Maverick van Aswegen Showreel
Hey there, I am a newly Graduate and looking for some critique on my work. Please also any advice on how to make a good showreel would be appreciated! :)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-7NjCyqVVwlbldIYWtmYXgwNEE/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-7NjCyqVVwlbldIYWtmYXgwNEE/view?usp=sharing
Comments
Liked your motion graphics opening, got into things right away. Not very concerned with which tools you're using, would rather care about what you're trying to show me you can do right now.
The fenced scene is a good way to see what you do with textures, the scene itself could be a bit more stylised - it's very square and the construction doesn't really lead the eye anywhere so the viewer just wanders around the images. I think that's why you had to zoom to make it feel more dynamic. The grass also feels really, really busy with all the flowers, if that's a shot you're going for, emphasise them a bit more in just one area of the grass maybe?
Not keen on spinning guns unless you're showing me how you go from high poly to low poly + detail textures. Things I care about there are attachment points, animation opportunities, wear patterns, etc. Still, probably the wrong person to show guns to, sorry ;)
Aha! Spinning ornithopter thing. Does it do stuff? Let it do stuff! Your texturing in the other scene was cool, apply it to this. Probably the wrong person for the tank too... Although if you showed that to the Afghanistan '11 team that might be cool.
The Unreal scene is a bit of a thing. The ground texture repeating immediately pops out at me and while I can applaud you for not going all "coloured lighting, make everything green and purple! ARGHAHGAHGHGHGHSBLBNLNLBLBLBL" it does feel very bland colour-wise. There are other colours in games than brown... Don't care if there were problems rendering foliage. There isn't a deadline for me to view your showreel by, so fix it. Why are the outer walls seemingly made of a very different material to the keep? (Also, the music here gets a little bit odd) The fire particle effects (stock?) don't really help the rest of the scene much because they make the huge water splash effect seem out of place and janky, either clean up the water a bunch or think about taking it out. And finally the camera motions in this scene felt very simple and point-to-point, I think it's the way the camera always cuts to zero motion and has to re-accelerate all the time, that feels quite jarring.
I'm not honestly sure what the stop motion section is supposed to showcase. It feels like sprites that I'm used to seeing move really well are suddenly being moved around a lot more, it's almost a shaky-cam style of thing, is that what you were going for? If so, I can see how that could work for a project at school, but it doesn't communicate well for a showreel: You should be able to position those sprites perfectly frame by frame, that'd be your job ;)
Keep all your contact info on a final screen at the end, there's no reason to make it go away. Yes, I know I can pause, but don't make me do it three times please.
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Again, I'm going to point out that a showreel of what you did for a course is quite different to one that you're using to get a job. There are loads of good articles about this sort of mental gear shift out there, you should be able to find plenty more. If you were aiming for a local games job, you've got to show off how you're a full stack artist that can take a model into an engine, animate it, fix the lighting in-game so that it works and also show off your mastery of particle effects and secondary motion elements that probably have nothing to do with the original model. A game is a setting, show people you can make those.
Good luck and I hope that you get more feedback from actual artists :)
You need to post process your 3D renders - save them out as a TGA and then remove the alpha and add in a 2D background.
Nic