Critique the shit out of my 'folio, yo!
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I think I'm ready to start looking for a full time studio gig. But before I get carried away, I need some honest feedback on my work. So here it is:
www.brandonlafrance.com
Any feedback is appreciated. Be brutal. Am I really ready for the big leagues? What am I doing right? What do I need to work on? How fat is my mom?
www.brandonlafrance.com
Any feedback is appreciated. Be brutal. Am I really ready for the big leagues? What am I doing right? What do I need to work on? How fat is my mom?
Replies
As for critiques, I find the soldier's pose to be a little strange. From the back it looks great, but from the front it doesn't look balanced. Maybe it's his chestplate?
Otherwise great work! I seriously want to see more!
I think your sculpts look great, but your low poly models really are lacking. I would work on your texturing/ material definition skills. Also work on improving your lowpoly meshes and baking. Also get some of your other stuff from the noob challenges up here. Some of your sculpts have looked really great. Especially the frog.
^This, and Caroline seems a bit "plastic" and ugly, although I cannot say why.
The knight and the girl are pretty nice! Keep up the good work, and I'd suggest to add more stuff to your portfolio.
Ps. I'm not a fan of Artstation basic website layout... It just doesn't click with me.
The knight and the Caroline character are not the same quality and polish as the other 2 pieces in your portfolio. Caroline looks good, but it's not finished. Also the knights armor probably needs some variation and the sword reflection is a bit plastic.
Overall, you have some pretty awesome stuff in your portfolio, I think the main thing right now is consistency and the level of polish.
I really love what you did with the girl character, I think if you can get a few similar quality pieces like it in your portfolio you would be in a very good spot.
stevston89: I think your critique is pretty much what I was expecting to hear. But as I'm trying to land a job in game art, I'm hesitant to make my portfolio too sculpt heavy. Rather than removing the knight, I would prefer to take the time to improve it. Could you be more specific about the shading errors that you're speaking of? Got any specific tips to improve material definition? The design is pretty much locked-in, but surely I can salvage the rest.
Also, I think you may be confusing me with someone else. The last Character Challenge that I participated in was the Monkey Guy. Didn't do the frog, but I'll have to check it out.
robschia: Thanks for the comments, I'll definitely work on that pose. I know my portfolio is kind of lean, but I've culled a lot of old work that just doesn't meet my standards anymore. I'm shooting for quality over quantity.
Good luck and keep up the good work!
Ah you are right. You and kapoff both sort of got the challenges started. I confused you my bad. Still I think good sculpts are better to show than bad low poly models.
As for more specific crits for the knight. All of you materials look like plastic. I would make sure to get your metals looking like metals. Also try to bring a few more materials into the design everything is just black. I would do something like iron or steel for the majority of the metal and then have some black gun metal for some of the detailing. Everything reads really flat this is mostly because you aren't pushing details into your gloss/roughnes map. Things like wear, dirt, scratches, dents are all details that help sell armor and there are none on your model.
The face looks like it's lacking some anatomical structures. For example I can't tell where the zygomatic (cheek) bone is. The skin is also very flat and too yellow. Also you don't seem to be taking advantage of the skin shader marmoset has. That will go a long way to helping the look of the skin.
The hair confuses me. It's a very anime style hair, but the rest of the model is semi-realistic. No one's hair in real life will look like that without a ton of hair product. I would consider redoing the hair to a more realistic style.
Last the are errors all over the model in terms of normals/shading. I am not going to point all of them out, but one of the major ones is the top of the sword. Also it's kind hard to tell if there are in fact a lot due to the fact that everything is black, but it look like there are a bunch at the edges of the armor pieces and boots.
Also because of the topology around the chest. You want loops going around the chest so it's easy to skin and works with the bones.
Hope this helps.
PyrZern: The UVs are mirrored, but the hard edge down the center was an intentional design choice. I hope it doesn't appear to be a shading error.
Leinad: I'll be sure to add material breakdowns for the game-ready pieces. Thanks for the encouragement. I will continue to work towards consistency in my work. It seems like the common thread is that I need to work on material definition, which makes sense, as its the area I'm least practiced in.
avenali312: Thanks for the response and encouragement. I'll be sure to start including my texture sheets.
stevston89: Thanks a ton for taking the time to write up such a thorough critique. The knight was a freelance job, and that hair style was specifically requested by my client, so there wasn't much wiggle room there.
I will take some time to add more variation to the materials and massage the roughness map a bit more. I don't think I'll have time to re-bake everything, but I will try to go back and paint out some of the normal map errors that you mentioned.
Now as far as the topology is concerned... because the armor is rigid, I was under the impression that it would not be deformed, and thus focused entirely on silhouette. Is this incorrect?
Thanks to everyone for all of the input. I will post back when I've addressed everyone's concerns.