Just posted a new demo reel…check it out, let me know what you think…
All 3d work completed with blender, textures painted with gimp, and MyPaint…
C&C are welcome 
I think your traditional/figure drawing skills are rockin’, but the animation and general composition of things was pretty weak. Also little things like some render artifacts that are blinking (mostly on the bird’s wings in the turnabout), parts of the mesh showing through where it shouldn’t (on the pirate’s left shoulder) really counts against you and it generally a pretty easy fix.
It’s crucial that you specialize more in my opinion. I’m not in the industry, but I’m speaking from what people who are have said on forums, and mostly what I’ve read in books like “getting a job in CG: real advice from reel people,” and it’s always much easier to get a job if you specialize. It’s pretty rare for a studio to need a jack of all trades. It looks to me like your strongest attribute is character design and low-poly character modeling.
If you’re going for games, you shouldn’t have prerendered stuff. I don’t know if that environment was prerendered or not, but if you’re trying to show off lighting and environments for game creation then the work flow for lighting is considerably different, and I think it comes off best if you show your environment running in an engine, with the name of the engine and the frame rate showing. There are so many great engine available to you. This also shows to some extent that you can work with an editor and work with a game engine material system. So if it was in an engine it should have said what engine during the reel.
But in my opinion the environment was very weak anyway so I’d drop that section entirely. Which brings me to another crucial point: Time. 5 minutes is way way too long for a junior demo reel. According to “getting a job in CG” and most pros, It should be maximum 2 minutes. Your turnabouts last way too long and I guarantee you someone going through hundreds of student reels will not bother to watch the whole thing.
I guess I’d recommend specializing and working with an editor if you’re trying to get into games. In a game studio the artists do very often work with an editor so say goodbye to lighting and setting up materials in your 3d package.
I hope that didn’t sound too harsh. If I was posting a reel, I would want people to give completely honest criticism before I send it off to the studios, who absolutely will not hire you for the sake of being nice. I do think your figure drawing skills are really awesome and that’s a very valuable skill to have.
Hey thanks…not to harsh
Its the truth…and if the truth hurts…then your not doing something right…
thanks for taking the time to write such a detail crit and opinion…i’ll keep all that in mind for my next show reel…which will be more focused…probally concept designs…