Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I understand this is an unfinished project so I will focus on giving feedback on what you’ve got so far. - You’ve got quite a nicely presented concept and concept sheet for your character. It would have been nice to see him posed with the little toy bunny. If you’re short on time I still recommend trying to present your character as if it was finished, in a lit environment by taking a few shortcuts. In that sense, you can take it in Unreal as a Nanite asset, not having to worry about topology. You may score points for a good looking result more easily that way but also lose on the technical side, it works if you are short on time. You could also use Marmoset Toolbag 4 with the ray traced renderer as it can handle quite a high polycount. - I’ve mentioned this in almost every feedback so far so don’t feel bad about it, anatomy. You’ve got a good fundamental knowledge of some muscle groups, but it’s really important that you practice more anatomy, especially realistic human characters before going to stylised. I can see you tried to do a two-jointed leg at first but then changed to regular human legs. Here, better anatomy knowledge could have helped represent your concept better. One book I highly recommend is Anatomy for Sculptors (https://anatomy4sculptors.com/understanding-the-human-figure/). Also, don’t forget to practise anatomy through drawing since a lot of the observations you make in 2D can easily be transferred to 3D. For this I highly recommend drawing quick poses (1-2 min) which force you to find the main lines of action and learn how dynamic the human body is. - You should show more in your documentation like reference images and talk about your process, the idea behind the concept etc. It doesn’t matter that the project is unfinished, this is vital information you can come back to and it teaches you how to present your work. Feel free to reach me at: verisof08 on Discord or via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihaiandrusandu/
• Submission title: The Scared Gargoyle Student name: Kevin Tarazona Challenge tier: SFAS Assessor: Caleb O’Brien - Senior Character Artist @Firesprite Research & Development Love your concept sheet, it’s awesome to see you exploring ideas and iterating on the silhouette and design. The fact you’re experimenting with poses and expressions is a nice bonus too, it gives a much clearer idea of the final character and their personality. Great work on the proportion’s sheets too. Some further explanation of the idea, project goals and additional reference/research would have been great to see at this stage. Reference is so crucial in an industry setting, although the concept acts as our target, reference is the ground truth which helps us navigate creative/technical decision making throughout production. It also helps align people on the vision for the character. Consider establishing constraints for your personal projects. This could be things like game type/genre, a rough narrative, target platform (mobile/ps5 etc.) art style influence/inspiration. Doing so will help mirror a real industry setting/live project, giving yourself a track to work inside allowing you to make informed decisions. Technical Art No evidence of final game ready asset. Seeing as you’ve got such a successful sculpt down it would be great to see you finish this project out, retopo the character, texture and render in a game ready setting. Keep it up it’s coming along great! Thanks for providing your ZBrush file, it was nice to get a closer look at the sculpt. When adding tertiary detail to your character and getting into more detail, consider working in a sub d approach instead of DynaMesh. DynaMesh is great for the early stages, blocking out forms and making big changes to the sculpt, but consider ZRemeshing to quickly create clean topology for sculpting, allowing you to subdivide up and project the details of your dynamesh. This will give you more flexibility and freedom, plus more resolution especially when getting into those detailed areas sculpting fine creases and wrinkles etc. The file was quite bulky and heavy with a lot of WIP subtools making it hard to navigate. Although it’s nice to see your progress, this would be better shown using images or GIFs. It’s worth adhering to good file management and workflow practices as in an industry setting it’s important to create clean files that can be passed between other artists. Consider naming your subtools and using the folder grouping option, this can make your life easier when working on the file too as there’s no guessing required. It's great to have a representation of the moss in the ZBrush file, but I’d suggest focusing on this during the texture/shading pass down the line to give you more flexibility and to not lock you into the moss placement from the high res. Creative Art Great execution of the concept with an excellent sculpt in ZBrush. You’re clearly super creative and passionate about character art. Your concept sheet is very strong and the personality of the character is shining through. Only comment here is that your final sculpt is siding towards a semi realistic style with more defined anatomy etc. compared to the concept, which is quite clean, stylised and simplified. Not necessarily an issue, but it might be worth nailing down exactly what you’d like to achieve out of the project so you can be more focused and decisive whilst working. Again this is where reference, inspiration and having clear goals can work to your benefit. Very nice overall though, I’d love to see how you approach texturing this character. Documentation Brief documentation provided with some progress highlighted showing WIP stages of the sculpt. In future try and give a bit of an idea into your decision making and explanation behind techniques used. At the moment it’s unclear what your goals are or if the character is aimed at a game ready setting. Although documentation like this might not be necessary for a final portfolio piece, the principles here will still apply to your breakdown images and during interview when you’ll be asked to go into more detail about your projects Final Presentation 2/5 Presentation of the concept is highly successful and clearly shows that you understand composition and presentation techniques. Hard to comment on the final presentation as the project appears unfinished. The sculpt is clearly presented and poly paint has been used to give an impression of the final textures. Ideally a game ready setting such as Marmoset or Unreal Engine would be used to show off your character. Keep up the awesome work, I look forward to seeing the results of the finished project and excited to see what you create next! It’s awesome that you’re finding time to invest in additional projects like SFAS, this will all add up leaving you with a strong portfolio ready to apply for industry roles.