[Portfolio] - Unleashed, character modeler

Unleashed

http://www.thelebaron.com

I graduated earlier this year & while Ive got a job, its not in the game industry so Im going to start looking and doing new work. Feel free to be harsh I'm mainly looking for critique on the content rather than the site, but Ill take everything really.

(I should have done this way earlier but ah well.)

ae.

im no character artist so i cant really comment on the polyflow of your characters or anything but the models are solid, the only thing i could say is work on your textures a bit more.

your female marine has just one coat of color on her suit it looks brand new, to be honest it looks like your just did a color pass with the texture not really adding any dirt or grime, you should aim at something like this as it is almost the same direction your going:

http://keithcombs.members.winisp.net/BrigadeDamaged_2D800.jpg

overall your works really solid i really like your zbrush sculpts keep it up. start working on new pieces and try to get rid of all the stuff you did in school.

David-J

Good work. I agree with what ae. said about the textures. Also, in my opinion, there are some images that I think they are not adding anything to your portfolio. The screengrabs u are using from Maya are almost identical from the full renders. I think you can take one out for each project. It's not hurting you now but it's not adding anything either.

Hope this helps.

cheers and best of luck!

butt_sahib

Hey!

Reading from the your female marine page, "I plan to improve the textures and import it into Unreal Engine 3."I definitely agree with yo and the above posters. The textures are REALLY taking away from the extremely proficient high poly model.
Her hands are too small too :P

Slave_zero

One thing that strikes me when viewing the second dinosaurus are the spikes and plates comming out of it. They look like they sit there with out beeing really attached to the body and the skin. From my imagination I would expect that the areas where plates or horns are placed the body has some deformations. Because I expect the plates an horns to be not just connected to the skin but to the skeleton. The horns on the flanks show such an effect a little, but the plates on the top not very much, although they seem to be quite big and heavy.

But I'm not very familar with charakters nor with dinosaurs.

BradMyers82

Since your posting on polycount I think its safe to say that you are going for a character artist position in the games industry correct?

Anyways, I think first and for most you need to start creating some stuff with more realistic stats that would be used in the games industry.

I am looking for work myself at this point, so I can't say for sure; but I would guess that a person who is looking to hire someone wouldn't give you as much of a chance because of blown out specs.

For example: Probably the highest specs you should really go up to are around 10,000 tri's and 2048 texture map sizes. With the Predalien character you went up to 14,000 tri's and broke the texture sheets into 2x 2048 texture sheets. This is just way too much.

There are a ton of tri's that are not really helping the silhouette much, and would probably not even work well with deformation. Also, at these resolutions, you could fit a ridiculous amount of detail into your texture maps, and I am just not seeing it.

Also, I don't see any stats on your other stuff, so I can't really comment.

Like others have said, the textures definitely need more love. Find a few artists around the boards that you really like and compare your stuff to there's. Just figure out exactly why there stuff is looking better than yours and implement those techniques.

Lastly, probably the best thing you can do is start a WIP thread here on PC and get critiques along the way. I promise you will learn so much more than you ever did in school this way.

I don't mean to hit you with all negative comments but you said you wanted tough crits. On the positive note, it seems you know what you are doing technically speaking. Like you probably have a solid workflow with all your software apps. So now you just need to improve you art skills. Also, I really like some of your high poly sculpts and it seems to be your strong point. I think that's great, because often times that's one of the hardest parts when doing normal mapped characters.

If you want some specific advice on texturing I suggest you look into the "old damaged pillar" training set. They use some sort of high specs there, but you could probably learn a lot from it (I know I did at least). Here is the link: http://eat3d.com/training_videos/pillar
Good luck!

woogity

BradMyers is right, start wip threads and you will learn 10 x faster than u did in school. also agreed on the spikes on the dinosaurs they dont attach realistically, the structure of the creatures would have to be extremely heavy underneath the spikes to support them with thier size and weight. as for the 14000 pcount on the predalien, that is a bit high, but not out of the question for next gen i believe some boss monsters go as high as 15000 but i could be wrong, also those creatures are huge, i never saw the movie so i dont know the scale of the predalien, but assuming he is under like 30 feet tall, 14000 is a bit high, with the detail level u have now u could probably cut that in half without losing shilouette detail.

on a more positive note, u have very nice edgeflow and a good understanding of topology, so for a recent grad u are probably ahead of the game

gl cant wait to see your wip threads...MAKE ONE! hehe


-Woog

Unleashed

the crits are spot on, thanks guys.

Brad - In an ideal world, I would be a character modeler but I do realize my chances of being hired drastically increase with secondary skills

Texturing has always been my kryptonite. I can actually paint decently with oils/acrylics but for some reason it just isn't translating into photoshop for me. Same with drawing stuff in photoshop vs a pen or pencil. Im definately gonna keep at it though, as I agree its the single weakest aspect of my work.