Sioux Sky Burial - ArtStation Wild West Challenge

Taylor Brown

Hey y'all! Here's my completed scene for the current artstation challenge. It was a ton of fun and I learned SO MUCH. A few months ago I was just playing with primitives, and now I am making things I'm actually proud of.  This community has helped me focus and push myself and it feels great! shoutout to @PixelMasher, your advice on an earlier piece lit a fire under my ass. thank you.

 model

Feel free to leave a comment or critique either here or on the submission page, it's deeply appreciated.
https://www.artstation.com/contests/wild-west/challenges/40/submissions/29993

Taylor Brown

Out of respect for the folks that don't have the time, interest or bandwidth to check out that 3D model viewer here's some still renders


enjoy!

Taylor Brown

I received a some feedback from the challenge's host, Javier Perez. 

"My biggest call outs would be from the textures. Are you using sculpts to get your normal information? I think you could take that wooden bed and really make an awesome sculpt taking the time to sculpt each log inside of zbrush.

My next concern is that your textures albedos are just not cohesive enough. The saturation on the cloth and on the ground is way to high. im not really sure what the green patches on the ground are?

The cloth that the body is wrapped in is reading extremely flat. I would say do a 1 to 1 sculpt or utilize marvelous designer to get some really nice thick folds and wrinkles in there.

As for the modeling i feel like there are an excessive amount of polygons being used that are giving you diminishing returns. Try lowering the polycount on the branches and only use what is needed for the silhouette.

The skull is can also be pushed a lot. Look up some reference for skulls online or even just the sculpts that some contestants have made for inspiration. Maybe add some cracks in the skull, give it some story."

I changed up some things to reflect what he mentioned. I went back into zbrush and really tried to dig into the wood and relied less on the texture normals. They still aren't perfect, I'm not much of a sculptor yet. Changed up the blanket's color scheme to not pop so intensely as well as adding a little unfolded area to give it a better impression of being cloth. Also fixed up the ground per his feedback. I changed the color of the wood mask. I guess it was getting lost as to what material it was meant to be made from. Also went back and managed to cut out about 40k triangles. Yikes!

FreneticPonies

I liked the blue on the cloth, gave a nice contrast. The initial long grass texture was great too, it looks a bit odd now.

Taylor Brown

I agree on the grass, the first ones were in sketchfab. the second set was in marmoset and i couldn't get it to look quite the same. i think ill end up getting everything updated in sketchfab in the next day or so

Taylor Brown

@FreneticPonies
Thanks for mentioning the grass. I did some further tweaks in marmoset and got it looking how I wanted.