Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Submission title: Fourth Dimensional Traveler Student name: Henriette Kormos Challenge tier: SFAS Assessor: Caleb O’Brien - Senior Character Artist @Firesprite Considering this submission is unfinished, it’s difficult for me to give in depth feedback. But overall, I love where this is going. You’ve clearly put a lot of time and effort into this already and I hope you find time to finish it out! As it seems like a very ambitious project; you could consider adapting your original scope as you go, aiming to just get the base character finished as I’m sure you’ll have learnt a lot from the process already. It might be more beneficial to apply learnings to your next project instead of getting too hung up on this one. Your skill and creativity are shining through, it’s clear you’re super passionate about character art. I love how much thought and consideration you put into the concept stage, researching different cultures, existing artists, and taking your own reference images. Your 2D concepts are extremely successful. It’s such a joy to see the exploration and iteration of designs in 2D before committing to 3D. I can’t see any clear ZBrush/high poly shots of your character; it would be nice to see how you’ve approached the cloth (Marvelous designer etc.) Overall, the proportions of your model look solid, and the cloth feels believable and has a nice weight to it. The full character with the backpack and accessories is super interesting and visually appealing, I’d love to see this come to life with textures and lighting etc. Perhaps the hair could be left out for now so you can get everything else over the finish line. So good to see that you’re experimenting with Xgen for hair creation. I would however suggest that for each project you set clear goals and choose a clear area to target and develop, otherwise you run the risk of losing focus and getting overwhelmed by trying to take on many different areas. It would be awesome to see you attempt a hair study in a separate/future project using xgen or alpha cards. I can see you’ve textured your character, but it’s unclear from your submission how you’ve laid out your UVs, baked textures, approached texturing and packed textures, and set up in engine etc. It would be awesome to see evidence of a game ready character with consideration for optimisation and performance for a game engine setting. Overall, I’m impressed with this submission but would love to have seen some more development, breakdowns, and insight into your process. This is a highly unique and interesting character and you’re clearly an extremely capable character artist. I’d love to see what you create next, keep up the awesome work!
• -Your entry does not respect the brief since you haven’t presented a game ready character showing the following aspects: wireframe, UVs, texture maps; and you have not presented the character posed (in 2 distinct poses) in the game engine (Unreal). Since you haven’t pointed this out in your documentation or entry page, I felt I should point it out. - Your documentation is extremely brief and limited, only your initial ideas behind the concept being written down. Ideally, every step of the pipeline should be documented in writing, outlining the difficulties/achievements you made in the process, what you learned and what you can do better. It serves both as a space for retrospective thought and reference for future projects. I recommend you read through documentations of winner entries from past years for reference. - Because your documentation is so limited and it does not mention the softwares you used I will go on my own assumptions, in hopes that the advice would prove useful. First of, I can tell you used Maya, Substance Painter and possibly Marvelous Designer for simulating the clothing. In terms of cloth sim, your result in the low poly looks very blotchy (folds are jagged) which makes me think you haven’t modified the result you got from MD at all. Ideally, you want to sculpt over and refine these folds in your sculpting software of choice. After that, you should retopologize the mesh manually, in order to capture the overall shape with the least amount of polygons. - XGen for hair is used only in VFX/pre rendered pipelines nowadays, maybe in the future it will be used in games, but as is, the output is too polygon-heavy to be supported. What you would want to do instead for hair is learn how to make and place haircards, as that is the main technique used for game ready hair. One course I highly recommend, which I myself benefited a lot from, is Maria Puchkova’s Real Time Hair Tutorial (https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/p835o/real-time-hair-tutorial?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace ) - Lastly, in terms of your concept, the idea is interesting and I recommend you finish it or come back to it after the competition, while trying to follow a correct pipeline and document your process. - For a good overlook at the character creation pipeline for games I recommend the following free course: Character Production by Daniel Rodrigues - https://www.artstation.com/learning/courses/xvl/research-and-blockout/chapters/GMDe/introduction Feel free to reach me at: verisof08 on Discord or via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihaiandrusandu/