Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Contestant: Isabel Middleton / @Dragonfern Assessor: Tristan McGuire / @Draconic_Cowboy Tier: Rising Star Congrats on completing your project! Things that went well: ✧ Nice use of Marvelous Designer. ✧ Well done on using a custom rig as this is a skill beyond expectations of a character artist. ✧ The butterfly planes worked well. Things to consider next time: ✧ When UV unwrapping, try to make the islands as straight and aligned to the grid as possible, as this allows you to pack them into the square more efficiently. Even an organic form can be cut in such a way that many of the parts can be straightened. ✧ Next time you do retopology, try and keep the quads square and evenly sized. Try to avoid long thin rectangles. ✧ To improve your final renders for future projects, take a look at examples of models by industry professionals on Artstation. As you are in the Rising Star tier, I hope this feedback can be used to inform how you approach future university projects and I would love to see you take part in the competition again next year! 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.
• Hi Isabel! Great work on this character, it’s a real challenge to work with long, draping material and I think you came to a fantastic result. Keep working on your sculpting and retopology skills and you’re well on your way to becoming a brilliant character artist! //Research & Development// You carry out great research and reference searching when illustrating your concept. I can see the Chinese court lady's influence in your final concept. I would have liked to see that continue into references for the body and face, which I believe you struggled with. Even if you were aiming for a more semi-realistic look, it is important to base your stylisations on realism. //Technical Art// Using Marvelous Designer is a great starting point for creating clothing, particularly an outfit that drapes like this. However, MD uses triangulation for its simulation processes which can cause a lumpy effect on your highpoly if this isn’t smoothed out correctly. This is quite obvious on the front of the skirt where there are a lot of folds. I would have recommended you revisit sculpting again to smooth out those lumpy areas. There’s a set workflow to ensure clean clothing from MD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Q-N8CoyCU I can see why UVing would be difficult particularly with the folds in the dress. But, I believe it may have been more difficult due to your low topology count. You may benefit from researching into what context this character would belong to (a particular game) and this will help to inform your budget and where to allocate more/less topology. Your final UV map (bottom right corner) is very inefficiently used, it would be more sensible to fit these UV shells into another material if possible, or change the texel density. (Texel density explanation: https://www.artstation.com/blogs/antodonnell/BppX/texel-density-is-back-it-seems) There’s a trick for exporting UVs out of MD too, just in case you find it useful in the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcktNdJHUT8 The baking errors could be done to your low poly not matching the high poly enough. In this case you need more topology or a larger cage. It could also be down to a lack of matching asset names (Bake By Mesh Name) when baking your ambient occlusion map. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTA6VdSuI5c //Creative Art// Although your concept is lovely and matches the theme very well, I would have liked to see some more obvious pattern work or gold embellishments (maybe of butterflies to go full circle) that some of your references contain. I think this would have brought more interest into the garments and make the textures much more interesting to look at. Unfortunately the white floral pattern gets a little lost in the final renders. //Documentation// Your documentation is very clear and well written. I enjoyed following your process through the character and I understand the decisions you decided to take. I think you could have benefitted from more evaluation through the process - thinking about each choice you made and why you decided to complete it in that specific order. If you decide to post this on your artstation for employers to see, I’d recommend adding a final polycount number and final maps for your materials. //Final Presentation// I agree that your final renders could have been more engaging but I like that you managed to pose her and it suited her too! I love the butterflies flying around and the real ethereal essence it adds. I think the lighting you’ve used is quite harsh for her though, you can see that by how dark the shadow of her hand is, this makes the shapes on her dress a lot sharper than they were in Substance Painter. I would have liked to see more “ethereal-ness” in the lighting too. You don’t have any renders of the back of the Maiden which makes me believe you may be hiding something, don’t let employers believe the same thing and make sure to show the back of your character to! For reference on how to render and present your character, I’d look at Tristan McGuire’s work: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3dZ03A (Winner of SFAS 2021, Finalist RS 2020)