Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Contestant: Ethan Allen / @SquidgeMan Assessor: Tristan McGuire / @draconic_cowboy Tier: SFAS Congrats on submitting your project! Things that went well: ✧ Good choice to focus on execution of the 3D model, rather than spending a lot of time creating a concept. ✧ Nice Marvelous work. ✧ Great transformation of the base mesh into an emotive high poly head. Things to consider next time: ✧ As you already know, this is an unfinished project, so of course I’ve gotta say next time you do a project, try to get it done for the deadline. However… I know doing SFAS along with doing uni work is demanding and I think it’s good that you still chose to take part. ✧ Next time that you do simulated trousers, try and get the folds on the crotch to be more diagonal and going from the middle, outwards towards the legs. MD has a tendency to create weird crotch folds - so just make sure to manually adjust things when MD isn’t quite hitting it. 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.
• I understand this is an unfinished project so I will focus on giving feedback on what you’ve got so far. - Documentation is very brief, even though it is incomplete. Ideally you want to show your process with some detail for each step of production. In your case, you didn’t show the process of sculpting your basemesh or the hard surface elements of the character (sword, buckles, belts). When it comes to Marvelous Designer you didn’t explain the method you took from Olivier Couston and how that fits in your pipeline. Just because you find a technique online it doesn’t necessarily mean that it would be a good fit for your project. - In terms of presentation you need to show the character in both a neutral pose (A-pose) and posed accordingly. Even if it’s just a high poly sculpt that doesn’t mean you cannot try to present it as a finished or close to finished asset. 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. - In terms of anatomy I recommend trying to sculpt characters closer to reality first, then move to characters with accentuated musculature. 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. - Facial anatomy and expression can also be improved even if you are going for a less realistic result. For that I recommend studying the book mentioned above and trying to do study sculpts of faces showing different emotions. Also a good website for sculpting and drawing reference is: https://line-of-action.com/ Feel free to reach me at: verisof08 on Discord or via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihaiandrusandu/