Game Demo Reel

[itsallgoode9]

can't look at your demo reel at the moment due to being at work but I can give you some environment art pointers based on your screen shot of the buildings.

1. A building like this for a FPS game, such as BF2, would not be UVd or textured in the fashion that you ahve gone about it. A building like this would likely use multiple tiled textures and would not be mapped on a single map as you have done.

I would suggest trying 8 or 10x512 or 1024 textures for this models. All though specs vary widely per game and per engine this is a very doable, probably even conservative, spec for a FPS building such as yours.

2. Second major thing is that you should not keep everything in quads, as you have tried to do. All this does is waste polys, use memory and does not do anything to further your model aesthetically. If a quad is what you need, then by all means use it, but don't have an edge wrap all the way around your model just because you want to keep it in quads.

[bake3d]

I Like that song on the demo reel.. although It made me a bit dizzy..

[ts-falcon]

interesting work. What i would reccomend is creating a reel that is more focus to a specific job. Like environment or character artist or even TD. the custom rig stuff was neat. Overall i think you need to work on your texture quite a bit, they are super blurry and lack detail, :P sorry if that sounds harsh but itll help you i hope. also your UV unwraps are crazily fragmented and soo many small pieces must mean seams everywhere. i would focus on improving your unwrapping and texturing skills. once you have those down it shouldnt be hard to quickly improve your work at an exponential rate. I would say the mech is your stongest piece but it too needs texture improvement. also focus on scale and proportion, the environments looked quite barren and empty...maybe go for smaller and higher detailed? hope all this mish mash of crits helps, keep at'er and great success will follow!
Cheers

[PenguinVisuals]

You're wasting a lot of UV spaces. You really should improve your UV layout and practice to make your model looks good with just color, first. Understanding tiling texture is a really important skill for game models. Before you move on to do fancier things like normal maps.

About getting good use of your UV space. Your robot, you have lots of little pieces that look identicle in the texture. Like all those circles for example. Things like those can easily use the same UV. You'll save a lot of space that way and give your texture even more pixel.

[sethwolford]

Hey thanks for the replies.

Some things on the textures.

The use of overlapping uvs with zbrush wont work it crashes when you are making normal maps and height maps. I can mirror the similar polys and move them over one uv space and will start doing that on some of these. with all the lil pieces I am not sure on the building how to get around the window and door openings that those represent. The workflow that I have been using is that in max I unwrap my model and then render to texture a base color that I then take into zbrush to start adding detail. The seams havent been a prob with this that I have seen.

On the mech I did use 4 1024 maps to do a leg a arm the cockpit and the base. I comped the map into one map for the demo reel cause I was thinking that it would show whats there without sitting for 2 mins looking at the 12 different textures. I wasnt sure on how to do this with the building as the interior and exterior walls are all unique.

Here is a pic of the model in the engine viewer.

The opening shot is a representation of an area that is for the game Force of Arms running on the Ogre engine.

Again thanks for the replies I will definitly be exzmong my workflow to be better at this :)

[LaughingBun]

Imma be real and say that you wont find a job with a reel like that. For the army man thing, The blurry texture is really annoying, even though its not what your showing off at the moment, its really distracting and unproffesional looking. Next is that building, i agree with everything that has been said about that thus far. If you wanna leave it in your reel, I wouldnt specify that it is for Battlefield 2.

The biggest problem with everything though, is the unwrap jobs on all the models. Aside from it being ineffecient in terms of space, Who in there right mind would want to texture all those liittle bits and pieces, you should almost be able to recognize the model based on the unwrap job. Keep stuff in groups as much as possible and only cut when neccesary. What texture artist would dare take on an unwrap like that?

For advice, i would say stop using zbrush for a while and focus on improving your traditional poly skills as well as unwrapping.

[PenguinVisuals]

The thing about Zbrush is that, your high res UV doesn't have to match your low res UV. You can do cheap auto UV on the high res just so it has something. Then transfer the normal map to your nicely laid out low res UV. If there are parts you think are going to look the same, zbrush just 1 piece, transfer the normal to the low res and make a few copies of the piece.

[GArriola83]

im gonna go ahead and say that this needs a lot of work. the modeling looks solid, but the texturing needs lots of work. anything made in lo-poly modeling is 20% modeling and 80% texturing. its great that you painted everything in zbrush but try and use photoshop to paint instead of zbrush to get your texturing skills.
the best thing i saw was the mech and that still needed work, especially on the unwrap. that could have been dropped with a symmetry modifier and would cut your UVs in half. and then all those tiny little things needed to be stitched to form large clusters to utilize the space given to you within the bounding box. wouldve been nice to see it moving too.
the custom rig was cool but the animation didnt even show the full potential of the rig. to be honest, it was lacking. it looked really stiff and unbelievable. work on animating that if you want, but it seemed to be your weakest point.
overall, its a good start but no means at all a finished reel. its real rough on the edges but has a potential to be a good reel. keep it up and work on those texturing skills and unwrapping as well.

[gsokol]

The first thing that came to mind after watching this was the fact that you are considering this a modeling reel, but there is more animation than modeling. If you want to model do some really good high quality models and do 360 views of them. If a company gets this reel that is looking for a modeler, they won't want to see anything else. Also, this was previously mentioned, but don't worry about using Zbrush or normal mapping until you get the basics of modeling, texturing down with traditional modeling software and Photoshop.

The one bit of Advice I can offer you is to stop making so much work for yourself. I can honestly say that I am impressed with the amount of time that had to have been spent on your work, but that time, if better implemented, could create much, much better results. I was shocked when I saw how much work you created by making so many small UV coordinates in your unwrap. Find some good tutorials on unwrapping and get good at that, and that will save you a crapton of time alone.

Keep at it though, you have a good start.

[renaissance01]

i agree, it's a good start...keep at it though. Another thing i noticed is that the reel goes for 3 minutes !? One piece of advice would be quality not quantity. Employers and viewers in general would much rather see 30 seconds of mind blowing stuff than 3 minutes of average stuff. So keep working on one skill such as modelling and pick out what you think is your best work and put that into your reel. Your showreel is only as good as your WORST piece. keep that in mind ;)

[pimeto]

nice stuff you got.
for the building that you posted image, i must say that you can optimize the model more!
theare too much polys that you can delete.
and its not a requirement to merge all the verticles into one object. you can merge the objects into one and save polys....

oh, i cant explain my self very well :)

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