Donte's Marvelous Material Studies

Donte' Hawkins

Hello Polycounters!

My name is Donte' and I am an advancing material artist! My ultimate goal is to get better at creating materials and will be updating my portfolio once I feel confident that everything is in place and good to go.

Here is a new thread for my material work. I'm in need for some assistance with my materials and will be posting updates as much as I can.

Constructive feedback is needed for:
- Look / Appeal
- Believability / Realism / Style
- Light positioning / Light Sources / Light Colors
- Anything else you might think that will help out!

Target Studios:
- Insomniac Games
- Toys for Bob
- Vicarious Visions

Game References:
- Ratchet and Clank (PS4)
- Spider-Man (PS4)
- Spyro Reignited Trilogy (PS4)
- Crash Bandicoot: N.Sane Trilogy (PS4)

Tutorials Used:
- Substance Academy Series: Getting Started with Substance Designer
- Creating Material Renders by Josh Lynch

Thanks and looking forward to seeing your feedback!

- Donte'

Donte' Hawkins

Dirt Ground Material

teodar23

I think there is a lot of noise in the ground or moss part of the material. The noise is made worse by the shadows or AO and one solution would be to remove that fine noise from the height output and keep it just in the normal. Another issue is that some taller objects like the twigs create stretching because of the height difference. I suggest using a bit of blur in combination with some edge detection to soften those. There is also some clamping happening on the twigs giving them a flat top.
The pebbles are the best part i think but they overlap and "merge" in some instances.

Donte' Hawkins

@teodar23 Thanks so much for the critique! I'll take a deep dive into it and see what I can fix. 

Donte' Hawkins

Next up is Bricks.

I've been trying to get a stylized look to the bricks. I'm still working on breaking the straight lines and also the normal map is kind of weird in some areas, so I've been updating it day by day. Definitely a challenge

valentin_baguirov

Would love to see how these are looking on flat surfaces!
Although I love how the idea of the first black material, the water or liquid part looks like it could be the surface of an eye with that subsurface and those branches or roots under water kinda look like veins to me at first glance. It might be also because youre using a sphere so it looks like an eye even more.  The black naterial reads like it could be a cool frozen lava material from another planet with some alien water in it! 
Its also hard to identify if those are branches or roots
In my opinion the brick material might need larger details incorporated to break up those large straight edges. If you squint your eyes, you can see the detail and that might be the look youre going for but in my opinion it would be great if you would add in some larger chipping to really break down the primitive rectangle forms.

Donte' Hawkins

@valentin_baguirov Thanks man for your critique. I've saved your critique in my personal notes library for the dirt/ground material, as I'll continue to work on those fixes later down the line. Yeah, those bricks definitely need more details and shapes. I'm still trying to figure out adding details without going overboard. I'll get it though. Thanks again!