Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• a lovely piece, could use some baked in ao in palces to make the clothing fit, and a little more research on materials.  Brilliant sculpts, pleasure to look at.  brilliant.  

• Submission Title:                                  Xu The Tainted

  Submission Tier:                                   Search for a Star             

  Assessor: Anthony O’Donnell          Lead Artist           Firesprite

   Concept design & Development:

  The concept chosen is interesting. I’d suggest properly crediting the artist of the concept in the document as a general good practise. Some additional research was done to collect aesthetically similar images to guide the artist. This is a complex and difficult design to get right. The artist did a good job.

   Technical Art:

  Some of my feedback from the initial look at the asset was going to be many forms not reading well in UE4 comparative to the sculpt shots such as the neck muscles. They are better defined in the sculpt. Upon looking through the assets this was down to the normal maps being OpenGL format and not DirectX as UE4 requires. To fix this you need to Invert / flip the green channel. In my case I did this in the texture details panel. 

  Channel packed textures were used and correctly set to no sRGB.

  Geometry wise there is room to reduce the density of the mesh. Aim for areas where the edge loops / vertices do not contribute to the model silhouette, animation considerations or UV requirements.

  A good workflow was followed during the sculpting process. I would have not spent time sculpting unseen elements such as the torso in detail as this ends up being wasted effort not being seen in the final model. That being said the anatomy was sculpted well.

  The use of Marvelous Designer was smart and produced a good result.

   Creative Art:

  Materials / texturing wise the production diary did state little time remained for this stage and it was not the artists strongest area of skill. There’s evidence efforts were made to have roughness variation across the model per material type with some surface noise variation.

  A more focused effort to vary roughness values in more considered areas where there’d be wear / damage or dirt build-up such as the boots would add additional visual interest and context to the model. Some of this is visible at the ends of the leather armour around the knees but lacking in other areas.

  In the reference the leather armour appears to be smoother and creates a nice contrast to the rougher fabrics. Having a look at this again to rebalance the base values across the material types would also help.

  The use of alphas during the sculpting process is good but in areas was applied heavily and made the larger sculpted details harder to read. It’s difficult but necessary to balance the macro and micro reads in game art models.

  The characters features were more gaunt and tighter to the skull beneath this was a lost a little in the final model. To keep with the style of the concept and easy reading of the model edges of the armour would benefit from a wider bevel.

  Written Documentation:

  The written document is presented well and goes into some of the character creation process. This is primarily centred around the sculpting process.

   Final Presentation:

  The final renders are good and clear. The use of 6 lights did soften the overall lighting meaning some detail was lost in the image. The artist did a good job of reproducing the character from the concept.