At this moment in time I’m unsure of which specific field I’d like to pursue, but I do have a rough idea, and so that is what I’ll be studying over the course of this unit. During task 1.2, I chose to research a combination of the following professions: environment art (3D), technical art, and material art. Although a technical artist may touch upon environments and materials, it is not their main focus, and so I’m reluctant to restrict myself to one pathway. I’m hoping that all of this research will help me make a decision for September. Therefore, I will be comparing portfolios of all 3 fields for this particular task, starting with material artists Vincent Dérozier and Daniel Thiger.
Comparing Portfolios
Material Artist, Vincent Dérozier
As ArtStation itself doesn’t provide the user with creative freedom, regarding menus, navigation, and layout, I’ll just be discussing the presentation of this portfolio in terms of appearance, presentation, and overall design. For this example, I’ve chosen to break down and analyse Vincent Dérozier’s portfolio – the current [11.06.19] lead material artist at Ubisoft – because I’ve taken a fair amount of inspiration from this company already, and I’m very interested in material art. Dérozier’s profile page consists of mostly materials made for Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which is a very beautiful game. These thumbnails are cropped renders included in each post, and is a very aesthetically pleasing decision on his part, with the title logo prominent in the image; this aspect is easily identifiable and already provides us with a great first impression. Now, students won’t have popular titles to highlight their work, but it should be noted that the thumbnail is a very important part of the presentation. Each cropped render is a representation of the larger image and should focus on the most impressive part of the asset. In this instance, the best out of 3 materials is central to the thumbnail. As a man who doesn’t need to impress anybody, Dérozier is able to get away with not having to fill all of the space with his amazing work – otherwise, I would recommend adding a favourite beauty render as a background image, as Daniel Thiger has done in the example below.
Vincent Dérozier has chosen to display his work in context, using some amazing renders of scenes that have utilised his work. In this instance, a high res image of a large Greek building has been taken to show how his work has been used to create common environments within the title, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Similarly, he has also included more focused screenshots and renders of close up assets that employ his efforts heavily. These beautiful images were followed by break-downs of the individual materials, rendered in Marmoset Toolbag on rounded cylinders. This method of presentation really displays the extent and quality of his work.
Material Artist, Daniel Thiger
Likewise, Daniel Thiger’s portfolio is also available on ArtStation. This could be because the service is free and easy to use and/or because it is one of the most frequented platforms for games art and film. Similar to Dérozier, Thiger is a material enthusiast – however, instead of working strictly for one company, Thiger is a contractor and so his work doesn’t consist of logos from popular titles and isn’t limited to the genre or theme of the video-game. Instead, his portfolio comprises of a mixture of his best work in his chosen field and a collection of tutorials sold via LevelUp. The thumbnails that represent the work within the post are focused on one part of the material, rendered on a static mesh in Marmoset Toolbag. This is particularly useful because the materials he chooses to create consist of plenty of fine detail that would provide for an excellent showcase. I’ve made sure to analyse both of these profiles because it suggests that even though these two men work for different purposes, and via different workflows, their portfolios are fundamentally similar.
As Daniel Thiger is a standalone Substance Designer enthusiast, he doesn’t have the advantage of showing his work in a scene complete with brilliant models and lighting. Instead, he’s chosen to include a few beauty renders in different lighting, on both subdivided planes and spheres. These posts often include break-downs of the different texture maps involved in the end product, often displayed side by side for easy reference. However, in this instance, Thiger has also chosen to include a previous version of the art made almost 10 years ago, for a great comparison.
Technical Artist, Marieke van Neutigem
Although this portfolio looks far less impressive than the previous two at first glance, this person’s role is just as important in the production of both games and film. As the categories highlighted above the work suggest, they are responsible for rigging, programming, and 3D art, and so must understand how all 3 coincide within the complex workflow upheld by the studio. Personally, I would present my own technical work in a similar fashion to most other artists on ArtStation, instead of the example inserted above. However, this new role should be more focused on the process and generation of solutions than the visual presentation. In fact, I think this portfolio has thrown me off the idea of technical art as a career path (lmao).
Environment Artist, Trey McNair
There is nothing that stops an environment artist producing amazing materials, like the ones displayed in Trey McNair’s ArtStation portfolio, inserted above. As much as I love studying Unreal Engine’s blueprint system, I don’t believe I’m built for a job that specialises in programming. McNair, the senior environment artist at Insomniac Games, has a diverse portfolio consisting of both scenes/levels from Spider-Man (PS4), but also materials he has contributed to the popular title – all of which are stamped with the game’s logo. Most of these posts consist of several renders from different angles and levels of focus or detail, alongside a wireframe of a specific asset or small portion of the environment to provide a better understanding of how the scene is made; this isn’t very common among environment artists from major studios, and is a very useful insight for ambitious students.
Environment Artist, David Baldwin
Similarly, senior environment artist David Baldwin, has used beautiful, high resolution screenshots of final level designs as thumbnails for his portfolio. Again, each thumbnail includes an obvious title and company logo. However, what makes his portfolio different from the ones I’ve already analysed, is the use of a strange lense focus for each render – this decision seems to ensure that the viewer can see more of the level itself, rather than just its main focal point. Each post also includes a multitude of mind-blowing 360 panorama from one point of the different environments, which is another aspect I haven’t seen anywhere else, as of yet. The material at the end of Baldwin’s portfolio also supports the notion that environment artists aren’t limited to modelling, which works in my favour with my interest in material and texture art.
I’ve made sure to include just a few of the angles available as part of the long list of 360 pano shots available for viewers to explore, in this post alone. The bottom of most uploads include ‘work in progress’ shots of block outs and sculpts to help viewers understand the work that goes into each level. There isn’t much else to discuss.
Student Environment Artist, Zhixin Mo
Unlike the professional and experienced users of ArtStation, Zhixin Mo is a university student who has chosen to represent her work with some beautiful renders for thumbnails. Behind each cropped image is at least 1 high resolution render and a screenshot of the detailed lighting in-engine, as well as the logo of the tools she used to create and present her hard work. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any ideas generation or ‘work in progress’ screenshots for employers to browse. However, there were some lovely videos that captured any animations or visual effects used in her work, one of which I’ve included below.
Student Environment Artist, Derk Elshof
Graduating university this year, Derk Elshof, has a fantastic texture/environment artist portfolio, consisting of both 3D modelling and material creation. With a simplistic style, Elshof displays his work through high resolution renders via Marmoset Toolbag, with the logos of the software he used to create his work included in the corner of the thumbnail. Each post consists of a few realistic renders using different lighting, a couple of sphere previews, and a texture maps break-down. In this example, Elshof has included a side by side comparison against a similar material he created toward the beginning of his university experience to really show off how much he has learnt and improved on over the last few years.
Portfolio Platforms & Providers
Art Station
ArtStation is the leading showcase platform for games, film, media & entertainment artists. It enables artists to showcase their portfolios in a slick way, discover & stay inspired, and connect with new opportunities. This platform provides users with a simple yet powerful method of showing their portfolio, and an opportunity to be seen by the right people in the industry – it’s quick and sleek design allows users to showcase images, videos, Marmoset and Sketchfab 3D scenes, and 360 panos. Blog enable users to share works in progress, articles, and tutorials with any user across the globe. Built in analytic features lets users check who views their work as well as a range of other statistics regarding their demographic. The platform even gives artist’s the ability to sell digital assets and prints online.
Google Sites
Google Sites allows you to create a website without having to know how to code it yourself. It falls under the Collaborative category in G Suite, meaning that you can get other Google users in on the website creation process too, which is what makes it so powerful and such a valuable tool for teams. Like other platforms such as WordPress.com and Tumblr, Google Sites has site builder features that make it easy and intuitive to design your site the way you want. With the new Google Sites service, and after seeing how it works, I thought it would be a fantastic method of displaying my work online for a great price. The platform provides an easy to use and sleek design where high resolution images can be swapped in and out whenever necessary. However, after using it myself, I decided it was a terrible idea but didn’t want to waste my efforts so I’m writing about it anyway. 🙂 Google Site’s functionality is extremely limited and underwhelming and it’s layouts are blocky and clunky. It’s safe to say that the service is not built for visual portfolios but rather blogs and written articles.
WordPress
At its core, WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. In fact, WordPress powers over 34% of all the websites on the Internet. On a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open-source content management system licensed under GPLv2, which means that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free. A content management system is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website – like content – without needing to know anything about programming. The end result is that WordPress makes building a website accessible to anyone – even people who aren’t developers. Though I’ve never personally used wordpress to create a picture-based portfolio, it has proven to be a very powerful blogging tool. Here are some great themes available for download that I believe would suit the portfolio of a games developer very well.
Portfoliobox
Portfoliobox is another tool for creating online portfolio websites, but is designed for and tailored to professional creatives like photographers, designers, architects, makeup artists, models etc. With quick and simple navigation, employers get to the see the best qualities of an artist first, without the mess of having to sift through masses amounts of information – most artists center their home page around a demoreel or showcase video, embedded from YouTube or Vimeo, which makes sure their top quality work is the focal point for the viewer. All and artist needs to present is a showcase of their work along with easily accessible contact information, including their name, role in the project, and professional email address.
At this moment, my work is only available for viewing on artstation.com due to the sheer popularity of the platform, it’s easy to use tools, and analytic features. Because my portfolio consists of only a few finished projects, I have no use for a demoreel or showcase video and therefore not much need for websites like portfoliobox.net. However, once I start to produce larger projects I plan to use the latter to present my work to the right people.
Level 3 Year 2 