Dragon Head Trophy - Prop Art

Semi

Hi guys, looking for some feedback on my first summer project. I had a blast working on it, and I'd love to get your feedback and critique on it. I started with a quick concept sculpt of the dragon using a couple of reptile references, that I then retopoed and textured. It is one of the first model I retopo, so I'd love to get some feedback on the mesh. Thank you and have a nice day!

Renders in Marmoset with different lighting schemes





Wireframe
I pack my materials in Substance Designer, I'll just leave it here if anyone wants to take a look at it, but it's pretty simple. Here's also the material breakdown. 


Hope you like it, I'll read the critiques and rework it before putting in on Artstation. The final model is a bit over 5k triangles with four 2k maps (Base color, Normals, packed Ao/roughness/Metallic and Emissive, which is used as an heat map in Marmoset)  

slosh

I think my main crit is I don't know what I'm looking at.  I guess it's an alien head on a mounted plaque but the head lacks any proper structure and the colors are pretty haphazard looking.  It has what looks to be bizarre areas of translucency and some gold and red lines.  My advice is when you design a head, make sure there is some proper anatomy to make it structurally sound.  You can base it off any animal but have SOME sort of anatomy that makes sense.  otherwise, you just get something that looks abstract and random.  If you look at any legit creature artist, the first thing you should notice is they clearly have a strong understanding of anatomy.  whether the alien has 2 arms or 8, the anatomy will make sense structurally.  This also applies to texturing as well.  That random translucency makes no sense to me.  I would expect to see this on appendages like ears or a nose.  I guess it could be emissive but either way, I don't get it.  All the colors look pretty mishmashed and slapped on as well.  In any case, I would say if you want to improve this, go back to the sculpt and give it more proper anatomical structure and follow that up with more cohesive texturing.  You may want to post WIP on here to get crits on design and color choices as well.  Good luck!

Semi

Thank you for your time, I was really hoping for something like this. Looking at it right now, I see how someone that doesn't know or wasn't described how I thought about the design would be extremely lost on what it is. It looks kinda like a reptile, but the scale are not defined enough to make us understand it, and the weird thing on top of his head makes it kind of weird. I also kind of get why the transluency makes no senses, it was supposed to be some kind of fire reserve, that would lead to the mouth and let the create breath fire, but the way I made doesnt exactly give any explanation of that concept. For the colors, some people actually liked it, but I think you are right on the fact that they dont make that much sense. It would be probably wise to choose between the red or the blueish green for the dominant color, and not have both of them be used pretty much evenly. Finally what I see in terms of anatomy is that the neck should be way longer, and it doesnt really make sense to have a decapitated head as a trophy with basically half of the torso with it. The others anatomical landmarks probably will need some resculpting, but your critique was definitely helpful! Ill post again pretty soon 

Goat Justice

I agree with slosh that there are issues in the sculpt that are affecting how the final piece reads. What stood out to me was an overall softness of all the features which gives it a kinda amphibian froggy look. Even if its a pretty sleek animal I'd expect there to be a few sharply defined lines where the surface plane changes quickly. Places like the bottom of the jaw, structures around the eye, or the nostril.  This guy's got some pretty good examples around the eye and mouth. 

On a more minor note, it seems odd to me that the neck ends in a sort of blob in front of the wooden plate. When I think of a typical trophy head It's usually mounted so that the neck stops abruptly where it meets the board. Kinda like it's a living animal sticking its head through a hole in the wall. 


Hope that helps. 

Semi

Goat Justice said:

On a more minor note, it seems odd to me that the neck ends in a sort of blob in front of the wooden plate. When I think of a typical trophy head It's usually mounted so that the neck stops abruptly where it meets the board. Kinda like it's a living animal sticking its head through a hole in the wall. 

Thank you for the comment, i've mentionned it quickly in my previous comment, so I completely agree with you. The others infos are also super interesting, I'll add the picture you provided to my reference folder! 

Youshi

I won't crit the head anymore, everyone else kind of nailed that.
I think you could improve the piece with some cavity detail around the plack, along within the grain of the wood itself and also subtly around the edges of where the head is mounted. Just to kind of "ground" everything and make it look like a whole piece.

Goat Justice

Semi said:

Thank you for the comment, i've mentionned it quickly in my previous comment, so I completely agree with you. The others infos are also super interesting, I'll add the picture you provided to my reference folder! 

Oops.. totally missed that bit when I was reading through the posts.  Sounds like you're already on top of it.