Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I like your focused reference on the skin texture you made and I can see how you brought that into your final design. I think your concept is nice and clear too! Maybe add a little colour as well at this stage, as the colours you choose for your character can make a big difference in the tone and final composition. I would definitely suggest nailing down these ideas before you begin sculpting, as it can keep you focused during the creation process and allow you to work on the specific parts of your character that are most important :) I have personally never sculpted a dragon so it was interesting to see how you sculpted it in a sort of quadrupedal T-pose. This turned out to be a smart idea considering the sort of final poses your dragon would have, nice choice! Your sculpt has some nice details in it, and it shows a lot of effort went into those scales, considering it appears you did not use an alpha brush. This must have taken ages and ended up looking great! Here is a great alpha pack I would reccomend for all manner of animal scales and textures for future projects if you are interested in building a library of alphas you can use while sculpting, <a href="https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/Xm025/30-off-ultimate-104-animal-skinpack-v2-for-zbrush-blender-and-substance-painter I think one thing that could bring your sculpt to the next level would be to add some extra areas of clear asymmetry and storytelling. Perhaps your dragon has an injured wing from battle, or a big scar across his face? Or even just angling some of the teeth so they aren't so straight would give him that extra boost of character. Your topology looks really nice and clean and seems to be a strong point. You've added extra edgeloops on the joints which is great, and everything seems to flow well. Nice work! Your UV maps look good, I would suggest that trying to have larger islands would help you optimise UV space and will make the texturing stage smoother, as the maps you apply will therefore have fewer seams. Try not to have too many thin UV islands if you can manage it. For example, the bones on the wings could be connected more to the flatter areas since they are part of the same mesh and there wouldn't be too much stretching by the looks of it. I would suggest pushing your colour contrasts more. Even going for a darker colour scheme, having more contrast in the deeper areas of the dragon's body would give it more dimension. Especially as you ended up posing him with a dark background. One way you can see if there is enough contrast is by zooming out far from the model and seeing if you can still make out those key features from afar. Your rig is really impressive and looks nice and detailed. I loved especially that you rigged the bones in the wings. It looks very professional. I'd love to see you push those poses even further, seeing as you made a very intuitive rig that looks like it could handle some really dynamic positions. I think your final compositions could be even better with some more specific lighting and a nice, background setting, even if you just use a simple skybox rather than black to help give us more context to the character. Overall, great work. Nice documentation and you seem very strong in your technical skills, like retopology and rigging especially, which you don't often see.
• This project shows a solid ability to complete a character using good industry workflow practices, and has resulted in a great looking piece! Some feedback: ∘ feel free do some 3d blockouts if you're more comfortable concepting using 3D, you could even draw over them. It would be good to explore some more variations of silhouettes, colours, references etc. and develop a clear final concept with justifications for design choices. Plan out the final compositions in the R&D phase as well so you have a clear idea of what you're aiming for. ∘ be more intentional about material definition, for example, the horns and body share a similar colour, texture and material. ∘ you could increase the range of values in the base colour, it currently feels very mid-toned all over. in general, scales tend to be dark between in the crevices, and light on top. yours looks inverted. Adding some dark purple between the scales and some small highlights would make them really pop. you could make use of generators in substance painter like AO and curve to get really nice effects. ∘ you showed nice consideration of how topology may be deformed, and made edge loops accordingly. the uvs are also packed very well. It would be good to look at some edge loop reduction guides to save polys where they aren't needed. ∘ it was a great touch using opacity for tears in the wings, it gives the dragon character. and very nice work on the rig, this goes above expectations! I hope this feedback can be of use to your future projects and best of luck! Feel free to reach out with any questions ~ Sasha Gallie, Character Artist at Double Eleven https://www.artstation.com/sashagallie