Demo Reel: Anthony Amenta

[Timewaste]

Not bad for only a year experience, i especially liked the zerg model. :-)
But I also need to crit some things:
- your file is WAY to large!!!
- in the end of your first shot there are shadows suddenly popping up on the ground
- nice zerg model but way too dark. use more lights and/or global illumination/ambient
occlusion
- your last shot lacks lots of shadows from the objects and characters on the ground

since you want to focus on lighting there is still a lot to learn, looked more like a
modelling/texturing reel to me. but don't let that scare you off, learning how direct and
indirect lighting works is very fascinating and can be a lot of fun.

[maestrofreshal]

- your file is WAY to large!!!


I CONCUR!!!

[lemonyfresh]

Hey Anthony, use windows media .wmv format for your movie, it compresses much smaller and better quality than quicktime. You should get that movie down to under 20 megs with like no loss at all, go for the WM9 NTSC download 1024kbps setting.



As far as crit on the work goes, Great job on your environments. Slap some volumetric lighting in them, especially the sewer. You should try to get some more variation in your reel. You seem to have a pretty dark bend, but I want to know you can light a sunny day too. Bump all of the lights on the rotate of the creature up, and limit the specular emission, every light in your scene should not be emitting specularity, you should have a main light source emitting Spec, a rim light in back emitting spec, (note on rim lights, they don't have to be from the top, put them in a place that will reveal the geometry of the back of the model best and they're usually the complementary color of the main light) Finally a second light on the front of the model on the opposite side of the primary light and from a lower angle, the spec from this light should be much smaller than that of your primary. These aren't hard rules, but good guidelines, play with it. Your going for the maximum amount of contrast, the darkest darks and the lightest lights and a good range in-between, I want to be able to easily see all the contours and bits of the model, go for renders that show dimension and detail. It doesn't hurt to parent some dim diffuse lights into the model itself just so your sure your getting it lit to that degree no matter where the camera is or where the model is, cheating yes, but effective. If you really want to be a badass, make some softboxes by making some planes, push an inverted grid (optional) through the incandence channel in a lambert, make sure primary visibility is off and use MR final gather. Bump the value level on the color gain on the grid to increase the intensity of the light. You can get great reflections this way by pushing an image through a sphere. Decrease the value in the color offset to increase contrast in the image.



If you want to display your modeling skills I want to see wireframes, particularly for organics.



Also and this is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT! What in this demo is yours? You have to tell us this, So maybe instead of having a cool song about doing H you should have a track of you briefly describing your work, but since most studios turn the sound off during reel reviews you should have a page at the end telling the viewer that everything contained in the movie is yours, and if not we need to know what is and what isn’t.



All in all good job though, for the amount of time you’ve had your doing great!



Good luck

S

[anthonyamenta]

Thank you for the replies.
I am taking it all in to acount. I will be re-editing my reel for the next 2 weeks. I will also make a new topic in the next few weeks with the updated reel and a much smaller compression size so its not 100megs.. Thank you for the awsome sudjestions, they will help me a lot.


Take care. I will have an update up by the latest, may 3rd.

Sincerely,

Anthony Amenta

[tamahoma22]

ah poop i missed it :) oh well just have to wait for the updated version... good luck with it :)

http://strugglefest.com

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