Personal projects are your friend. Just do it. You should still show some professional work, but if you arent happy with the stuff, then you have to do it on your own time. Yes, its tough keeping a balance, but if you don't just suck it up and do it, you'll never get it done.
Yeah you're UVs need some work, half of you texture is black because of the occlusion. You should reconsider how you cut up your mesh, you can pretty much stick the UV shell with your logo on it right in the black area it's on, and gain so much texture space.
There's nothing wrong with showing early works in progress. What better way to receive feedback on the fly, and to improve your design process than to post up things while you work on them? I reckon you continue to post work as you work on it, if you're interested in the community's feedback as you work.
That's actually a really good point. I've got pointers like that even from people who aren't 3d artists. Sometimes all you need is a second opinion, even if they can't really tell you what is wrong and it's up to you to figure it out. Helps you grow a lot, I think.
Make TiledShot a keyboard press so you don't have to open the command. Also, you can just hit a command and hit fly like above, bind a key to that command. Then fly around adjust FOV (if you set you camera up correctly) and snap pics all day long.
You say "no matter what filter i choose" but you continue with "the one that works also".. :D what about unfiltered? Are you sure to be able to compare bilinear filtering and trilinear filtering? What about your driver settings? Do you have set something like "force bilinear filtering" ?
You need to create a second UV set in your modeling software. You should use automatic mapping for those UVs in there. When you import your mesh in Unreal you should assign the second UV slot to the lightmap. Second UV slot has the index of 1 while the primary is 0.
hey Adam in Zbrush when baking your normal if you first go to Color and change the RGB to 128/128/255 then create a new Texture the size you want it will give you that nice even Normal Blue background so you wont have that ugly white behind your texture.
you NEVER need to do concept if you dont like doing it, if you can express yourself drawing is what it matters, ofcourse trying doesnt kill anyone, which is good what you are doing. That looks alright. Keep trying more. Look at shapes and silhouete always first! And then details later.
EDIT: Oh, you got the answer earlier Maxim You mean like this? (except concave instead of convex) It was a serious pain to figure out, but once you got it down it's like cake. If Maya ran on this machine, I could SHOW you. Just a second while I write something up.