What to Purge in my Portfolio?

obscure_official

Portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/the_obscure_official

I have many pieces and I think they may be to much, any good ideas on what to remove? 

Ashervisalis

So I'm looking at your portfolio with a critical eye and trying to decide what to remove. If your plan is to get a job placement I wouldn't say any of your pieces are portfolio worthy, you've got a bit to go until you hit that quality bar. Do you have any ZBrush sculpts which are anatomy studies? I would suggest focusing on doing some awesome anatomy sculpts right now.

kanga

I'm with Ashervisalis on this. Your anatomy is low quality at the moment. The above suggestion to develop that aspect of your skillset is sound I think. Also more accurate and expressive material representation. You might try using Daz3D as a reference while practicing sculpting figures. Daz3D is free to use.

obscure_official

Ashervisalis said:

So I'm looking at your portfolio with a critical eye and trying to decide what to remove. If your plan is to get a job placement I wouldn't say any of your pieces are portfolio worthy, you've got a bit to go until you hit that quality bar. Do you have any ZBrush sculpts which are anatomy studies? I would suggest focusing on doing some awesome anatomy sculpts right now.

I wish to have more details regarding what specific points of my anatomy is the big issue. I have been told to improve my anatomy without much detail regarding this. Once person told me my proportion where good, so I am unsure what to make up with this. Only three of my characters have enough exposed flesh to have potential issues with anatomy (Athlete, Spider Queen, Kriv Shavok). Is the issue one of proportion? Muscle detail is lacking? Something else? The others are either non-humans, completely covered in clothes, or only have a small part of their flesh exposed (The face for Moira, and Jhin's left arm). The character called "The Wizard" has a human form but is not meant to have greater detail since he is supposed to be purely dark violet completely for example. My latest character simply called "Athlete" is an anatomy study turned character, if you scroll down at his page you see a front and back screenshot of his Anatomy sculpt in ZBrush. 

Other than anatomy, how are the textures or other traits of the works?

obscure_official

kanga said:

I'm with Ashervisalis on this. Your anatomy is low quality at the moment. The above suggestion to develop that aspect of your skillset is sound I think. Also more accurate and expressive material representation. You might try using Daz3D as a reference while practicing sculpting figures. Daz3D is free to use.

Do you have any great tutorials regarding the improvement of materials and texturing? What else can I do to improve my presentation, lighting, and overall appearance of each model?

DavidCruz

Artstation Learning Center
Free for the year after that i suppose you have to pay so ingest everything everyday/week/month even every hour if you learn that fast.  
Youtube

Best of luck.

Ashervisalis

So I'm not going to go into too much detail, as I am primarily an environment artist and not a character artist, or well versed on anatomy myself. When sculpting anatomy, something good to do is side-by-side comparison, whether with another sculpt from a talented artist, or an actual nude reference. I did a quick search and put yours beside someone else's, and can instantly start finding a lot of issues. Your knees and feet are pointing forward too perfectly, you have no crotch bulge, I believe your legs are too short (I think other characters of yours have this issue as well). The sculpt is super sharp details, but everything below the hips looks like it had a smooth/blur applied. Your abs look like they were chiselled in with a dam standard brush and don't look natural at all. His head looks a bit too large (I could be wrong on this). His hips look too narrow. A lot of the muscles on your characters back look like they were added in on a single clay brush stroke and don't blend into where they should. I could go on and on, but instead of me listing everything wrong with your anatomy, I think it would be best if you took the learning into your own hands and did some courses or followed tutorials. Even if the character has clothing covering the body, you can still see anatomy issues. Your wizard character's knees are far too low, and arms far too short.

Best advice I could give you is to start watching anatomy sculpting tutorials, and don't stop. Follow a new one every day? Flipped Normals and Pavlovich are excellent YouTube channels to check out for anatomy sculpting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAVGcCuSjxA

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWiZI2dglzpaCYNnjcejS-Q

Regarding your texturing, specifically on the athlete, your character looks like an action figure. The skin looks plastic, possibly from being too glossy, lacking SSS, fine hair or course beard area, or any fine/micro details provided by a normal map. Your clothing looks too glossy and gives it a plastic look as well.

Topology-wise, the character's head is not optimum for animation, and you're going pretty low poly on everything. If you look at the facial topology for Kriv, it looks nothing like any good facial topology images that you can easily search google for.

Good luck in your learning journey, it may feel intense, but its rewarding later down the road. Keep pushing yourself and posting here, and really listen to other people's critique.

kanga

Ah ok. Ashervisalis has given you examples above outlining what I meant. See, I don't believe there is a shortcut to this stuff. You just gotta practice your figures. It doesn't matter how much flesh is exposed, the foundation of the character is underneath and influences the form on top, so that is the first thing to get right. depending on what sort of character artist you want to be you should practice figures alternating from male to female, young to old, but nail the generic ones first (naked, anatomic studies)and go from there.

Larry

Try pluralsight. It is very cheap and really worth it to set a base pipeline.

What you basically need to know is how the muscles flow underneath the skin and some key bones like clavicle, knee etc. This way you know how to sculpt the body. If you dont sculpt it that way, it will never look good enough.

For texturing there are lots of tutorials for stylized stuff on youtube, for realism it is much harder to find a tutorial.But hopefully you can improve some things if you read this one. It is an article i wrote, learning from my mistakes.

https://lazarosinep.wixsite.com/home/post/contrast-drama-gradients-setting-up-a-base-thought-process-for-texturing

obscure_official

I thank everyone for their advice, my work many months ago was considerably worse, perhaps when I come back it will all be much better.

sacboi

Learn from one of the founders for digital sculpture:

Anatomy for Artists Online Course by Scott Eaton