Zeus' totally mega awesome fabulous new portfolio website etc

[Zeus]

Spent a little time tweaking this and updating with some work since i finished my MSc, i'm doing a fair bit of work right now so always updating

Let me know whatcha think

[laughing_bun]

Hey i like your new site. I think its a big improvement and you have a lot of nice work.

i have a few crits though. Your realtime environment scene has some really jacked up smoothing groups. Apply a "smooth" modifier to some of the objects and fix them. You obviously put in a lot of work and the smoothing errors are killing it for me. Everything has the smoothing group of a round object which is destroying any hard edges you have, which is basically every object in the scene.

Other than that your Curriculum vitae is confusing. What is with all the subjects and a letter grade? is that like your report card? Not bad grades but nothing I would really advertise either...

Your site is slightly confusing in the sense I don't know where you want to fit in, within the gaming industry. You need a mission statement that clears that up like "i Strive to create interesting worlds", "i want to create levels that challenge the player"..... something that gives focus to what it is you do.

anyways just something to think about.

[swag]

Your site is pretty good, but I do agree with laughing_bun's comments.

I also find that the "contact me" page shouldn't be used. You should have your contact info directly there (like your email) so that people can contact you at another time, if they don't want to use that form. They might also put your email in a database, but they can't the way you have it set up.

Also, the info sections are too big (the text). I think it would look best scaled down a little. And maybe you should have some texture flats (you can watermark them if you wish). People want to see how you texture stuff, and how your UVs are layed out. Right now they can't really tell.

You might want to take a look at this article, it really helped me out:

http://www.game-artist.net/forums/sp...pels-jobs.html

As a side note, that article probably should be a sticky.....lot of people really need the advice in there.

Anyway, the good news is that your work is fantastic, and that's the hardest part

[Zeus]

Thanks for the comments guys

Laughing Bun - thanks for your comments, the smoothing groups on the objects are all in order - other wise the corners of the objects would blend right across (as trying to render a square pillar as a cylindrical one), the softness is caused by the mental ray daylight render which has a tendency to create nice lighting and shadows (good) but also to soften normal maps (bad ) But, i kinda dig the look, feels to me like the soft corners are more representative or real life stone work, not too keen on really hard edges. I haven't updated my CV yet since finishing my uni course so thanks for the reminder, the marks represent grades and in the UK its sorta required to list them, though i may simply put for my secondary (high school) grades "all A-C" as they're not really relevant now im older. Ill also look into a mission statement - good thinking thanks.

Swag - I originally didn't like the contact me page thing, it came with the template however i have since received a fair few invites from mod teams etc to join them through it, so think ill leave it but also like u say maybe make my contact details more prominent for potential employers. Not yet got round to putting my texture flats on there but i will for sure, thanks for the link to the article - ill check it out and ur right it prob should be a sticky. Oh and thanks for the nice comment about my work - much appreciated!

Thanks for your help guys, ill update today hopefully so feel free to check back tomoz and give me any extra comments you might have!

Thanks again

[myles]

Looking pretty good, I agree with the comment Swag said,
Although i think a really nice addition would be to use a handy script called ThickBox when installed this expands your image links instead of opening in a different window, most sites do this now.

[Zeus]

thanks for the link, i had a look but im not sure the service i use will let me edit the css, it claims it does but my template that i use doesnt give me the option

[TheCorey]

First off. I don't like Freewebs much. It's loading so slow. Since you are really serious about finding a job you should buy some webspace. Or find a better free host.

I think it's better to have 1 thumnail for each project. Then if you click that thumbnail you 1 page should load with all the renders, wires, texture flats etc. This way you can acces you work in one click.

[Zeus]

Yeh i see your point, though im fairly limited in my HTML knowledge and itegrating that into the freewebs template is also kinda tricky, so im not sure ill change it now, plus i have a few portfolios of prominent artists that i like that use the exact same format, so i figure its ok.

Freewebs seems to load really quickly for me, i have a 1 meg connection here i think which ain't amazing obviously, u sure its not ur web provider?

If anyone else found it slow let me know and ill consider a change (though its taken ages sorting the site out into what it is, lol)

I had a thought about what Laughing_Bun said about the environment renders and decided to have a crack at doing some with different lighting, i think ill post in the wip section for opinions.