Peter Asberg - Environment artist

    Hi y'all

    I work as an environment artist and thought I'd post up my portfolio here after a friend and co-worker showed me this thread. I've been doing 3d for way too long and have been working in the games industry for some years now and I've browsed mapcore in the past but never gotten around to register until now. Feel free to have a look at my portfolio here:

    http://www.urgaffel.com/portfolio

    Also got a blog where I post scripts, articles and other game industry related articles. Hopefully you'll find it usefull and/or interesting!

    http://environment-artist.blogspot.com/

    The portfolio will be updated with images from the latest game I worked on when it's out and I also need to update the layout. I've got a few ideas, it's just finding the time to do it that is the problem...

    I like it, easy to overview. Only thing (I know it's very standard tho) is it'd be nice to have your name or something at the top. Or at least in the title of the site.

    Your work looks great and it's good that you've written what your responsibilities were underneath the pictures.

    I like the selection of pictures right at the top of the page, but I missed the Next/Previous arrows at the bottom the first time around. I kind of identified that black bar as a title of the following. Don't know if I'm the only one to miss it, but in case I believe adding the name of the next/previous pages ("Personal Work", name of games) next to the arrows would make it more obvious.

    There's a typo in the title of your article: surfacse -> surfaces. It's not a big deal in the middle of a paragraph, but in a title it kind of gives the idea that you didn't even read it after writing it.

    I also think that article should be somehow seperated from the rest. Your website could use some more visible category titles: the Documentation one is the same size as the title of the article. It should be bigger and clearly seperate the following form the list of games you worked on. Maybe also duplicate the style of it to a new category above the games:

    Games

    - Shellshock 2

    - Overlord

    Documentation

    - Creating metal surfaces

    If you categorize the entries with more visible titles, you could also keep the bold text to make the name of companies or job titles stand out from the regular text.

    Finally, but that's not major and up to your liking, but I find the font type to be a bit small. It's not like you're limited in space, so I don't see why you should make it so small. It doesn't make me want to read and makes it harder to scan through the page.

    Thank you for the pointers, I'll fix that typo right away... I can't believe I missed that (and I did read it after writing it, several times!) o_O

    As for the layout, I'm going to try and get a new layout sorted this weekend, it's about bloody time I did that... Also means I can prepare the site for the next batch of images coming soon

    As for documentation, I think I'll just create a link to the blog in the future version of the site since that's where most of my writing have ended up. If you could have a look at that too I'd be very grateful. Which reminds me, I should post my tutorials there too so it's all in one place.

    Thanks again for taking the time to look and give me some feedback, much appreciated.

    *edit*

    Typos fixed, name added to the top. Text size will be fixed in the update

    Sounds good about putting your articles in the blog. Nothing prevents you from adding a list of the most interesting posts at the bottom of your portfolio with their titles linking to the blog entries. Somebody looking to know more about you or your way of thinking would then be able to follow up to the blog naturally.

    I checked your blog quickly - didn't have time to read much though, so I can only comment on the aspect.

    - I think you should keep your labels to a reasonable minimum amount. Have maybe 10 labels top instead of lots with only one post related. For instance, labels such as "2142", "Bram Eulers" (sorry Peris), "Overlord", "editor", etc. won't serve much purpose but get the other ones lost in the crowd. You should try to gather your posts under generic labels in the vein of "Gaming", "Personal Work", "3D Art", "2D Art", "Concept", "WIP", "GamesIndustry", "Tutorials", and forget the too specific ones that you won't be using again. I understand that going back and editing all your posts' label is going to suck, but I believe if you are going to add more and more articles you should stick to that rule of having few categories. It makes for better browsing and your page will look cleaner.

    - If that is possible, put your labels before the "Useful links" section. It's safe to admit people visiting your blog aren't there to look for links and are more interested in your posts than your webring.

    - I would just suggest you try to add more to space to your longest text-only posts. You could also divide the longest articles by inserting some bold/bigger sub-titles every 2 or 3 paragraphs, but only if that makes sense. Some entries are quite long and look overwhelming without or titles images to interrupt the flow. I realize there's not always a good reason to add pictures, then maybe try to highlight the critical words by making them to bold, so it's easier to scan through the articles and see what might be of interest. I'm just speaking about the most hardcore text-only posts here of course, most of them are alright, either short enough or showing pictures. Just consider each new post you make and if it looks too much like a fat pile of text, add spaces/sub-titles/pictures to give it some air.

    - One last thing that's completely up to your visual tastes: I believe the page could use another color to contrast with the blue/purple aspect. Maybe set the titles of the articles a warmer color, so it serves the purpose of contrast and helps seeing where a post starts. I dunno how much freedom blogger gives you so I don't know if you're able to change that without affecting all the links, but I honestly think some color in there would be nice, especially since some articles don't have images to give some contrast. Maybe if you redesign your portfolio, you should duplicate your choice of colors onto your blog so it fits? Just thinking out loud.

    My two cents. I have to agree it's mostly nitpicking, but you asked for my opinion I'll get to read some of that later, sounded interesting!

    EDIT: Hehe, was reading a bit and ended up on that sentence: "Last of all, I want to apologize for the lack of images. This is supposed to be an art related blog and no images? Shame on me." Looks like you're aware of the things I mentioned

    Thanks, some good points there. About the tags, it's definitely a good idea to have fewer tags and it will be easier to edit them now before there's too much content I know what you mean about the wall of text posts, I wanted to add some images to it but couldn't find any good ones that made sense at the time so that's something I'll come back to later. Thanks for reading and giving feedback, always useful

    You've got a lot of nice work in it for sure. I think it's a shame though that you've divided the work into three pages, so that all your work isn't visible from the first page. Most people today seems to prefer a blog-like approach where you can just scroll down to access all content without linking around, and I definitely recommend that you put everything in one page. If that looks too cluttered you can simply divide the work into different sections on the same page, and perhaps put the role info next to the adjacent work section instead of having them stand-alone further down at the page. It would be a shame if people missed out your work simply because of the layout, because I didn't notice at first that there were more pages in your gallery.

    Cheers!

    Quote from Pomperi

    You've got a lot of nice work in it for sure. I think it's a shame though that you've divided the work into three pages, so that all your work isn't visible from the first page. Most people today seems to prefer a blog-like approach where you can just scroll down to access all content without linking around, and I definitely recommend that you put everything in one page. If that looks too cluttered you can simply divide the work into different sections on the same page, and perhaps put the role info next to the adjacent work section instead of having them stand-alone further down at the page. It would be a shame if people missed out your work simply because of the layout, because I didn't notice at first that there were more pages in your gallery.Cheers!

    Yeah, that's what sort of what I have in mind for my new layout, the thumbnails will all be on one page with a short description on each project and then you can go into a "proper" gallery from there. Possibly. I am going to get it all on one page though, that is certain, I just haven't figured it all out yet...

    Quote from Rick_D

    Pete sucks.

    Not as much as you Rick, and I should know. I witness your sucking on a daily basis...

    *edit*

    Cleaned up the tags and changed the link colour. Thanks for the suggestions, keep em coming!

    Hey Peter,

    Wanted to say I really liked your info on metal surfaces and have linked to it on my blog (http://caponeart.blogspot.com/), liking your blog too and have made sure to bookmark that.

    Your portfolio is much improved over what it use to be from my vague memory and should be enough to get you a job but I do see potential improvement in the structure. You explain the different projects you've worked on but it's not clear when just browsing through the gallery so some people will have to piece it together by looking back and fourth from gallery to descriptions. My personal solution to this was to put html text on each image so that it can easily be edited if needed, originally I included the dates the work was made which was something that I later found out to be a no-no so thankfully I didn't have to edit each image.

    I try to not even put text within my images anymore as it can cause huge problems if you don't have the original PSD.

    I would say you can get rid of a few images, it seems a shame that your first page of images look very similar bar the bottom row. There are a few that look a bit too similar such as the one with the walkway on the water, you have two shots of seemingly the same area but different angles, I'd get rid of one. Then there is image 6 and 8 which seem to be very similar even though 8 stands out as the better composition, to me at least. Also lack of info again, did you model and texture the gun also?

    So yeah, good enough portfolio already but if you wanted to tweak it I'd look into those issues.

    Thanks Adam. I'm going to change the layout of things so there will be better info and less repetition. As for the gun, since I'm an environment artist, I would probably not be the one who modeled it

    I think the dead space pictures you used for metal surfaces actually looked pretty bad. Doom 3 did a much better version in my opinion

    Hehe, I'll have to get Doom3 again and get some screens then! Don't want to nab them off of google image search... But yeah, Doom did do metal very well, how could I forget that? As for Dead Space, it looks great in motion. I didn't spend that long trying to find a good place to take some screens... Shame on me. I should revisit that.

    Thanks Helder, glad to hear it

    That's why I love you dux! <3

    Last time I replayed Doom3, a couple of months ago, i took more than 500 screenshots of the game during my play-trough! The whole game (art wise) is a gold mine for references.

    I basically learnt how to make decent metal by looking at doom3 textures, especially specular and normal mapping.

    Couple of examples:

    http://i35.tinypic.com/90217a.jpg

    http://i34.tinypic.com/14dksbd.jpg

    http://i37.tinypic.com/iy0hdz.jpg

    http://i33.tinypic.com/15xtkig.jpg

    http://i37.tinypic.com/1t2d5x.jpg

    sorry for raping your thread Peter!

    Hehe no worries, it's all good. Yeah, seeing those screens makes me remember how awesome I thought Doom 3 was back when I played it. I really need to get that again now... And I'm going to get better screens from Dead Space too, I still think they did a great job of metals in there. It's just hard to show off since you can't show the light playing on a surface with a still

    *edit*

    Took some new screenshots, hopefully these will be a bit better? ;P

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