Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Contestant: Natela Samkharadze / @NatelaX Assessor: Tristan McGuire / @Draconic_Cowboy Tier: Search For A Star Congrats on completing your project! Things that went well: ✧ Nice UVs. Good attention to straightening them where possible. ✧ Stylised textures work well and are aligned with the style of the source material. ✧ Great use of the rig to get the model into two poses. ✧ Compositing the character onto a background is a great touch. Things to consider next time: ✧ Great start to the facial topology, but next time take a closer look at the cheek area. You’ll generally want an edge running from the corner of the mouth horizontally towards the bottom of the ear. You’ll also want to add the muzzle loop that goes under the mouth and over the nose. ✧ Giving the cloth more thickness would help achieve the desired stylised look. I hope this feedback proves useful and will help you with future projects and building your portfolio. You can find me on the social medias in the link below. Feel free to reach out in the future. All the best! https://draconic-cowboy.carrd.co/ - Tristan, Character Artist at Airship Interactive.
• Assessor Name: Caleb O’Brien – Character Artist @ Firesprite Really successful character that feels right at home in Wild Rift, lovely piece of fan art nicely done! I like that you’re sticking strong to your inspiration and referencing the source material at each stage, such as during posing and final presentation to ensure you’re hitting the right feel. You’ve demonstrated a great understanding of the pipeline and managed to achieve a high-quality final result. Great job on keeping things efficient for a mobile game setting, but considering the character would be really small on screen, I think you can be stricter on the texture budgets, particularly for the eyes and hair. You could potentially be more efficient here, even having only 1 or 2 texture sets for the whole character. Same goes for the polycount, certain areas feel slightly dense like the cuff details and the rope ties, these could potentially be baked down into the normal map and read perfectly well in game. With that being said I understand that this is more of a high-quality portfolio piece over an in game mobile game mesh, but I think it can be a really interesting challenge to try and create an appealing character whilst working within a strict budget. The Raid: Shadow Legend characters are a great example of this or future reference! Lovely job on the textures, you’ve done an excellent job at evoking the feel of the source material! I’d love to have seen the hand painted textures pushed slightly further, creating more depth with hand painted baked in lighting and pushing overall read from top down using light to dark gradients etc. The flashes of gold/metallic against the cloth are super appealing and read well, they add a lot of interest to the character! Posing and final presentation is fantastic too, I love that you’ve created multiple poses using your rig. A little more offset between the angles of the shoulders and hips would create a nice sense of contrapposto and may add to the overall gesture. Overall this is a super solid piece nicely executed at each stage, I look forward to seeing your future work and remember to keep having fun and drawing inspiration from your passions! I’ve not had as much time as I’d have liked to rate projects, so please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or would like some further feedback on anything in particular!