Showreels

Showreels are very important for animators and riggers but more prop/character and environment artists it is less so, we can use still images to display the work, and they are much easier for people to view the art work rather than a video much might not give the best quality of the work. Having said that showreels are there for showing off you're best work, and it is more of a dynamic method to show off artwork. With props you have them usually rotating around, showing off the wireframe, high poly, low poly with baked normal map, and then diffuse, specular maps as the prop rotates. 

However it is more complicated with environments, you have to think about the camera, be very subtle when moving it around the scene. Try not to go over the same area more than once, and not to drag it out longer than it needs to be. For smaller environments it might be easier to have screenshots but for the example below I will show you exactly why a video is needed. 

Here is an example of how a large environment can be shown off using a showreel, this is the only project show in the video but as you can see it a massive environment and it would be impossible to show this off just using still images.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EbsFRtELgI

It would have been nice to see a breakdown of the scene a bit more but he had done that on their development showcase thread on polycount. I will look further in showreels and see how environments have been broken down in wireframes, textures, lighting and so on, as I prepare to block out my own. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkIBEIf-2d4

Here is a better showreel, you can see the environment is shown as well as props, showing the different maps used in a cool way. I really like how the camera is used and makes viewing more interesting.