Latest Work, Please Critique
Hello,
http://www.stevenbabbart.com/
My name is Steve and I'm really looking to improve my skills as an artist. I mainly work on 3D characters and props but I'm looking to expand to more environments as well. I've attached my latest work and a link to my portfolio. I would love constructive criticism to figure out what I need to do to land a job in the games industry as an 3D artist. A bit of background on me is below and I hope this is the correct area for this kind of thing. I really want to work on professional portfolio development. What do I need to do to improve my work and make myself more employable? Please check out my full website and let me know what's up!
http://www.stevenbabbart.com/
I'm currently looking for a full time job in games or 3D in Germany. I just moved to Stuttgart, Germany from the US. Anyway, I would love to make some contacts here - especially in the games industry. Please contact me if you fit the bill!
Thank you so much!
-s_babb@hotmail.com
http://www.stevenbabbart.com/
My name is Steve and I'm really looking to improve my skills as an artist. I mainly work on 3D characters and props but I'm looking to expand to more environments as well. I've attached my latest work and a link to my portfolio. I would love constructive criticism to figure out what I need to do to land a job in the games industry as an 3D artist. A bit of background on me is below and I hope this is the correct area for this kind of thing. I really want to work on professional portfolio development. What do I need to do to improve my work and make myself more employable? Please check out my full website and let me know what's up!
http://www.stevenbabbart.com/
I'm currently looking for a full time job in games or 3D in Germany. I just moved to Stuttgart, Germany from the US. Anyway, I would love to make some contacts here - especially in the games industry. Please contact me if you fit the bill!
Thank you so much!
-s_babb@hotmail.com
Replies
I will readily admit, the cleanliness and definition of material and balanced fidelity of many areas of the character model do not reflect your more awesome handle on comic art and inking.
There's a lot of fundamental issues going on, but I won't be able to say anything concrete until I can see what you were trying to recreate.
You need to spend the time making clean meshes, or your sculpt, then your baked maps, and then your textures suffer. You get a cascading effect of problems if you don't have a clean high poly mesh.
I would recommend going forward to spend time subdivision modeling or sculpting to get clean meshes. In the highpoly, everything doesn't have to be contiguous meshes. You can build it like they do in real life: separate shirts, shoulderpands, shoes, etc. Your lowpoly can be contiguous if you want.
I quite comics and 2D illustration work because the hours to payment ratio is horrendously bad. I did a number of projects over the years and signed lots of contracts with various publishers. Sometimes I got paid, many times I didn't. Pretty familiar story in that line of work. I've had a few successes in 3D and the medium just is way more exciting. I plan on doing a 3D Cyclops, but I'll bring this feedback with me as I work on it. Here is WIP drawing.
I think the reason it looks too dark or muddy is that I was using too many viewport filters. Ambient occlusion, cavity occlusion and zdepth. Might have been too much for a detailed piece like the first character. Below are the wires and the character with more simple lighting and no AO, or Cavity AO or zdepth. Does that make for a cleaner presentation?
In 2d, you seem to care about design principles such as straight against curve. You also seem to care about line quality, and so on. This is why you are getting good results.
Now, those same principles need to be applied in 3d as well if you want to achieve good results. Currently your model is muddy, it doesn't read clearly (I'm talking about the mesh for now, let's forget about the textures). Your shapes aren't clean nor well defined (do you see how the topology bends in different direction in the neck area for instance? how the arc for the hair strands aren't an appealing curve? or how the boots or the helmet looks muddy instead of being a clean hard surface? etc)
For the time being, I'd advice to turn off the texture entirely and concentrate on the mesh. Once you'll have a clean and appealing mesh, than you can go back to texturing to enhance it.
I hope you won't take this too harshly. I merely want you to take a good look at your work. If you do, your 3d work will quickly improve. Keep it up!
Could be the renderer that you're using that's stock with what you're using, but it still looks like bad bakes from a sketchy, unclean sculpt. And now, with the colors relatively flat, texturing and detailing that doesn't quite take into account cavities, edges, etc. Just scattered dirt and grunge, no sesne of focus or direction.
If youre sculpt can look clean like this, you're going to have a better time with bakes and texturing later on.
What software do you have available, and are you planning to ever put this into a game engine? If you want to do game art, you need to render your art in a game engine to prove that it will work well in a video game.
Critiquing the character design, it just overall seems really noisy and primarily, I have no idea what this character is about. She has this big bauble on her back, and white tree veins going around her body? Purple highlighted hair? Do you have the concept for this? What were you referencing exactly?
If you want further free reference to good game art, I recommend downloading assets from this thread:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=138341&page=6
Batman bust sculpt block out. This is a WIP. I have a lot fix here, especially the cape region. I plan on retopoing again in Max as well as fixing the concrete blocks at the bottom.
Also, that microdetail on the rock doesn't really sell the rock-surface as rock. It's soft-looking-- Try something like the TrimDynamic brush. I swear by it + the orbs crack brush for both wood and rocks of the more stylised persuasion.
You should get something more like this:
Also, I think it's worth nothing that really you should start/block out at a much lower detail level (fairly limited and faceted) until the forms and shapes and basic construction are set, then you can up the subdivision and start detailing as much as you can there, then go up another and polish as much as you can again, rinse and repeat until you get to wrinkles and cracks and pores, etc.
Adam Fishers' sculpt videos are a pretty good example of about how it goes. It starts off as a very low poly base mesh and he defines the shapes and refines from there.
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Good luck. Your 2D stuff is great, would love to see you matching it in 3D soon.
Is the sculpt suppose to be of realistic anatomy or are you going for something else ? Alot of the anatomy looks awkward to me like the neck / traps area since it looks like it bulges out backwards.
Face seems a little small
It's hard to see, but muscles of the back and neck look weird and need to be revised.
About presentation:
Colors you chose just don't work together, sadly. Try using colors from comic book illustration and see how clearly you can see shapes there and why. To me, the colors look too saturated and details you have on sculpts/normal maps are being lost. Flat lighting also doesn't help a bit.
Skin color. Is your Batman supposed to be a zombie? I know he lives in a cave, but he's a human being and has blood flowing under his skin
@SuperFranky: Not sure how black and yellow doesn't work together, but okay. Skin color - photo textures are fine for lots of things, but not for me on this particular project. Also, it's a real time render and with the program I'm using to do that there is no SSS.
I'm not sure you know what flat lighting is. Above is not flat lighting. Below is flat lighting.
If the anatomy is not working that means I didn't push it far enough. It doesn't mean I need to pull back and limit myself to 'proper' anatomy.
Thanks for the feedback.
With this sculpt, though, I think it's mostly textural work. Either define the materials, or switch up the local colors. Right now, not much is making it stand out or look clean.
That is the usual misconception. No matter how stylized the character is, if you included muscles or any anatomical structure, they should look correct. You push and pull them out of proportion yes, however if they look so obviously incorrect, it will only distract the viewer from your piece, which is what the neck of your bust is doing.
Talking of stylized characters one of the top artist I know is Michael Defeo. Check out one of his bust, you'll see that the nose, lips, eye lids, for example, all look correct while his character is way way stylized.
http://michaeldefeo.com/character-development/26.html
In your 2D work you use a lot of very clean shapes and sweeping strokes-- try to translate that to your 3D stuff. I'm really serious when I say you would work at a much lower resolution-- you can only get those clean shapes when you can see the polys-- otherwise the smooth tool doesn't do its job, and you get all these unclear muddy forms. All the forms I see again and again in your 2D work can easily be broken down into simple primitives-- cylinders, semi-spheres, cones, etc with skin around them.
Maybe have a watch of this (but this guy has been working on his skill and technique for years-- again be careful of being too destructive or working at too high a resolution when you're not super experienced).
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Also, when SuperFranky said "flat lighting", he meant the lighting feels flat, as in, poor and not doing your character justice. What did you render in?
Well, if you don't like photo textures- fine, paint skin in Zbrush or Photoshop using real colors of a human skin, at least.
Sorry for confusing you, by flat lighting I've meant "boring and unnatural". Can't see anything.
Stylized or not, anatomy should be there. Muscles should sit where they belong.
Yeah I think what SuperFranky meant with Flat Lighting is the lack of contrast between major areas of light and shadows. Three point lighting would help you boost the quality of your renders. At the moment I can see you that you've got your Orange Rim Light set up which is quite nice, but your Main Light seems a bit too melded in with your Fill light, making it fall flat.
Did a quick paintover to illustrate what I mean. I can only do so much without actual lights and and the actual model though.
Basically what I think your model needs is more light strength, a stronger Rim Light, a Main Light towards the opposite end of the Rim and a Fill Light that helps those intensely black spots get visibiity. You're doing your details a disservice by having them too dark.
Your 2nd and 3rd WIP shots are actually pretty well lit. Though I understand you're probably going for a gritty Dark Batman lighting. You're gonna need to be extra careful with lighting a dark scene so it doesn't fall flat.
Hope this helps!
Latest stuff
http://www.stevenbabbart.com/