Critical Feedback Please Dont Hold Back!

AnarchyAngel

Let me first say Ive watched these boards for many years and Ive never posted. So I thought it was high time I posted some of my work. So here is a link to my website.

AnarchyAngel.net

There you find a Gallery and My latest Demo Reel. I'm very interested in getting some critical feedback so please dont hold back and let me have it! Im partically interested in receiving feedback on my New Demo Reel.

cholden

Hi Julian, welcome to Polycount. Overall, you have a nice page, with good presentation. Replacing the home page with the gallery as your main page is always nice to get employers quickly to your work. I prefer full thumbnails over cropped sections so I know what I'm about to see. I didn't notice any contact information until I looked for it. It's nice to have your contact information clear to see on each page (hyperlinked email address near the top). Also, nothing in your gallery is watermarked, as in contact information, a link back to your site, etc. Always good to do this in case someone saves your art to show someone who then can't find you.

Biggest gripe is your texturing. For example, the first piece (ship), I recognize that wood texture as an unmodified reference material I've personally had in my maps directory for something like eight years. You tiled it unmodified all over your boat and crates. Another example is the car's tire, the treads and main face don't match up. Again, this looks like an unmodified picture.

The smelting factory scene is likely your best piece, but still more issue with materials. Everything is very grungy, but the chains are perfectly clean. The buckets themselves appear to have a rock texture on them. With minor tweaking this could be a great looking scene, as I'm sure you know since you put it in your graphics.

Quick gallery rundown: the cartoon ship is cute minus the texturing, the car isn't too bad though a bit blocky/wonky, alternate ship and car don't really warrant own section (can be tied in with originals), pedestal thing looks neat though could be lower poly. Factory looks nice and great with minor touch ups, foliage scene is pretty good too. Overall, the characters don't do much for me, and your strength could be environments. It could be worth while to focus on a good environment artist portfolio to get in the door, and you can learn more about characters through your peers at work.

Keep working on this, and you should land a gig over time. A few quick tips: focusing on a specific field instead of being a jack-of-all-trades can make finding work easier, and mod work is a great way to get game editing and teamwork experience. Both are very smiled upon by employers.

AnarchyAngel

Thanks for the feedback I'll try to implement those Ideas about the Website within the next few days. Thanks for the feedback on the Models as well. I put those ideas/critics into effect as well very much appreciated.

MisterCline

why is your demo reel a .exe file????

Mit Gas

some of your models are tight, some need work. I think your human characters lack decent shapes like that dude on his legs or the stargate dude near his arms. The skins need more contrast as well.

Those chainmail arms are a big no-no. Pasting such textures on a model always looks cheap. Paint a human arm on it so that you first have the basic layout, where muscles are, where there are shadows and so on. Now you can lay that chainmail texture over it.

What helps a lot is looking at models or skins by really talented peeps like MoP and look at their way of modeling or texturing. Save them into your reference folder.

I know many people will disagree with me but a good exercise to improve your skinning is the following: Slap pictures/photos onto one of your models. Just cut them out and fit them onto the UVW map, like pictures of a bodybuilder for his arms. Now you've got some horrible photopasted texture. The shadows and lighting will be off if you've got the pics from different sites most likely. Now merge the photos on a single layer. Make a new one and paint over them on that new layer. Adjust them to fit onto your skin better, i.e. change the lighting where it's wrong. Just use the airbrush tool and paint with around 20% opacitiy over it, pick the colors from a small palette, maybe fom one of the photos.

You know what realsitic photos look like, now try to get a painted version of that realistic photo. Overpaint it. If you can archieve good effects with that mehtod, you'll know where and how to start to skin from scratch.

Cubik

I'll give you a quick checklist over what you can look at and maybe change in your work.

Firstly, I agree with much of what Chris is saying. Why is there no info about polycounts (exept on a few), texturesizes or contact information included in your pictures?

The ships are pretty low detail and needs many more details in the textures and models to look convincing. Using old MAX stock textures is a big no-no. If you want ideas on how you texture your ships check out DHs' http://www.horribledeath.com/2d3d.htm Age of Empire III work.

The characters look rather unappeling with what looks like some varing texelsizes resulting in textures that are quite blurry in some parts. There also seems to be a general lack of depth in the textures making the models look flat. Look up Piors gargoyle http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=2&Number=71655&page=0&fpart=3
and compere it to your work.

Also, get an alternetive to Bink. It just used this browser window to connect to its damn site so I just lost half of what I had wrote. No more crits for you .

AnarchyAngel

My demo reel is a .EXE file because its a bink file. Plays on all systems and the codec is built in so it doesn't matter if the have the codecs or not. Plus has excellent compression that reel was originally a uncompressed Quicktime file @ 1.92 Gb and now its only 27.5mb

Also thanks for those links Cubik I checked them out very helpful thankyou

Mark Dygert

Click the gallery thumbnail to view the lager image, click the larger image to go back to the gallery.

You need to work on your texturing. I would go into specifics but I don't have the time right now. It's not bad, but it isn't going to land you a job doing texture art. The best thing I can say is try to work on unwrapping and adding in detail.

Sails should have folds, stitches, seams, dirt, shadows, patches, holes. You have some of those things but you have to strain to see them. At frist look I didn't see any of the sail detail it came across as big blank white sails. Sails wouldn't stay white for long, and often didn't start out bleached white.

Applying a wood texture to something doesn't make it a wooden structure. Master ship builders would employ different kinds of wood and different sizes of wood to build a ship. you have one standard kind of wood, and plank size for the whole ship. You need to look at ref of ships, how they where built and how they laid thier decking and hulls. More than likely They didn't use the same size of wooden plank all over the ship, or even the same kind of wood. Also they would try to preserve the ships with paint, stains, and finishes. The sea is rough on wood and your ship is brand spankin new with untreated wood. Referance would definity help. You modeled and textured what you know about ships and you need to know more.

Models need to show history and show players this object has been around for a while. Don't go over the top with the dirty and grundge because it becomes obvious you are trying too hard to "fool" the player. There is a fine line between good visual story telling and pandering.