Recent Art Test

Dimfist

So I recently did an art test for Unnamed triple A studio, and it was a killer.  I had 1 week to do it while working a full time job and dealing with a 1 year old, but, I'm very happy with how far I got.  Took me a day or two to recover from the 100ish hour work week.  So I intend to finish out the textures on this and work on the lighting set up.  I was even considering adding legs and clothing but I think I need to move on and finish my current character I'm working on in my spare time.
Any feedback is always appreciated.  I will update the post when I do another texture pass.  Cheers!

slosh

What were the requirements for this test?  do you have more specifics?  It feels pretty ridiculous to expect that in a week.

Dimfist

Yeah it was 100k limit, needed to have full PBR and rendered in Substance and Unreal.  Needed to figure out a way to make the arm work.  Update his arm basically and make sure that it could pivot and stuff correctly.  Turn ins were the zbrush tool, and the renders but I also turned in the fbx.

Alemja

I'm not sure if you're allowed to show us if there is a concept or not or if there was a concept at all, so my comments won't really be about the design itself.

The biggest problems I see are with the materials, everything has a very uniform roughness/gloss, it gives the feeling that everything is a similar material. The skin is a huge area that has this problem, unless he's sweating or covered in liquid, skin is far less shiny. You also have very small uniform noise that has been added to all of the surfaces. I would reduce it everywhere is keep it even more subtle, and instead try and get some of the medium details that are unique per material. Like edge scratches, or paint wear, these elements are not coming through as strongly as they could be and are getting drowned out by the small noise.

I hope this helps!

Dimfist

Yes it does help. Oh and the concept was just a few screens from the DC comics Judge dread.  Wasn't any real concept art and part of the test was to concept out the arm. 
 I wish I had even few more hours to work on textures, unfortunately I had to quit so I could get the renders set up before final turn in.  I will do another texture pass as I had wanted to really scratch up the arm paint and add a Pinup girl on it.  Also with the skin I would like to spend another few hours on that to get more color into it and add a real spec to it so it isn't all shiny.

slosh

So, aside from the fact that it was a pretty unreasonable art test, I think you could improve a few things.  As mentioned, the materials could use work.  I am also seeing a lot of hard low poly edges which shows a lack of understanding of baking principles.  None of these should really be showing.  If you have bevels in your hires, you should bake them to your low poly properly so you don't see these hard edges.  

Dimfist

I agree Slosh, its all in the arms. If you look some parts have good bakes while other parts have no bake at all.   I will post the high poly tonight when I get home.  I could not get substance to do bake by name (52 separate pieces) so I had to do a lot of the bakes 1 at a time in xnormal. I even tried to do the batch bake in xnormal but it kept overlapping uvs for some reason.  I am wondering if it is because of an error in 3ds max when I placed UVs.  Instead of merging objects to move uvs like I normally do I just selected the objects then adding a modifier to all of the selected.  I had to make a decision on missing deadline or figuring something else out...so I just brought it into substance and hoped that I could get them to look passable.
Everything you guys have said is spot on and unfortunately something I knew while turning in the project...I guess I had to choose the lesser of two evils type thing.  Maybe it was my time management? I felt like I did the best I could but I definitely lost a lot of time when it came to the bake debacle

almighty_gir

Critique on the art-test aside (you've already gotten great feedback from Slosh). I hope you take the time to go over things that are lacking, and finish this up. It's interesting enough and you've put in enough work that it would be a waste if you didn't.

pmiller001

oh cool!  i have so many questions!
 when'd you get this art test? Did you get the test from a lead or a recruiter? 0.0
also, not to be a downer, but are you allowed to show this? I imagine people who are goign to apply to the same place could use this as thing to "study" from. 

Dimfist

@almighty_gir I would love to finish this out.  Maybe not the full body but at least what I have now.
@pmiller001 Hey, I got the art test from HR but it was pushed through from the Lead at Daybreak after going through the basic process.  They did not say we couldn't show it but I understand what you are saying.  If I had signed something saying I couldn't show it then I wouldn't of course.

Dimfist

For some reason I have not been able to bake by mesh name in substance still.  All the maps are black.  I've tried to do it by fbx too and it won't bake.  I've double and triple checked the names of each mesh.

Dimfist

Dimfist

Tweaked some textures. Reworked AO as for some reason it wasn't in the last render and changed the lighting up.

wormo

the texturing and all the details in the normals etc. are awesome! I think the wear on the gun could be more convincing, otherwise it's all really great.

Dimfist

Thanks @wormo
I agree could definitely push more on those.  

Alemja

Looking better! I have some more suggestions for you:

Look into color zones on skin, there are areas that tend to lean more blue/red/yellow because of the way it's affected by light, blood and thickness of the skin. Magdalena Dadela did a really good demo on painting skin at GDC earlier this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ywhVkZBtq8

I also think some of the bare metal you have could use a little more love, like the plate on the scapula and head. The noise is just kind of all over and overwhelming. Especially on the scapula, it looks like it is much lower res than the rest of the pieces.