Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Contestant: Emily Marshall / @emarshallarts Assessor: Tristan McGuire / @draconic_cowboy Tier: SFAS Congrats on completing your project! Things that went well: ✧ Great research and development, leading to an interesting final concept. ✧ Nice implementation of peer feedback. ✧ Solid final sculpt. ✧ Body and cloth topology is good. ✧ I like your use of drawing over your own work to plan ahead. ✧ UVs are pretty nice. ✧ Great to see rigging skills. This is somewhat outside of the realm of a character artist in a studio, but is a very useful skill to have. Things to consider next time: ✧ To take the UVs even further, you can straighten even more of the edges such as the seams on the legs. It would also be better to have the hands and arms together on one UV. ✧ As you already mentioned, further lighting research would be useful. Look into making some softer shadows. 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, Deputy Senior Character Artist at Airship Interactive.
• First of all, I want to thank you for the work you've done; you've done well with the task. I found it very interesting to evaluate your character. Thank you for your effort and diligence. I want to wish you good luck in the challenge and creative success! Denis Beletskii. 3D Concept Character Artist. Wargaming. Also, I would like to add some useful materials on working with characters and more. I hope they will be helpful to you when working on new excellent characters. Good breakdowns in my opinion: • Sin Nombre—Valerious by Kristina Perinska https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YBQrOX • Frostpunk Explorer: Character Design for Cinematics by Claudiu Tanasie https://80.lv/articles/001agt-frostpunk-explorer-character-design-for-cinematics/ • Game Res character by William Paré-Jobin https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oAonE4 • Yokai Breakdown by Anastasia Fomina https://www.artstation.com/artwork/OGOn06 • Creating a Strong Male Character by Annina Weber https://80.lv/articles/creating-a-strong-male-character-in-maya-zbrush-substance/ • Marilyn Monroe by Alexander Lyan https://gamesartist.co.uk/marilyn-monroe/ Useful literature: • Excellent anatomy books for sculptors. https://anatomy4sculptors.com/ • A book explaining the use of lighting for artists. https://www.laurenceking.com/products/light-for-visual-artists-second-edition • Anatomy for 3D artists. https://www.brownsbfs.co.uk/Product/Legaspi-Chris/Anatomy-for-3D-artists---the-essential-guide-for-CG-professionals/9781909414242 • Character design. https://store.3dtotal.com/products/fundamentals-of-character-design • Another book on lighting, but this time for portraits. https://www.ammonitepress.com/mastering-lighting-flash-photography/
• Too start the piece is very strong for only a 4 week project for research and development of the concept of the final piece to the finished model, you should be very happy with how much you achieved in this time frame. Your highpoly came out really nice and folds of the shirt are really nice both in the sim and your zbrush refinements. your project also shows a wide range of techniques and knowledge of different software's. Feedback - a more detailed roughness map would really help the skin texture, as this would help add detail in the lighting on the face. Maybe also a sharpen filter to help sharpen up those details both in your albedo and normal. the eyes would also benefit from a fake cast shadow to help the eyes blend into the face better, but also would benefit from some reddening in the corners such as veins or blood vessels in the eyes. a minor piece of feedback related to the render not the character itself would be to look into creating a floor that fits the world the character is based in, i would keep with the plain background to help thew character too standout but add some detail to the base. for example https://www.artstation.com/artwork/G84BrN anatomy - Its good to see you created your own base mesh from scratch for this project starting from a sphere, small feedback on this would be the lower back. in your ref you can see there is a dip in at the lower back which becomes more defined as you get older and hunch over more. this detail would change up the silhouette and change up how the cloth sims on the back adding some more interesting folds. Cloth Textures - your zbrush sculpt has some really nice memory fold info which is getting lost in the textures, to bring this back i would use a mixture of hand painting and your baked curvature mask too add more contrast too them in your albedo too bring that detail back in. also using a fabric edge smart mask with a off white colour will help to bring these details back in while also adding some good colour variation on the edges and other sculpted details. overall this project is a good improvement on previous work and displays a good set of skills in different software's while also displaying your ability to create a character in a short time frame.