to hide the gun but i forgot, and this works perfectly well.
you viking ship could definitely use more polys near the front. looks too lowpoly especially for somethign that big. also, since the stripes on yoru sail look very identical, you could just add divisions in your geo on the sail so you have like 3 divisions and then for each division have a red and white stripe. that way youll save a lot of texture space by only having to texture 1 red and 1 white stripe, not 9 stripes which all look identical.
All in all, I would expect more from a graduate (three years im guessing?) You definitely need to apply what i said above about saving texture space. And read some texturing tutorials on how to bring them to the next level.
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4678
another random note: its not "tries" its "tris"
anyway, i hope i didnt offend you or anything. just keep working at it. good luck.
EDIT: your site navigates pretty well. one tiny issue i found was that sometimes the arrows buttons would move because an image would change widths and be too wide and it would nudge the button. small fix, but kinda agitating as i have to look back and move the mouse. it would be nice to lay your mouse at one place and just click.
And I'll fix the website problems as soon as I can. Thank you.
can i suggest making your thumbnails more zoomed out, as i don't know what to expect as i'm clicking on them.
your animations - personal preference - i would embed them into the site somehow, not an external avi. but thats jut my personal suggestion.
on the work:
maybe this is jumping the gun, and you should probably get the texturing down first like 00Zero stated, but I think you would really benefit from learning the hi poly to low poly process. If you have that lantern thing as the first prop in your website - it says that you don't understand the current gen process of making a small game asset such as this. There is a lot of wasted geometry with those small wood pieces. Although I could be wrong if the shadow is more important than less geometry - if so, ignore my rant.
hope this helps!
<title>Your title here</title>
The words in the tabs are hard to read. Have to take a second so i can figure out what each one says.
Wait, animations??? What the crap do you want to be dude? A environment artist? A character artist? A prop artist? An ANIMATOR??? Pick something, and stick with it. Plane and simple. You have a lot of different things that are half decent, but none of them hit the mark at all. Personally, I think your environments are the best of the bunch, but even then, it needs a lot of work (which has already been explained above). Pick something, and try to perfect that, because your all over the place with work that could be better, but since you did something else, isn't.
- fixed it so the arrows on the site are now in the same place
- fixed the spelling of tris (not sure why I started spelling it tries)
- fixed it so it doesn't say untitled document in the tabs it now says jagedgamer
Thank you all for your advice.
Jaged, I didn't bother reading everything in here, so I may be telling you things you already know.
Info - Currently your main gallery page is your index page, bravo! And while you have your name at the top, you should probably put your email address right next to/under it, and make that whole image be a link to email you, rather than a link to your demo reel.
Format - The Gallery feels very lopsided. Everything is crowded into one side, leaving mass amounts of empty space on the right. In addition, you've put in separate thumbnails for the object, a flat shade, the normals, etc. etc. I personally would prefer if you had a link to JUST the object, and on that objects page, the rest of the stuff was just further down, and I could scroll to see it or not. Your actual individual pages are fine, and your arrows are nice and quick to respond, just dump the rest of those subsidiary images into the first page. That will give you lots of room to make bigger/better thumbnails, and allow you to rearrange in a way to show off your stuff better, and ease viewing.
Animations - I'd make thumbnails for these, and just make another subsection on your first page
Resume - You've got it on the page, got a link to the Doc AND a PDF, Bravo again! But the text (and this goes for the whole page) is thin and odd. Try a thicker sans-serif font on all of your pages.
Links - Most people aren't going to care about your links, but it is a little odd. Why are you linked to these people, are they friends? Either way, you usually don't want a recruiter to come to your site, only to be redirected to someone better. . .
Overall - You need to decide what you REALLY want to do and focus on it. Right now you have a little bit of everything, and it feels rather manic because of it. You also just simply need to keep working on your stuff. It's pretty standard uni level stuff, but you need to step up your game if you want a job.
If I do that I would like to embed the video into my website and I don't know how to embed video yet, so could someone explain it to me please.
Thank you all for your tips and suggestions.
Instead of replacing that tab with the demo reel, I'd just make a larger Thumbnail image on the new "Gallery" page. Put it at the top, and just link to your reel. There's no reason to embed it.
(all of this is of course only IF you feel the need to even have a reel. If what you want to do is model/texture, reels are barely used anymore, and I'd just ditch it in favor of a more concise gallery of still images.)