Playground Art Test

Imasho · Feb 2014

Hi Polycount,

I was asked to do an art test for company, the roll was as an environment artist.

I didn't get the position and the feedback was pretty vague. I was hoping you could take a look and see what you made of it and where I could focus my efforts next time to be a better artist? $:\$

The brief was to use the image a basis and create the scene. I chose to display it on UDK as its the engine I'm most familiar with.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

silver_hoodlum · Feb 2014

good approximation though, how long it took?

Clark Coots · Feb 2014

looks pretty nice on its own, but compared to the concept here's some feedback:

Some of the colors are different - road is darker, concrete/rock is lighter than the concept and the sky is also under exposed. If you were meant to try to follow the concept as closely as possible than that could be a reason.

If you think about in a studio concept artists/art directors spend time establishing a color palette/lighting/mood so I imagine it's important to be as close as possible to the concept.

However I've seen really rough pencil sketches floating around the interwebs for official art tests and the studios want to see your creativity.

DWalker · Feb 2014

The field-of-view is very different between the two pictures. UDK defaults to 90 degrees, which is roughly equivalent to a very wide angle 10mm lens. More typical values would be between 48 degrees for a 28mm lens and 28 degrees for a 50mm lens. This site, http://www.abelcine.com/fov/, lets you see the different camera focal lengths. Most games will probably use something closer to the default value, but when matching a scene to a photo it's much easier to have a common starting point.

The textures could use some help. The cliff face has a distinct three tone - light gray, dark gray, brown - texture, with sharp delineations among them. Also notice the distinct lines formed by cracks in the surface. The grass at the base of the cliff is distinctly yellow, whereas yours is green.

The cliff face itself should be nearly vertical, with fairly subtle curves that are mostly hinted by the shading; yours appears far more curved. This is probably the biggest problem with the scene.

Imasho · Feb 2014

Thanks for the comment guys I appreciate it.

FOv was something I was wanting to fix but I was to inexperienced with UDK setting s to get it changed something to look into now I think. Also look into how to change the aspect ratio of the image?

The whole piece took me 5 days silver_hoodlum I don't know if thats long or short either? I had to make some textures for the trees and bushes which took a while and I had a go at generating the cliff texture using a tiling sculpt in zbrush I think it didn't work out to well. Back to the drawing board.

coots7 - cheers for the feedback I think i'll need to be much more precise colour wise next time.

Thanks for the link DWalker I've some reading to do on cameras in UDK!

I'll look into re-doing the rock wall and making the changes you suggested to the colours. It's always a fine line to tread between branching out on the creativity side and sticking closely to the concept. In this case they hadn't stated that it was to be an exact match in fact they said you could add to it if there was time.

I'll do better next time

Thank again

-Phil

Playground Art Test

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