I made four shields

joe gracey · Mar 2014

I would really like some good advice/critiques of the shields that I made. I'm going to use the advice I get and make my next shields even better.

Thank you in advance, I have strong feelings for all of you.

www.joegracey.carbonmade.com

BARDLER · Mar 2014

The sculpts are well done but the textures could use a lot more work. Your textures have a lot of noise in them that really hurt your renders. Also you really have to think about material definition and understand what you are trying to recreate. Your metal and wood in all four shields look way different from each other because of the lack of material definition. You should be using a gloss map in order to get the metal and the wood to read correctly on the same model. Your metal diffuse should be dark for metal in Marmoset 1, around 20% or less on the value scale.

Hope that helps.

joe gracey · Mar 2014

Yeah that helped a lot, thanks Bardler

billymcguffin · Mar 2014

Also your UVs have a lot of unused space. You could probably rearrange them a bit and end up with 1014x512 maps that look just as good.

I think the last one is the weakest, due to material definition (the whole thing looks like metal and stone to me.)

stevston89 · Mar 2014

Also I would recommend making the shield a single mesh it will save you a few tris and bake better.

EDIT: except the smaller pieces you should keep those separate.

joe gracey · Mar 2014

Excellent critique thank you billymcguffin and stevston89. Everything you both said I will put to good use.

Joost · Mar 2014

The shields look pretty good, but is there any reason you're only making shields? Some diversity would be better for your portfolio.
And I agree that you need to work on your material definition.

joe gracey · Mar 2014

These shields aren't for my portfolio, they're just for practice to get better. I like them because it's something that I can start and finish, which I struggle with sometimes. I was out of the 3d loop for a bit and this is my way of easing back into it without overwhelming myself. My materials are actually really terrible the more I look at them! haha

Xsim1 · Mar 2014

Really nice shields! It's funny because 5 weeks ago, at school, we also had to do shields in my Sculpting class. I wish I would've seen these before, it would've inspire me a lot ; P

luge · Mar 2014

i'm gonna have to hop on the band wagon on this. the textures seem blurry/noisy and the materials don't read like what they are meant to be. I can't say much cause i still have problems from time to time.

but nice to see other people getting back into 3D. I myself kinda fell out of it for a long while and just recently found my passion and strive to get going again full force ^_^

Xoliul · Mar 2014

Really the worst thing is the UV layouts. Ideally the main part takes up 3-4 times as much UV space.

joe gracey · Mar 2014

@Xsim1, Thanks I'm glad my sculpting is terrible

@luge, yeah I read in a couple forums people talking about how much easier realistic texturing is vs hand painted but I don't think it is

@Xoliul, You're definitely right, it's awful. Waaaay too much extra space. Another obvious problem I will work on.

mats effect · Mar 2014

Agree with everything said pretty much. Nice work so far and keep at it! If you want some inspiration for cool shield material def, colours, patterns etc check out the TV show vikings.

joe gracey · Mar 2014

Thank you and ooooh that's a good idea, thanks mats effect!

Der Hollander · Mar 2014

You've got some nice sculpts going on with the shields.

In addition to the other critiques the thing that really jumped out at me was how "slapdash" the low-resolution models are. The renders you have of them front-on look fine, but I can tell that your second and fourth shields will totally break down if viewed from any angle other than head-on. With the same amount of triangles you've used (or less, most likely) you could build a much more accurate representation of the high-poly mesh's silhouette and structure. Making the low-res true to form is super important to getting correct lighting from your normal maps. By ensuring that things like breaks in silhouette or large, non-planar shifts in your design have representative geometry, you can be certain that the asset will look awesome from any angle, and you can optimize the mesh further by eliminating unneeded inside geometry that doesn't contribute to the silhouette.

All that being said, it's good work, just keep at it.

I made four shields

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