nightshard's improvement / critique thread
Hello all. Been lurking for a little while and wasn't really sure what to post or say, but I've decided I want to try to get better at 3D stuff and I hope I can get some advice. Felt especially inspired by the new Spyro game recently, haha.
I'm mostly self-taught, aside from the initial push of my former supervisor and the tutorial videos he gave me from Digital Tutors back when they were a thing. I had never done 3D before this job, but he got me hired to help him make textures and taught me the basics of Maya. He ended up leaving for a better paying gig elsewhere and I ended up having to take over all the art/visual related stuff on the project -- that project being 3D ship / mission planning for a university's software development project.
Since I was trying to learn what I needed to for this job, basically all my creative work ended up skewing towards that, but I've wanted to break out and try different things including character modeling or creating scenes / environments. I don't have any experience lighting, rendering or animating these things since I had to churn out models pretty quickly -- we even stopped texturing things early on just so the software engineers could get the models faster. There's also no oversight now since I'm the only one doing models or art for the project and none of the other folks know anything about 3D, so getting feedback or critique to get better is really difficult at the office. Most of my stuff feels lower quality since I had to work fast and try to use... uh, 'efficient' poly counts.
Being self-taught, I'm always worried that I've developed bad habits and I was hoping reaching out here might help me get better. I've always been interested in trying to learn enough to make a career out of it but never had the tools until this job. There's a lot that I still don't know.
So, please, take a look at my stuff if you have the time.
Here's a model doubling as a link to my sketchfab account.
Incidentally, should this sort of thread be posted here or should I put it in the Digital Sketchbook section or elsewhere?
model
I'm mostly self-taught, aside from the initial push of my former supervisor and the tutorial videos he gave me from Digital Tutors back when they were a thing. I had never done 3D before this job, but he got me hired to help him make textures and taught me the basics of Maya. He ended up leaving for a better paying gig elsewhere and I ended up having to take over all the art/visual related stuff on the project -- that project being 3D ship / mission planning for a university's software development project.
Since I was trying to learn what I needed to for this job, basically all my creative work ended up skewing towards that, but I've wanted to break out and try different things including character modeling or creating scenes / environments. I don't have any experience lighting, rendering or animating these things since I had to churn out models pretty quickly -- we even stopped texturing things early on just so the software engineers could get the models faster. There's also no oversight now since I'm the only one doing models or art for the project and none of the other folks know anything about 3D, so getting feedback or critique to get better is really difficult at the office. Most of my stuff feels lower quality since I had to work fast and try to use... uh, 'efficient' poly counts.
Being self-taught, I'm always worried that I've developed bad habits and I was hoping reaching out here might help me get better. I've always been interested in trying to learn enough to make a career out of it but never had the tools until this job. There's a lot that I still don't know.
So, please, take a look at my stuff if you have the time.
Here's a model doubling as a link to my sketchfab account.Incidentally, should this sort of thread be posted here or should I put it in the Digital Sketchbook section or elsewhere?
model