New Freelancer Looking for Crits

Jack M.

Hey fellow polycounters,

I'm once again looking for some constructive criticism from this excellent community. This time it is for my first freelance works. I did most of these works very cheaply as I'm still fresh to freelance work. Every single person I have worked with so far has been exceptionally happy with my services.

However, as a growing artist I always feel the need to do better. So going forward I would like to know what I did wrong, what I could have done better, what looks good, what looks bad, and how I can provide better pieces in the future.

With that being said I will continue to update this thread as I continue to do freelance work. Please critique away. Any advice is also welcome.

Here is a pipe that was made for a sci-fi scene. It was rendered in marmoset toolbag 2 and was intended to be implemented in Unreal Engine 4.



Diffuse



Normal



roughness

Jack M.

I just finished up a sci-fi cable.



Diffuse



Normal



Roughness

billymcguffin

These props look alright, but it's really hard to say much of anything because they're so insignificant. A pipe and a cable isn't much to go off of. You have two cylinders with some textures... I'd suggest working on a more complex 'hero' prop which would be much more interesting and probably a better indication on your overall skill that people can give feedback on, or an environment to put these small props in.

The pipe's material definition is lackluster. It appears like it should be metal, but the albedo is too bright for a metal surface. In a PBR workflow, pure metals should be nearly black, if not completely black.

For the cable, your texture size and UV usage is pretty ridiculous. The vast majority of the texture is the same thing repeating, with no unique detail what-so-ever. You could probably do the same texture in a 128x or 256x texture, especially considering how insignificant a cable is in an actual environment.

I wish I could give more feedback, but there really isn't much here to comment on.

GOBEE

I'm with billy here. Very confused. All I see are cylinders with a photo overlay and normal map slapped on it.

Quick question: what makes the cable sci-if?

I checked out your portfolio and it says you have experience in practically every major software program for making beautiful art for video games. Surely you have produced better quality assets than this. Show us your other work!

DireWolf

Agree with texture, looks like a lot of wasted space. Pattern on your cable for example could be easily tiled which would reduce your texture space by a ton.

Jack M.

Sorry about the simplicity of these props guys. I am commissioned to do these simple props for a science-fiction gamedev project but wasn't entirely happy with how my work turned. There's a ton of amazing talent here on these forums and I was hoping you would offer me some advice on how to improve my craft. I'm not disappointed!

I'll immediately rework the albedo and try fitting the cable texture in a 128x or 256x texture and see how it turns out.

I also hope to do some bigger, and better props to really show off what I am capable of soon.

Jack M.

Hey everybody,

Here's an update. The pipe now uses one 512x512 primary texture, one 256x256 detail texture, and one 256x256 normal map. All of the textures are tilable textures. The different colors are changed through the material settings.

When considering the name of the thread I decided to remake the thread due to the fact that several months down the line it could become very misleading. So here is the new thread, and a render in Unreal of the retouched pipe. I also have some pretty exciting stuff coming up that I'll be posting soon in the new thread.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=138407

Jack M.

Here are the textures. Due to the struggle I have been having with pbr I used unreals textures as a base to work from. The only one that I didn't modify heavily is the normal map. The rest were changed quite a bit.

UV's



Main Albedo



Detail



Normal

skyline5gtr

I'm with everyone else, try to concentrate on the asset before jumping into PBR stuff. even if it is a simple pip or line mesh im sure you can add more detail to the actual asset and bake it. Your also wasting a ton of UV space for other area. Most of your textures are just taken straight from cgtextures and plopped in as a map. Keep at it

almighty_gir

Jack M. wrote: »

I just finished up a sci-fi cable.

this is a horrific abuse of texture space. you'd be way better off giving it two materials, one for the end at something like 256*256 res, and then another at 256*256 res for the cable itself, but tile it across the length of the cable.

sltrOlsson

You have some huge gradients in you normal map. That means that you'r surface is always bent - with other words, the light will always be wrong on your models. How do you solve this? Stop inputing photos in to crazy bump or what ever you're using, without any thought. If you don't know how, google it. I promise you there are good tutorials out there.

You also have reflections in your albedo and cause of that - big as gradients in your roughness.. No light and no shadow in you albedo and random big ass gradients is generally pretty bad to go with. It's up to you if you like that gradient, it's just that it's based from your albedo (very bad) and just makes on end of what ever that texture is applied to more shinny in one end, with out any reason.

And like almighty_gir already pointed out, your textures are very wasteful. Tile your textures, that's how we can make things look detailed with limited memory.

Jack M.

Thanks for the tips guys. I'll be remaking the cables textures and I'll optimize everything to the max. NO wasted texture space! Clean normals. Everything is going to tile. It'll be a little generic still, but hell at least it won't be a half broken game asset anymore.

I'll be posting the changes to this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=138407