Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques
The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!

It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!

https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament

Cassette Radio Recorder

Hi PC!

I wanted to share my recent personal project, a cassette radio recorder. The design concept was created by Vitaliy Ishkov. I used Blender and Substance Painter for modeling, texturing and rendering. You can see the wireframe, textures, and UV on ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1NVZRo



Feedback and constructive criticism are welcomed~

Replies

  • kosh3d
    Offline / Send Message
    kosh3d keyframe
    Nice project!

    In terms of modeling you have a fairly clean lowpoly mesh, good work here. I think it could use more polys all around since you have very visible facetting, especially on the big round dial in the middle and on the corner piece with where the lanyard is attached.

    In terms of proportions you have a few errors, your model seems to be overall a bit too wide and some of the elements are off. Especially the antenna is too small and too thin. I'd also take measurements of the standard casette and place a box of that size in your scene so you can test if it really fits into the slot. 



    UVs look ok but the packing is very sub-optimal since you have a lot of wasted space.
    If you have a very long and thin strip in your UVs that is limiting the packing algorithm, it's almost always worth it to cut it in the middle. Now you can pack much more efficiently. You have straightened most of your shells which is very good. 

    I'm not sure what your highpoly looks like, but the bakes appear to be non-existent. Every edge is extremly sharp. If I had to guess I'd say the bevels on your highpoly were very small which is not ideal for game-art.

    Textures are the area where you could improve the most imo. Right now your textures are very flat and it is unclear what material or even style you were going for. Everything appears to have the same roughness, except the screws.
    Like in most things related to art, references are key. Even for concepts of non-existing devices, if you want to achieve believable and realistic texturing, you need to find lots of references for similar things or at least the materials you're going for. You can make your prop a lot more interesting and catchy by defining material separation, introducing wear&tear and different kinds of finishes. Here are some ideas as inspiration, I just searched for old cassette players on google:


    I also recommend doing some Artstation Learning courses on texturing so you learn how to construct materials and how PBR texturing works. Hope this helps!  :)

  • nyxro
    Hey @kosh3d , thank you for the amazing, well-detailed feedback, much appreciated!

    In regard to adding more geometry in certain areas, I understand what you mean. The polycount is already at 7,167 tris though, is that not too high for a prop like this?

    The main differences with the high poly model were the screws and the curved grooves. I didn’t add any bevels to the edges since the original design concept has sharp edges throughout most of the surface. However, I think I will bevel the edges slightly as objects in real life always have a small bevel to them regardless.

    I understand what you mean about the textures. Thank you for the reference photos, and I’ll definitely look into some tutorials on ArtStation.

    Thank you again for the feedback! Will definitely be working on the areas you mentioned.
Sign In or Register to comment.