May I trouble you for feedback on my folio ? [3D Character Artist]
polycounter lvl 12
I was spending the last few months working on improving my portfolio. I believe some characters were made before I made some learning breakthrough. But I'm not quite sure what pieces to keep/cut.
https://aduongsaa.artstation.com/
Also, I'm living in Washington state, in Redmond. And I want to work in videogame industry and/or making sculpts for 3d printing figurines and such.
Would love some feedback.
https://aduongsaa.artstation.com/
Also, I'm living in Washington state, in Redmond. And I want to work in videogame industry and/or making sculpts for 3d printing figurines and such.
Would love some feedback.
Replies
- You could push the presentation a bit on most pieces. A lot of them are the regular basic sculpting pose without any pedestal or anything. Take the time to present things well. Also, that pedestal on the second 3DPrinting (the red wax girl) isn't looking good at all. It would take you 2 minutes to make a quick nice clean mesh. Right now this attracts the eye a lot because it looks bad, which is a shame since the piece is good.
- You could push more some pieces. Solid base, but they still look somewhat wip. See below.
- The guardian of Arrakis presentation is all over the place with those big fonts. Keep things simple AND consistent regarding info. People want to see your work in the picture. Just put you name and web address in the corner in small. There's no need to have a massive title, you already have one in the web page. People will only care about your name if the work is good, focus on the work first.
- Your renders mostly look flat. This is a bit of a problem because your sculpts are better quality than your final output. Your materials do not always read as they should (metal being metal, skin being skin, ...) and your lighting is often overbright with little shadows and variation. The elven hunter is a good example, he's completely killed by the lighting, try to make things more interesting with a defined shadow, some nice backlight, ...
And some quick critics more per piece:
- Biomech Soldier: Really nice start, but that looks like a Wip. Always avoid Wip in portfolio. Right now, you have some pinching on the knee pads, the helmet angles are not as defined as they should, the hands have clearly not been worked much outside of the basemesh being subdivided, ... It's a really cool base, but it's a base, you need to spend time to detail it a bit. Push it more, add a nice little pedestal/dramatic pose and some good lighting and this will be a strong piece for you.
- Dryad: Nice flow, nice sculpt, nice idea, ... But really, that lumpy pedestal isn't doing you any favor. Spend the time to do a little forest ground, that will increase a lot the value of this piece.
- Stag: Looks clean overall, but again this looks unfinished. Your folds on the cloth are lumpy and wavy in a wrong way, you need to clean them. The antlers are again basic model subd without much work. The hands clearly lack work. The face could be more detailed. You could also easily add micro detail to make it even better. Same as above, push that more and present it well, you'll have a winner.
- Arrakis: If you make a bust, make the full bust. That armor flying in the air isn't really working out. Again this looks unfinished and is hurting you. Same for the texturing, why is only the head textured? Try to be more consistent inside your piece. The skin could also use some better shader.
- Low Poly Models: Your sculpts are cool, but it's not translating in the final result. Lighting and material definition is often hurting you a lot. Presentation could also be better. This is a problem for potential game jobs, you don't really have one fantastic game ready piece right now.
Overall, I would pick a couple of pieces and push them further (deporting everything else to a blog). More details, better material definition, a real interesting pose, a nice little pedestal if need be, some good lighting. Your sculpts are cool, they deserve more attention in the other part of the work. I feel the Dryad could be a very interesting piece if you spend the time to make the presentation better and nail a low poly piece for it.
Hope it helps, and keep it up.
Thank you for the detailed reply
I know I can work more on the robot. Pedestal for the dryad is doable, though I'm not so sure about turning this into a lowpoly. With the vines/roots hanging all the over the places(some over the body, some hanging a bit further), lowpoly could be very very messy. I could rework Stag's cloth. I could make torso armors for Arrakis. I will see if I can improve the lighting of the elves... Though I'm not so happy with the material definition of the texture.
Now that I think about it, the lowpoly projs are a tad outdated now. Not sure how much I could recover them... Might be a great time as any to start a new lowpoly proj.
Some things:
Grey stands for mediocrity, avoid mid range grey it looks bad
Backgrounds and colors are important, do something with your presentation and at best make it unified or at least consistent
You NEED to work on your texturing man, the highpolies all were good to begin with and all you did was more highpolies but you already have plenty that are more than good enough. Dont start any new highpoly in the next months.
Take out like 30% of the worst, polish up the rest and rerender everything
Also just get some marmoset or unreal, you need to render this somewhere that is easy to do, and while you do it, do it consistently for all. You can do so much with lights on a highpoly. I would generally suggest going with a classy approach and untextured only for now until you have good textures and final models to show
Do one nice clay or marble material and get a good light setup with nice contrast and make an art expetition style presentation that looks classy, and detains from the lack of textures. Use a soft background such as this per example: http://cdn.pmnewsnigeria.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/White_Sculpture.jpg or some blurry HDRI from marmoset or whatever
Also wrote some things here:
After you have your stuff selected and polished, make lowpolies and only work on textures in the near future and then slowly fill the portfolio up with textured models and everything will work out.
First off, thanks for taking the time to help. I have some questions for clarification though.
What do you mean by the following ?
I do have and am using Marmoset for render. Should I use it to render Zbrush sculpts as well ? More than 5m tris and my machine is lagging especially with good lighting and shadow. Most of my sculpts are rendered in ZB atm. (hence the grey background for all of em) I think James Bond is kinda blue because I picked wrong Sky/Background in marmoset...
Clay/Marble renders of lowpoly or of highpoly ? If highpoly, how is that different from the sculpt renders I have ? If lowpoly, then you mean just normal/ao without texture ? (like the image at the bottom of my post ?) Dead direct link for the example there.
Also
Could you tell me how is this sculpt unfinished ?? I actually made lowpoly with normal/ao baking. Here. (no Alpha on cape, yet)
Even on her though, the anatomy is really soft and undefined. I don't get a sense of a bone structure and musculature underneath her skin. For example, the knee doesn't have any definition to it, when in real life the patella tends to make a crisp and defined shape, with some interesting fat pads below it.
I suggest you do more anatomy studies. You need to spend a lot more time carefully assessing the subtle changes in silhouette of your model against reference, from as many angles as possible. You also need to spend more time looking at smaller anatomical features. Imagine you had to sculpt an 8 foot tall sculpture of just a knee. What kind of details would you have to put in to make it actually look like a knee, viewed entirely out of context like that?
If you have money to spend, I suggest the following resources for anatomy studies:
http://www.scott-eaton.com/
http://3dscanstore.com/
If you can't afford to buy anything right now, you can check out this Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ProkoTV
I also agree with Shrike that you need to work on your texturing. It's easily the weakest link in your portfolio right now. However, I don't think you should stop working on your sculpting, because there is a lot of room for improvement in both areas.
if you cant get them in marmoset you should look for another good solution
It doesnt matter how much it lags as long as you can work and get a screenshot out of it
Id make clay / marble rendering of everything, consistency will make a much better impression
The character looks unfinished because the cape is just a blob (if that does not matter to the lowpoly, make sure to hide it somehow)
the hair looks like tentacles without definition and the chest area has strange proportions in which I found that your first character had easily a more correct looking form. you also have better defined hair on other characters
Highpoly models need to be rendered nicely ofcourse, but they don't need to be rendered in a real-time solution, IMHO. I think it's perfectly fine to pick one consistent way of rendering your highpoly models and another one for your lowpoly models. Noone expects highpoly meshes to actually run in a real-time environment.
I just chime in again to say that you have talent and some good stuff Pyrzern. Those kind of threads can really feel negative and depressing, but really you've got potential. However, being a successful character artist in the game industry is very very demanding. The places are few and characters benefits from a large amount of resources in terms of performance since they are considered the most important thing in most games. That means the level of skill required is absolutely massive, much higher than for environment artist.
You're on the right path IMHO. But overall, I think you need to focus on one specific piece and push it a lot more. You seem to skip the final detailing phase, let some things slip for some reason. That won't do in production. And as Wendy said, it's absolutely essential to have the knowledge of anatomy and proportions with you. If you're a bit bothered by a piece and want to do something else, fine. Do it and put it on a blog or something, put comes back to the main piece and continue going at it until it looks awesome.
Essentially, you will limit your progression if you just do stuff over and over without fixing the mistakes or by avoiding stuff you're not good at. Always focus on your weaknesses, it's the fastest way to progress. It's like learning to draw. If you want to learn to draw poses, draw that pose until it's right. Don't just draw dozens of poses everyday without looking too much into it, analyse what you did and redo it knowing your mistakes. You'll end up with one drawing much better than anything you've done before, and that new knowledge will spread to future drawings.
Keep it up really, you'll get there.
I think I can add more anatomy details to the Dryad. She's mostly covered in leaves and roots/vines anyhow. So maybe I will focus on her knees, ribcages, hipbones and maybe elbows. Some bone landmarks and such.
Maybe I should try KeyShot for Zbrush ? Would that help with presenting the highres sculpts ? I could get some textures in as well without uv'ing the sculpts, right ?
Anyhow, I will setup a consistent render in Marmoset and see if I can produce good lighting there.
BTW, when you say the headliners/banner/things are confusing, should I just get rid of it altogether ? (but then, would the thumbnails alone be obvious enough which piece is which). Or should I keep them but make them less confusing. Like, make the category banners longer and shorter, de-saturate the colors, add trims/borders, or something. Or maybe I differentiate the thumbnails more... Sculpts always show full piece, while lowpoly focus on the face. (and get rid of Portrait/Bust, merging into Sculpts)
Normally you're only going to think about what you can afford to sacrifice when you're in a production environment, when it comes to your portfolio though its an opportunity to really show off all the love you can pour into every part of a character. When you have leave things in an unpolished state it calls into question if that's REALLY the best you can do.
Also, I would seriously consider either drooping the Sean Connery likeness or removing his name and just leave it as James Bond fan art.
One day...
Say, this piece.(I re-rendered, after a few small fixes, will do more improvements) I did plan for the hair to come out that way. But not sure if it just looks bad or if I have poor taste.
Good hair in art, whether stylized or realistic, is informed by reality. However, what happens a lot with stylized hair is that one artist will reference other stylized pieces to create their hair. And the hair they used for inspiration was probably created in that very same way, too. When the hair gets several steps removed from reality, it just gets crazier and crazier, and at one point, it just doesn't look good anymore. To paraphrase the late and great Andrew Loomis: "Be a child of nature, not a grandchild of nature." Or a great-great-great grandchild of nature, for that matter.
The best remedy is to find actual photo reference of the exact hairstyle you meant to capture. Oftentimes, you may find you can't even find a real picture of the hairstyle you wanted! This is a clear sign that there is something wrong with your design.
In the case of your character, you don't have any trace of the scalp showing, not even at the hairline or the parting. This doesn't happen with real hair. You may have had in mind that lots of volume is luxurious and desirable, but instead you are channeling a cheap wig look.
Much in the same way, you have a ton of volume near the scalp. If you look for actual photo references with this kind of volume, you will end up with 80's hairstyles. So when you think about it, such a thick voluminous look is really not that cool at all... unless ofcourse you meant to make your character look "totally radical, dude", in which case you should probably look up 80's hair bands and go all out.
So my recommendation is that you find some real pictures of the actual hairstyle you want to capture. It will give you a lot of new ideas about how you might portray it and stylize it. It will allow you to reshape it into a more convincing shape overall, and it will also inspire you to include unexpected details; stuff you'd never come up with from the top of your head. Nature has awesome variety if you look for it, even if your intention is to create stylized art.
I hope this helps you to push your art into a new direction. Keep working on it! You have a great work ethic and I'm sure you will get there.
And probably also getting myself into the debate of realism vs source material as well... The piece is a fan art, after all.
Thanks for your suggestion as well.
I will make 2 versions of her hair. One (what I have) where I will made adjustment and show more of her forehead and the parting of the hair. And two (new one) a more realistic hair.
Stay tuned !! (I guess)
Big image - http://i.imgur.com/UWZghOa.jpg
https://www.photo-reference-for-comic-artists.com/photo_sets/search/query//thumb/large/standard/1/category-12/Woman/category-39/Fighting%20with%20sword/page/1
Even the free preview images should be enough to help with the general pose.
As for the detailing, the torso is looking very nice, but the model gets increasingly less detailed towards the lower body and feet. I think you need to spend more time with the folds in the pants, and maybe add some additional seams and stitching. Definitely look up some reference of how pants bunch up when you tuck them inside boots. The folds you have here look very unnatural. Other parts of the clothing are looking much better than the pants.
The boots need a lot more work in terms of construction. Boots are sewn together from multiple patches of leather. If they are form fitting like you have here, they need a closure, for instance a zipper, lacing or straps and buckles. I suggest you look up reference of classic riding boots for inspiration, and try to include as much of the construction detail as possible. Also keep in mind that boots have folds as well, especially near the ankle.
And lastly, your cloak folds are too superficial and repetitive in size and shape. Check out how nicely cloth drapes in real-life:
http://static.premiersite.co.uk/14749/img/14749_617063_3.jpg
http://www.cloakedanddaggered.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/midnight-velvet-cloak.jpg
Again, your best bet will be to find some reference you like and try to mimic it as closely as possible.
The pose didn't exactly come out the way I want either. Guess I just went from serenity + lost in thought => shy.... Crap.
Yeah, don't think I could make this pose work well enough. And I find it very hard to pose in general... With clothing over skin and laces all over the place. Would be easier to pose the naked body before building clothes on top... Next proj, I guess.
Guess I will do a totally diff pose now... This looks worse. Yeah, fingers not done, but I didn't like the overall look anyhow.
Your latest pose doesn't look quite right, because it's off-balance. When drawing a plumb line down from the pit of the neck, you'll want to make sure that it ends up at the weight-bearing foot, or inbetween both feet. Also, if you want to pose your characters on tippy toes, you should make sure that the entire forefoot is firmly planted. A person can't balance on just the very tip of their toe. It would also be good to sculpt some folds in the leather where the forefoot articulates. Shoes always have folds here, unless they have never been worn. Having those folds will also make it look more convincing when the character is standing on tippy toes.
Okay so a bit wary posting this since there are so many good artists on polycount and whenever I give a crit i imagine them wondering why such a scrub is talking like he knows what he is doing haha. Hopefully some of this could be of help. Ah sorry for the small font
oh and some links
Paul Richards lectures http://www.autodestruct.com/
Glen Keane notes http://onanimation.com/2014/12/30/design-notes-by-glen-keane/
Disney pixologic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A36i_1kqhw0
Zack Petroc vimeo https://vimeo.com/zackpetrocstudios/videos
I will do something about the noises.
Dang, the belt really breaks the silhouette on the side view there.... That's bad... Time to change things up some more.
and OMG this was both fun and informative to read . you sir know how to write
sorry if im not adding anything constructive to this thread . i just wanted to mention how awesome i found your post
Hey man, np. Before I answer your question I would like you to get a pen/pencil and paper then read/watch the links. Take notes
CATZCRATCH
Thanks for the compliment