FAILED: Art Test!
polycounter lvl 14
Hey guys, recently managed to get as far as an Art Test for a studio but unfortunately I failed.
Kindly, I managed to get some feedback from the studio which was helpful.
I'd appreciate other people's input on what I produced, and on what the studios comments were.
I should say that this was for a junior environment artist role. I was given a photo to produce the scene from. And as one of the restrictions, there were no normal maps allowed.
My image:
The studios feedback:
Kindly, I managed to get some feedback from the studio which was helpful.
I'd appreciate other people's input on what I produced, and on what the studios comments were.
I should say that this was for a junior environment artist role. I was given a photo to produce the scene from. And as one of the restrictions, there were no normal maps allowed.
My image:
The studios feedback:
Replies
I think the biggest thing that stands out to me is the grass, it's way too bright/saturated, kind of looks like it's glowing. Are they being lit?
I agree with them about your dark ground, it almost looks like it's not being lit at all. The bright lighting on the building is contrasting with the dark ground, which looks odd, I think that's what they meant. Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if the grass isn't the problem, but it's entirely the fault of the dark ground that's making them pop like that.
Otherwise, I like the scene, good job dude, and good luck.
Ok, right from the bat, your brick is indeed flat. You don't have decals on it, or try to break up that brown color a lot. Bricks are not the same.
Grime and stains from rain collect on corners, or next to windows. Specially if there is metal around it. There are different kinds of bricks. But that pic should give you an idea. Break up also the pattern with decals. Blend other texture to give Dirt, grime, paint that is worn out a more natural feel of how things wear out. Paint that was just added is good as well. Scratches. Those details are what make them convincing. Don't over do it, or your texture will look busy tho. You have to add detail that catches the eye, but doesn't over saturate everything.
You have to redo your grass. It looks like a paint stroke with no detail.
Ok, then... where things meet you have some weird lines. You usually can get rid of them with shapes of dirt, rocks, rubble, wood. All kinds of things. It's always a good idea to tell a story with the props so you give character to your scene and people see what happened.
You should break up your ground with blending textures. Patches of grass that blend to dirt, that blend to broken blocks of road.. or something.
I notice that you have some nice rust and details on your doors and other things. But they might be too prominent. Try to find an average so that your eye is not drawn straight at it. This will distract from the rest of the details around. I guess that also has to do that they are easier to spot because you don't have any details on the brick, and ultimately your sky is black.
Do add surroundings. A nice skybox with the time of day should make it feel a little more dramatic.
Last, your lighting looks like just one lights casting on it. You need more. Your shadows are black, usually i try to stay away from Black, it's ugly and makes your composition dull. Try different colors that make your scene come to life.
Look at the soft shadows on this white set. It might look bland but the soft shadows and ambient occlusion will give you this kind of detail. Having some backlight bouncing of your porch behind other objects. That is what makes your env pop and be a lot more interesting. Also, make your composition a little more interesting. Right now your scene reads to the right where you have a lot of empty black space on the back. So your buildings doesn't really look like it's the point of interest.
i think i wrote enough. Sorry for the wall of text and pics, but i hope that this helps. Overall you have a good start, you just need to focus on the details and polish it up. Keep us updated with this, and we'll try to give you more feedback so you get something nice that you add to your portfolio. Or at least give you more tools and skills so you can be a better artist.
Things that stick out to me are that there is a lot going on but general lack of detail to most of it. Textures seem isolated from each other, no stains from rusting metals on the brick or dirt/grunge on building foundation.
I would say that you need to work on the textures. A great model can look like bad if the texture is off. The way I see it is the texture sells the model.
the scale of your roofing is WAY off too - try to really look at the reference critically to make sure you're getting the scale of things correct. a good engineers trick is to count bricks to estimate rough sizes from photos - currently your roofing sheets are about 2-3 bricks high when they should be barely one.
Use it as a learning experience. Just make more stuff and move on. If you keep at it and get feedback on weak areas (through PC and/or a group of friends) you'll do nothing but get better. Failing art tests are hard to deal with at the time. You get your hopes up, think about working at company x and on project y, moving to that area or whatever. When that doesn't happen it's a punch to the gut.
But at the end of the day you have to dust yourself off and just keep your head high and move on to other things.
The feedback provided from the company (not always common to get) and all the feedback from glottis8 and other people on here should give you enough spots to learn where you need to work on. Just stay positive and don't let it get you down.
Everything else people have gone onto great extent to mention I would agree with...the textures need some more detail and they do look flat. Even though you weren't able to use normals there should still be a good sense of color variation, scale (when it comes to dirt or stains or anything), and micro detail that goes into the diffuse at times. Definitely heed everyone's advice given here.
also what studio was this for?
You should really never do this unless you know what you're doing as poor render setup can wash out your textures and make them look flat and blurry. It's also not a very accurate representation of what your model will look like in game.
Always use a viewport screengrab or something like UDK or Marmoset for your final pictures imo.
- From what I can see, for the textures, you just took a picture and copy/paste them into Photoshop without or minimally retouch them to look credible. Take your time to add subtle details that's gonna pop up and looks awesome and being worked. You should also think about the "story" of your scene. Adding dirt on your bricks will give more unity to your scene because the rest looks old and rusty, and not the bricks.
- The scene looks very flat and we don't see that much volume. The ambient occlusion will simulate subtle shadows from the reality because light bounce everywhere. If you're using UDK, bake the light with the lightmass system. This will give you a general ao to the scene.
- You should put a skydome, or at least, a plane on the background. With a big black background, we can't really see which moment of the day we are presently. I've never seen a sunset with an entire black background.
- The grass looks strange because they appears there without reason. If you want to add grass, makes them fit on the whole ambience. You have a dry ground, which is good, but in reality, grass won't be that greenish with that kind of dry environment. Also, it's good to add them to strategic places : where grass can grow and where not?
- There's only 1 direct light in your scene. Bo be realistic, you should have at least 1 indirect light, and maybe at least 1 direct light. What I mean by indirect light, it gives a uniform light all over your scene (use the skylight). The direct light is a light with a source point (like the omni, spot, direct...).
- Take a look at this thread on CGSociety, so you can understand better how the real world works. http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=650761
Hope this help you understand better. Good luck with your application!
- Modelling is there silhouette wise, although could probably be optimized if we saw your wireframes.
- Render looks none-realtime, and you have no sky or coloured lighting.
- Textures and colours need a lot of work.
Aswell as approaching your photo reference It's a good idea to get screenshots of other artists realtime work that relates to the photo and style. I know someone did a warehouse in daytime which you could use as reference lighting wise, that's just one example ofc.
Take the feedback given and form a short fire bullet point list of what you need to improve on, and apply it to your next scene, you'll see tonnes of improvement!
only things i really changed was a bit of the lighting, the brick and ground. and added a background. you container looks pretty decent, same for your wood texture.
cheers
Unfortunately I am unable to name the studio or show the original photo. I agree, It wouldnt make it a fair test for anyone else who applies to work there! My scene is very very accurate, perhaps too accurate. It pretty much looks like a game version of the photo. The props and everything are all in the same place etc. The only changes I made were proportion wise, to fit it to a grid. The composition is the same as the photo - they said I could set it for one shot. The only things missing are some blue warehouses to the right, taking up the rest of the shot. I was given 5 days to work on this. The image has a yellow key light and a blue fill. The shadows are also a dark blue. I was quite happy with my lighting, obviously have a lot to learn here! Again the lighting was similar to the photo supplied. The only texture I grabbed from the source image was the front of the shed. The ground doesnt look that dark on my laptop! It was rendered in Max Scanline.
PixelMasher, that paint over is awesome, thank you. Think I might just use that!
Glottis8. The wall of text and images are very much appreciated, very helpful.
For the wall I used I tiling texture, that is why it is bland.
So would the best thing to have done is use decals of grime and rust etc? Or would it have been better to have used a unique texture with all of that baked in?
With reference to the AO, does this mean baking into the texture, ie if I made it a unique one for the bricks etc, or does it mean a lightmap on a second UV channel?
Some wires:
Just for curiosity, how much time were you given?
:P
Thanks and sorry you were rejected mate.
I am also curious about whether you should have used decals to break up the tiling texture, or whether it was better to have made a single texture with this already in?
Again I like to know about the AO comment, is this baked into the single texture? Or is it applied like a light map?
Can anyone help me on these?
I bombed my first art test. The only feedback that I got was, modeling looks great, textures need work. I was really bummed about that one. Its a learning experience, though.
I realize computer graphics is completely different, but the point is the same.
To employers your work is worth more than your grade.
Bombshell, he means an art test for a job application not an actual school test :P
sometimes I herp, sometimes I derp.
I guess I'm not that familiar with the process of getting a job in graphics XD
one important thing to work on here is the scale of the photo textures and their details.
for example, the transformer cabinet right in front of the camera and closest to the viewer seems to have blurry texture and the scale looks really off.
the rust details look too big for that scale of the object.
try scaling it down may be and also just go through all the textures and compare their detail scale to real world.