Ben Cottage 1st year Showreel

[bcottage]

Hey guys, thought i would share my 1st year showreel. I am a 1st year student at the university of Hertfordshire and this i guess is the few best pieces that i have produced throughout the year.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB7Xb...ature=youtu.be

[Von Hoggler]

Some promising stuff there. While you still have a couple of years to go my advice would be to focus on one area. If you want to be an environment artist for games, focus on that solely. We get portfolio after portfolio here with some game art, some architectural, some animation, some game design. and it just doesn't work. You should spend your remaining years trying to build up a portfolio of only great game environment art, whether you do that outside your course or on it is irrelevant. If your course is 9-5 it still leaves plenty of time for developing your skills and you won't get a chance like this again.

[raahl]

Hello Bcottage,

I graduated from a BSc and MSc in computer games design and can confirm what Van Hoggler wrote,

you need to specialize not only in one field, such as 3d modelling, game design, game production, or game audio, but then you further need to specialize in a single area.


For modelling your choices are:

--- Low / Mid / High - Hard surfaces,

--- Low / Mid / High - Soft surfaces Bio (ZBrush skills needed)

--- Animations

--- Rigging



When you specialize it means that you focus on that; you keep on practicing all modelling skills to stay on top of the game, but your portfolio and reels show at least 90% of what you selected.

If you select Low / Mid / High - Hard surfaces you need appropriate renders, which are either entire scenes rendered in a game engine such as UDK or studio setups.

From what I have heard from students having found jobs as environmental artists the key is having strong websites and very strong reels.

A strong website is one which loads fast, has a professional look, a correct color combination, contains at least five (5) high quality in game environments, and at least ten (10) quality studio setup renders.

A high quality in game environment is one which showcases a good understanding of proportion, so nothing is too small or too large, a solid grasp of modelling, a good control of texturing, high skills in lighting, so everything is illuminated, and a good control of the engine itself. A very effective way of showing your versatility is to work several engines in different styles; make a scene in a specific style in a specific engine and then move on, so that eventually you might have a futuristic looking environment made in UDK, a forest environment made in Crytek (what else), a desert made in Unity, and a city made in UTIII. Remember to pace yourself, so that an environment takes you no more than a specific amount of time and no less than a specific amount of time, generally no less than three weeks and no more than a month works.

For studio setups you need to create the setup once in 3ds Max and then simply place the assets into it by using the Merge tool.

The studio setup I use, which you can see in the latest renders I uploaded to this website, is the following:


--- A plane with a Matte Shadow material set to 256 256 256

--- Environment color set to 256 256 256, so it blends with the plane

--- One Omni Light

--- Two Directional lights pointing towards the center of the plane; one at 1,0 strength, the other at 0,3; one slightly orange, the other slightly blue. Asset should be always rendered facing the 1,0 Directional Light.

--- Renders with Mental Ray, Indirect Illumination at 1,5 with flat white color and two (2) bounces. Without this renders will look broken

--- In order to render use Safe Frame and change the camera from 35,00 to 50,00 angle, so that you get slightly more isometric.

--- Make sure your renders are at least 900 X 657


Once you make a render you need to get it into Photoshop CS4 upwards and use:

--- Vibrance +20

--- Smart Sharpen

--- Whatever post is needed, such as blurring, smudging, darkening.


Hope that helped,

Damian.

[bcottage]

Wow thanks for the reply's guys. I 100% agree with everything your saying, i know i need to go into one area.

"9-5" lol, i wish! class times are from 10-7 then i do the assignments from 8-4am every night. Thats pretty much the same with everyone in my class. We are worked to the bone lol.

I cannot wait till the summer! i am going to write a plan to work on personal projects. I want to concentrate on hard surface stuff like guns, vehicles, some modular buildings etc. I am also going to do a zbrush sculpt once a week because that is my weakest area at the moment. I will be doing noob stuff at the begging like alien heads to get used to the tools.

I will of course be posting my work on here so i will be looking for more feedback.