Junior Artist Portfolio Advice:
When building a portfolio as a new artist, its incredibly important to show range in themes, styles and materials. Create a checklist of things you want to show your proficiency in:
- Styles: Realistic, Toon (cell or flat shaded), Hand painted
- Themes: Realism, Fantasy, Sci-fi, etc.
- Materials: Wood, Stone, Metals, Foliage, Cloth, liquid, etc.
Avoid wasting time with overlap. Once you have shown a good example of hand painted cloth or realistic stones, there is little point to making another scene or asset that shows the same ability. Make sure to show a range of poly counts as well. (very low to high)
When creating stylized work for a portfolio, I always suggest finding an existing game that you think looks great and building assets that would fit within that style. Analyzing and studying games with solid Art Direction is the first step to making good choices. This not only helps with consistency, but also allows you to focus on making good, creative assets in stead of worrying about what stylized wood should look like. This will also help you with color harmony, lighting, detail levels, scale cues, etc. Ok, now lets get into some of your work.
There are no normal maps, but a heightmap. The AO map and or cavity is usually used as a layover for the low poly and is the BASE for the hand painted texture. so it would be:
- make highpoly
- make lowpoly
- bake AO, Cavity
- hand paint texture AO/Cavity asa guideline and overlay
- also baking an normal map and extracting the inverted greenchannel (only the green channel) and overlaying will give smooth lighting on top of the object
for the tileable textures RENDERS of planes are used as base for the lowpoly obejects.
So the tile is sculpted on a square and rendered in the different passes which are the
base for texture painting and used as overlays and so on.
Height maps then add geo
Fanny's workflow
