Latest build of my reel, next up is improving my rigs. Any feedback appreciated.
Related Demo Site: www.treyanesi.com
First impression: It’s really long. really really long.
The iK arms strike me as being inconvenient to animate with, why is the control floating out to the side and not on the wrists?
Is that jeep’s wireframe as low poly as you went with it? if so, I’d cut it, or at least don’t show the wireframe.
the house set after the jeep looks like an old architectural rendering, there’s no context and it feels sterile, unnatural, I’d cut it.
When the dog’s feet are on the ground, I want to see it in iK. this could be because this was the convention at my school, but I’ve never seen any animator have a foot in contact with the ground in fK. If I’m wrong on this, someone call me out, but if I’m right, it makes it seem like you don’t know how an animator works, which is a big problem if you want to make rigs. I don’t know whether iK controls exist or not on those legs, but until I see them when I expect to, I assume they don’t.
the UI somesuch starting around 1:40: This could be really awesome, but I can’t see anything to be able to tell. Therefore, according to my former professors, employers will probably assume it’s not so awesome.
prison level: for the wall shader, I kind of want to see a nice high res screen capture of you painting the wall textures, so I can get a good look at what the artist can do with your shader. Shader work is going to really look awful with the low-def imagery, because shading is such a visual discipline. Don’t show me the graph node unless it’s large enough for me to see it and read it and/or you walk me through the techniques you’re using. Same goes for the water shader, which I don’t think I saw working in the reel (if you can’t actually show the shader in game, and there isn’t some sort of major technological awesomeness going on, why is it in your reel?
the city exterior level once again seems very sterile and CG, if you’re hoping to get work as an environment artist, I’d say you need to do some solid work on your texturing, if you’re not, pull the EA work out of your portfolio except where it’s excellent, and even then only a dash to highlight how awesome and versatile you are.
The floor in the…hut place is pretty awesome, the spec intensity might be a bit high, but I do like it because I used to live in a place that had a floor that caught the light like that. Unfortunately the rest of that room suffers from the same problems as the rest of your modeling/texturing environments, and so the floor actually probably hurts you because it makes everything else look even worse by comparison. Additionally, the camera work in that room is disembodied and doesn’t really pull anything from camera language. consider constraining your movement to one plane, to help with that I actually created a camera rig in UDK to help with creating more natural feeling cameras.
The script that you show (applying a random texture to elements) doesn’t have much of a visual appeal. The script is pretty simplistic, and since you list yourself as “Programmer,” I’m looking for more sophisticated code work.
This may just be personal taste, but the image at 3:25 is…kind of scary. It’s the eyes and the teeth. That may just be strictly personal taste/preference/whatnot.
Okay, so it’s not as long as I initially thought, but you really don’t need your credits/thanks to be that long, and you really really don’t need the long music outro. Unless other people think you do (they’re more likely to be making hiring decisions than I am right now, so I’d say go with them 
)
Right now I have a lot of issues with the portfolio, so I can’t really tell how good some of the work is, and some of the work I’d definitely pull.
Hope that this is helpful, if you have any questions feel free to ping me or ask below, I’ll be following the thread 
A comment on the editing:
Speed up your end credit screens to only be about 3-4 seconds each and trim off the end of the video. You have a (roughly) 3 minute demo reel. Padding it out to 6 minutes with nothing but a black screen will just make people wonder why you did that.
Appreciate the feedback, the reel is a rough draft. I did throw likely too many things into it, and some unpolished material. But I wanted to get some direction, and this is helping greatly. The added time at the end was not done purposely, it was meant to be trimmed. The house is done purposely as architectural, I get a lot of requests for local contracts for that style of work so just playing to that crowd, same with the cheesy text beginning and the cartoon face at the end, I didn’t want it in either to be honest. My ideal job would be working as an environment artist to start. I will smooth out and add more in that area, and improve the shot of that wall material. As far as my coding skills, I wouldn’t think placing code within my reel would be beneficial, so I’ve left the code on my actual site. If I’m wrong on that, I’ll gladly put it in, I just remember reading comments about other reels that had done that.
So, review, revise, re-render
Sincere thanks for the comments!
-Trey
One suggestion I might add based on your response is, you might want to create a few reels if you are trying to cater to specific groups. One for the architectural crowd, one for environmental art and one for coding stuff. This will let you show more content from specific areas so you don’t not need to edit as much and try to fit all that you can do into one reel.
Yeah I think I’ll have to cut some of these up for those groups. Well as long as I’m still doing contracting. It makes you somewhat schizophrenic. Rest of the day I have to shift gears and do web work, so in a completely different direction yet again lol.
I’ll only speak about the rigging, which sounds like it isn’t the direction you want to go anyway.
You can shave some time by showing some animated clips using your characters, rather than wiggling controls on the rigs. Wiggling controls is good if you are showing off special functionality or an extremely flexible character, but for basic FK controls and spines, it really isn’t that important.
My suggestion would be to find an animator to animate your rigs. You will get 1) more interesting clips 2) awesome outside/objective feedback about how to improve your rigs.
I’d honestly go in whatever direction would gain me solid constructive work (*No longer contracting). I do have an animator, and I think she’d love take a final rig for a spin
Prepare to spend a lot more time getting your production looking slick and professional. Your content may be great but if the quality of the video and website isn’t great, it is major strikes. Why? Because ultimately you are being interviewed for personality and intangibles, not what hard skills you have (for an entry level TA position). Having a concise and neat presentation shows me you are ‘detail oriented’ and a ‘self starter’ and other shit like that. Show me solid (doesn’t need to be exceptional) content in a professional way and you’re almost guaranteed to have at least a first interview. It it looks like a kid made it, I’d pass.
Thanks everyone sincerely for the comments! I’ve been taking notes and revising throughout the day, on the site as well as the reel. I’ll post back to this same thread when its completed.
(and Happy Thanksgiving to those in the states!) - Trey
[QUOTE=TreyAnesi;13119]Appreciate the feedback, the reel is a rough draft. I did throw likely too many things into it, and some unpolished material. But I wanted to get some direction, and this is helping greatly. The added time at the end was not done purposely, it was meant to be trimmed. The house is done purposely as architectural, I get a lot of requests for local contracts for that style of work so just playing to that crowd, same with the cheesy text beginning and the cartoon face at the end, I didn’t want it in either to be honest. My ideal job would be working as an environment artist to start. I will smooth out and add more in that area, and improve the shot of that wall material. As far as my coding skills, I wouldn’t think placing code within my reel would be beneficial, so I’ve left the code on my actual site. If I’m wrong on that, I’ll gladly put it in, I just remember reading comments about other reels that had done that.
So, review, revise, re-render
Sincere thanks for the comments!
-Trey[/QUOTE]
I won’t go into critiquing your reel specifically, because everyone else covered that pretty well. On the subject of length/presentation practices; I have a ton of different examples on my website, and none of them are much longer than 10 seconds. That way if someone wants to see my animation work, they go to the animation tab, read the descriptions, and skim to which one seems the most applicable. I don’t have an actual “demo reel”, and the only reason I would make one is if it were for a specific job, in which case I would keep it as short as possible, cutting it to relevant clips tailored to that position. I agree with keeping code on the website- because it doesn’t actually help that much unless you can actually read it.
I still have plenty of areas to work on, but I hope this version is much better. On the site my next area to revamp will be developing more useful scripts. Right now that area has been “untouched”. It’s next on my chopping list.
As before, any feedback has/is being greatly appreciated and taken in!
Video Reel:
Website:
www.treyanesi.com
[Stepping away from the keys for a day or so, but I’ll check the forum periodically. My family around this area is actually “concerned” because of the time I’ve been spending on this, lol. I guess I should make an appearance to ensure I’m not on a milk carton yet - http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2192 Love this thread by way, sums a lot up. They still don’t know what I did in Texas at Bioware for the last year :)]
The room and the truck are not strong enough to open a reel with.
The lighting on the truck, black on black background makes it hard to see and just looks bad, the tires don’t feel right as they are super shiny.
cut-dog wireframe turn around, not a model that needs to be shown.
The dog face rig example, isn’t showing anything and your capture is slowing down the scene it looks like so it needs to be redone/captured and show some more animation of the face rig not just the head moving around.
No need to see the rendered version moving around. There are many free dog meshes on line that you can get or buy for cheap that will look better and allow you to show off your face rig.
@video capture- I am not sure what capture settings in cam. you are using and what you are rendering /compresing to but the video quality is rough.
Capture at 24 fps at least and when you render the capture to a file to upload to youtube, make sure you do it to a HD format , let youtube convert it for you because right now the capture is part of the problem.
Yeah I’ll admit I was having some issues with camtasia capturing while running. (The rig capture and some of the UDK material- particularly the water shader didn’t flow at its normal speed when capturing). I’ll also try rigging someone else’s model, cut the wireframes, and redo the Defender model.
Capture was at 29.97 drop frame I believe. HD 1280x720 from Final Cut- then compressed to F4V with the same settings to upload to Youtube (The initial 1.2gig file needed to be crunched).
Thanks for the input!
I take that back, camtasia had the default settings of 15fps (Had to go over and check), I’ll use your advise and try 24 next time.
You can switch cam to capture to xvid and get a much smaller file at better quality than trying to compress down form the default capture format.
Either way, watch your compression.
I have a few presentation suggestions in addition to what has already been said. I do have my own Tech Reel you can refer to if you want a better idea of what I am talking about.
[ul]
[li] A very brief introduction of what type of tools and examples the reel includes. Chances are your audience is going to gravitate to one thing or another, let them know what they are looking forward to. Without it, you run a greater risk of them loosing interest and moving on to the next reel.[/li]
[li] Show only parts of the interface that are relevant! No one can read all the small text in the Maya or UDK UI in a video. It is a distraction. Also, another pet peeve of mine, avoid moving around windows mid video. No matter how impressive the work is, it always gives the impression you are fumbling around.[/li]
[li] Make sure the text is clear and concise! Preferably no more than a few words at a time.[/li]
[li] Try maintaining some visual consistency. The work just feels a whole lot stronger if it is presented as a cohesive package.[/li][/ul]
Hope all that helps!