I need critiques

cabritozavala

Hey everyone, it's been a while since my last posting. I just completed a few pieces for a class and would like to get some feedback and suggestions before I put a website up.
Thanks in advance. [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image] [image][/image]

Jesse Moody

make the font for the stats a lot smaller and try to find a format that goes with everything. I feel like i'm looking all over the place and sometimes the stats are right in the middle and are larger then or as large as the art.

also on some of your textures you have a ton of wasted / not used space.

aesir

Yea, I'd defintely agree that wasted texture space is your biggest problem at the moment. You've really gotta pack those in as tight as you can.

Another thing which I have a bit of a pet peeve against is the fact that you rendered all these pieces out on a white background. Please never do that. Choose a neutral color. White makes it incredibly hard to see your work.

cabritozavala

Thanks for the quick replies. Does it matter if the size of the UVs is not the same?? what I mean is, when you unwrap and have the checkers on, I was told to keep the checkers the same size all over, does it matter if I resize some of it to make it tighter?

Joseph Silverman

Well, think about it. Smaller checkers = more pixels, which can definitely be noticeably different. In some situations it's okay to have inconsistent density, but as a rule, especially on props like this, you really want to keep that stuff even.

cabritozavala

OK, I'll get to work as soon as I can and post the progress. Thanks a lot for the crits. Any comments on the texture work, wires, or color choices??

Thanks again

Jesse Moody

You have solid work here. By pushing your uvs to the limit and using every pixel as much as possible of your uvs it will get even better.

Yeah i gotta second the never on a white background. Black usually isn't good either.

think grays usually can't go wrong there but some will disagree.

Just out of curiosity where do you go to school? I'm thinking AI - San Diego....

NeoShroomish

Yeah always render with a mid to dark grey background, white washes out all the contrast and makes it harder to see. As for the textures and models themselves, they all look great.

cabritozavala

Yeah, AI SD, how did you know??

Steve Schulze

The cage bars are going to be a real problem in game. They're already moired in your nice clean render. If you dump them into an engine its going to look nasty. If you made them a little thicker and a bit further apart they'd be less problematic, as long as you've got anti aliasing. Realistically, unless you're trying to keep insects in there, you shouldn't need so many bars anyway. They'll only get in the way of being able to see your wee birdie.

Jesse Moody

Yeah Jacks right about the bird cage. I missed that at first but after going over to my moms last night and seeing her bird cage and then this one again. For sure the bars need to be further apart and have less of them.

As for how I know this was for AI. The projects there are always very similiar and do not change over time. I graduated 2 quarters ago and this was one of the last projects I did. The single room with older Arts and Crafts period type stuff.

It can be seen by a few other fellow polycounters on here as well that are / were AI guys. That is one of the major problems with schools like that is that everyone is doing the same project and while your stuff is pretty solid if 10 people send the same portfolio to the same company by the time an Art Director gets to yours he's gonna be sick of seeing the same things.

So along with this stuff start building up a nice solid portfolio of things NOT from school.

Build high res meshes so you can show that you know how to do stuff for current gen games with normal maps. While these have normal maps I'm pretty sure they were taken from crazybump and/or nvidia photoshop plugin.

and tell Asa I said hello

stimpack

This is a good start man. You deffinately have a grasp on the modeling and UV's it seems. The problem i see is the texture work. Honestly its like your droping a generic over the entire UV set and just doing dodge and burn to get some detail in there. no doubt a bradley technique? Also whats hurting this is the small details in the wood grain and such like that dont seem to be in the normal, or arnt showing up enough in the normal to make a difference. So because of that the highlight from your specular is just solid over the whole thing and flatens out every detail you have added. Try to think of it as this... normal will boost shadows, and the spec will boost the highlighted areas and raised areas. Once these two are working together you will get a very convincing texture. You may also want to consider using a gloss map in addition, it will help refine your specular.


on a side note i just looked closely at your table and it does have the details in the normal from the wood. It just doesnt seemed poped enough to make a solid difference. try playing with the spec and normal a bit more and see what you get.

good work overall, deff better than most i have seen from that school =P

Penzer

I wonder how many of us went to one of the AI's, would be interesting if we made a thread to figure it out. AI Vancouver for me and Tulk, and a lot of others.

Just want to add that you have good presentation too, filling up your jpegs with actual stuff instead of dead space.

cabritozavala

thanks to all of the suggestions. I'm almost done with Homework and I'll start on these pieces.

Jessemoody: Which pieces would you recommend to keep for a portfolio?? I'll work on all of them for practice but I'll like to work harder on some to keep on my portfolio.

Stimpack: I don't really use dodge and burn, just brushes but I'll take a look to see what I can do to make it look more realistic. What would you recommend I do to transfer the detail from the diffuse into the normal?? I know that I can make a mask from the color intensity in zbrush, or would you just work with the nvidia filter or crazybump?? I don't know about glossmaps, could you direct me to where I can get a tutorial or information about it?

Jackablade: You are right about the cage, I didn't even think about it, thanks for pointing that out.

culturedbum

Hey guys, good stuff here... Another AI student here, I got to the one in phoenix though.

As for the crits, I think the models are great; I do agree with the boys about making your layout a little more attractive..I disagree with Jesse about black not being too good, I think black is fine as long as you do an overlay of something that has a texture to give it more definition...just personal choice. Anyways good stuff man, a better presentation will make this pieces stand out "like a green hat with an orange bill".

stimpack

brushes are kewl, it seems easier for items like this to just use photos and manip them a bit (which im sure your doing) but the brushes are giving it a painted look a bit, kinda soft and fuzzy or hazy in places.


for the normal, ummm im not sure what your work flow is for this. I usually do a highpoly in max then a low. i use render to texture to shoot the AO and normal. Then i texture ontop of the AO in photoshop. To transfer the diffuse info into the normal you will duplicate one of your layers be it wood grain, or the parts that are beat up ect ect one at a time onto a new page. easiest way to do that is right click on the layer and say duplicate then select new. once in the new layer do a fill of 50% grey behind the layer and flatten image. make sure its desaturated. then run nvidia plug in. then once again right click the layer and duplicate it into your map where the normal is you rendered from max. once there go to levels and do the drop down box to select just the blue then set it to 128. it should be a funny grey color at this point with random bursts of color. set the layer mode to overlay and wala your done. Do that with each of your diffuse layers so you can conroll the amount of bumpyness each part will give.

as for the gloss, its just like spec. you use black and white. white will make a very tight highlight and black will make a broad highlight. so spec makes it shiny and gloss will determine how tight or broad the highlight of that shinnyness will be. just unwrapp a sphere and do a bright spec for it and for the gloss do half the sphere black half white and you will see the difference.

hope this helps. best of luck homie.

oh and i went to AI SD, tho i try not to admite it that often

cabritozavala

Hey thanks a lot for the tips Stimpack.
I finally had some time to rework these pieces. I redid the unwrap for the birdcage, I'll start retexturing it using the tips I got. Here's the uv layout, suggestions are always welcome.

AstroZombie

Fill the background on your normal map textures with R=128, G=128, B=255. The black can cause problems with mip mapping in game.

cabritozavala

Just wanted to post progress on the birdcage, I chose to work on it further because it's not typical furniture I've seen in student portfolios. I'm still working on it but I wanted some feedback.

Ott

Not only to re-iterate what Moody said about originality, but part of what isn't standing out about your presentation is that Judd, Tyler, Geoff, and Jason were doing almost the exact same presentation and renders that you are. You might wanna be careful about matching the examples of the class too much and go a different direction as well.

(I'm a GAD graduate from AI-San Diego as well.)

low odor

Birdcage looks good. Feathers are a nice touch. I think you could get away with mirroring alot of the uv space without losing any quality.

stimpack

why is the whole thing the same material? mix it up. makes the stand some kinda peuter color or the bars more of a steel and the cross beams plastic or just something to break it up. i cant really tell if this is supose to be wood or just rusty stuff.

cabritozavala

I played around with the spec map and got rid of the wheels, I wasn't feeling them, plus change the material of the horizontal support bars on the bottom, but still have to make it look like rusty metal.

Em.

Definitely like the thicker bars better, the texture is looking pretty noisy and could do with some more color variation. The alpha on the feathers could use some love. Also, your render is looking pretty blurry, might wanna mess with those settings so that we can see the texture better. All-in-all, it is an improvement, keep it up!