3D Environmental Artist and Prop Designer

Crybone

Hey Everyone

My name is Shane, I graduated college at the end of 2015 with a background in 3D Animation and Visual Effects.
I have specialized my work around 3D environments which includes texturing, mapping, modelling, set design and basic lighting. Doing all this has led to me naturally creating assets for said levels.

I am looking for an internship or full time junior position.

If you have any questions please email me at: hazeofblue@gmail.com
My showreel as well as portfolio is available on the following sites.

crybone.artstation.com

I look forward to hearing from you.

dislekcia

Disclaimer: I am not a 3D artist. I model/animate when I absolutely have to. I do hire artists though, so in a way you're aiming this portfolio at people like me. So, take this feedback from that angle and hopefully it won't feel to jarring :)

The music track felt like it had something wrong going on - what was with the crunching? Leaves? Someone walking?

The spinning bust carried on for quite a bit too long, long enough for me to start noticing things like you were never intending to animate this (the character can't look up without impaling their own back) or how the broken horn is all smooth instead of being old trauma.

I wasn't sure what I should be paying attention to in the robot and spring scenes. Perhaps some better lighting to make something stand out that you want to show off would help? The spring scene in particular confused me, usually I see water in motion in these sorts of reels so I wasn't sure why yours was a freeze-frame. Did you model the water by hand? If so, I'd have expected more attention to the texturing and how the water would have been folding/breaking up into smaller particles. The bucket was also a bit confusing, is it hovering or is it in the water? If it's in the water, why isn't it distorted?

The indoor scene showing anime on the screen was constantly distracting, I had to keep trying to focus on the rest of the scene because that's what you're supposedly showing off. Also, the anime it was showing, while probably not a concern to you when you picked it, ended up being a freeze-frame of boobs on your video thumbnail. Um, that's really not cool. In general, I'd avoid having content in a showreel that made light of issues around diversity (or didn't seem to take them into account), diversity is a big concern when hiring people and anything that indicates you're not aware of that (or worse, a potential culture risk) could count against your consideration by a team. I'd suggest showing a slow nature documentary on the screen maybe? Or having it show other work you've done, that way it's not bad if people are looking at it instead? The camera motions in the scene also felt rather robotic, standard lerp from point to point with a little easing stuff, there's a lot more room to explore there. Again, lighting to create focus can help... The bathroom was a bit of a mess, sorry. If your sculpt didn't work on the bath, take it out. The flickering on the wall tiles also didn't help. I'd drop the bathroom entirely.

Why is the spring scene back at a different zoom level? Still not sure what to be looking at here, but the bucket is jumping out at me a lot now. Actually, as is the water taking on the background grey. Give it an envmap with a sky or something ;)

The spaceship scene could also benefit from some more attention to the camera movement, as well as maybe some FOV tweaking to prevent crazy distortion at the edges as the room spins. I'm not sure what's in the containers, but that's not how glass works - it should only provide different distortions as the camera moves, or there's something moving around inside the gel(?) that's causing its entire surface to shift against the glass... At least, that's what it seemed like. You could play with that more by putting stuff in the gel maybe? The lighting in the exit room is better, but it's suddenly very bright compared to the other room with no seeming bleed between the two. Also, light strips shouldn't just have 1 visible point source. That's a terrible font. HRE ME?

...

Okay. I know that seemed pretty brutal. I'm sorry, that's not my intention. I can see that this is a very "student" portfolio, you're showing off the work you did in a year and there's not much direction or focus on what you think you might want to do in the future. All I can offer is that there are a lot of articles like this out there about making great showreels, they should change your perspective on this stuff a little bit.

From the angle of getting a game job, showing 30 seconds of a model going from 3D tool, through decimation, texturing, animation and finally into a game engine environment (Unity or Unreal would work well for this) and executing an animation with good lighting and secondary particle effects to make it feel real ingame... That would be a strong portfolio.

Good luck and I hope you get some more helpful feedback than mine :)

DavidHecker

I have to agree with everything @dislekcia said and add a few more.

If you' want to show off your models, seeing the construction is massively important as it'll show a potential employer that you can model efficiently and in a way that's ready to be animated. This is especially crucial for working in games. Show the wireframes, wireframes overlayed on the diffuse model and the textured final. Additionally, there's not much texturing in any of those scenes, mostly just a diffuse colour and nothing else. The bulk of asset modelers in games will do their own textures, so seeing UV's and how you've actually painted the textures is also important. how efficiently are your UV's packed? Are you re-using certain parts cleverly?

Regarding the camera movement, I've always maintained that stills or slow-moving cameras are always better, until you've properly learnt to control a virtual camera. A few well-composed stills of the same environment will always look better than an uncontrolled moving shot. What it shows too is that as an artist and visual thinker, you're able to direct the viewer's attention to exactly the right spots. As mentioned above there are a lot of scenes where we're not sure what we really should be looking at or where the focus should be.

Best of luck!

Crybone

Thank you for the feedback, it is really helpful to hear these things. I take it all to heart to help me improve.

I hope my future videos will be to your liking.