Critique another 7-day art test...

Junkie_XL

Hi. Turned this in a while ago and I was just looking at it again. I'd like to improve this further and I'm looking for fresh eyes on things for crits. There are some things I'm not happy with and I was wondering what others here thought?

My specs needed to be under 7,000 tri's for the whole scene. And all textures needed to fit within a 1024x1024 space when added up for each pass. Could only have one single final image.

What you're looking at is (supposed to be) a food stand and then I had to create an environment based around it. Kinda went the morbid route. Sorry for it being a bit cheesey...McBrainald's is what I came up with at 4am one of those evenings/mornings...heh.













Off the top of my head...I'd like to increase the sky resolution or do something else with it because it takes up so much of the final scene real-estate. I could probably better maximize space and move some object textures into the bare areas of other textures. Not sure how much room I'd save though. Will probably also spread some more grass sheets around...pulling tris out of the skull & gargoyles or something. (Borrowed the grass texture from Cloward cause I was running out of time and nothing I made with alpha quickly was turning out how I wanted, heh...just a color tweak there to look more dead.)

Anyways, thanks for looking.

Junkie_XL

Here is most of the high-poly stuff...

ZacD

The skull and goblins look really good (textures are a little boring though), but it looks like there's some scale issues with the size of some things (columns look tiny, sign cloth and hanger thing look huge). Also there's issues with texture density.

PolyHertz

Like ZacD said the scale is off. Skulls and eyes too big, columns too small. The overhanging cloth seems flat in the middle, like gravity isnt affecting it.

Also, if this is supposed to be a food stand you should have baskets and containers of sorts on the table. The eyes should be in them, and the skull could have a price sign stuck into the top saying how much the brains cost per spoon full or something. You could also have things like bats, bugs, etc., stuff that represents Holloween.

Funky Bunnies

This is pretty cool, man
I totally agree about scale issues and containers for the food items.

For the skull I'd say you should keep the middle seam in mind a bit. It's a little distracting with so many cracks right there, so I'd lay off it a bit. For the brains I think you should handle its surface treatment way different than the skull to help separate it. At the moment it looks exactly like the skull material with a slightly pinker shift to it. It might be nice to exaggerate the specular and fleshy and maybe form differences to help it stand out more.
and haha price tags sound awesome

Junkie_XL

Hey guys,

Thanks for the crits. I guess one thing has been made clear to me...I shouldn't have made a human-looking skull. Should be more monster-like. That seems to be throwing people way off on the size issues.

It wasn't meant to be an uber-realistic scene. Size of the sign, etc was more stylistic. This was meant to be a kids scene. The art test was more of a food stand for kids in the description and sample. Different sized eyeballs should've given it away that they weren't all meant to be "human eyeballs". Monsters eat this stuff, not humans. I suppose some sickos out there would find it appetizing...heh.

Anywho definitely appreciate the other crits. Pixel-density, texture interest, etc. The brain specular does look a lot more wet with Xoliou's shader but the final render didn't seem to come through very well. Price tags and baskets sound fun. Running out of texture space though if I still want to keep this within 1024^2. I'm going to be having an interview with this company soon and I'd still like to stay within the specs if possible...hm Pillar is probably the wrong style though...

Taking notes here. Thanks again guys.

SHEPEIRO

my take, looks good, some nice sculpting, technically proficient, but needs some work to the overall composition

there seams too much black in the recesses of your textures, the greener stone works better than the grey/white stones, but maybe just blend in some geen towards the base/crevices of these

lighting is (sorry) horrible, i thought this was handpainted diffuse only at first only when i saw the highpolies did i realise it was normalmapped, remove the main light add in a strong moon light (edge light) the re add the main light but focus it much more on the table

add a touch more life to the scene by changing the angles of stuff too many parallel straight lines, the sign is crazy everything else grid like-
-tweak the pillars so they angle outwards,
-cut the ground up, random stone pushed up, at angle etc especially cut the edge so it is no longer staright


move the moon on to a floating ploy, and tile the sky twice(will give better rez on the moon if you use half the space for it)

as others have said add tension to the cloth, weirdly bulges up atm.