m1kclark's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[A living room]

Sooooooooooffftttt! (lighting)

Lovely color choices and the uber-soft lighting gives it a particular feel, sort of ethereal.

But gah! Those plants are covered with polygons!!!

(I'm a little loopy today. Sorry I lack my usual critical style of writing.)

<deleted> responds:

Well, everyone deserves to have a bad day. And besides, your comment karma has totally justified your shorter-than-usual comment. But thanks anyway :) Yeah, the plant is like that becauseIm'm not much of a plant modeler and I just got one online.

[Splitting Personality]

Kung Lao fatality?

fadedshadow responds:

hahaha quite possibly

[Underpass]

I love the image because it is universal. You mentioned lighting and water's reactions and the perspective, and all of these things are not only technically good but they lend real emotion to the character in the foreground. You want to empathize with her, and the rest of the image makes that easy, right down to the color choices. The best part is that it could be anything: the girl could be sad or desperate, introspective, grieving, peaceful, tormented, reflective, at the end of a journey or at the beginning of one; it could be the present, or an alternate present, a steampunk past, a dystopian future, a utopian future, in any city in the world, real or imagined, and the image doesn't even exclude the possibility of a sci-fi otherworld.

This is what I mean by universal. Your art really speaks to our emotions using all of our visual senses, with a setting and a character, upon which we may imprint any of our own ideas, feelings, and insecurities. It was a successful experiment and you've made a great piece.

DJPsi responds:

Thanks for the in-depth review!

[Bourdeaux]

What is with her right hand? Otherwise, excellent caricature.

Pyrowman responds:

I tend to go a little overboard when it comes to drawing hands.

[Lazarus - Mother]

Nice pixel-art piece. The mostly two-tone makes the fireball stand out, but you manage enough contrast with only the black and olive-green to give the scene real depth and a sense of overall scale. The Metroid inspiration is there and it is clear once you've seen it, but still it isn't obvious at first.

I think you've captured the essence and the humanity of the Samus/Mother Brain battle (which is really a David-and-Goliath struggle), still putting it in a sci-fi venue, and managed not to duplicate the Metroid scene. That's really good art, portraying exactly the conflict you wanted. Keep it up.

Tishe responds:

That's a brilliant review from an obviously open minded person, so thank you for that, I really appreciate comments and reviews like this, they're honest and motivating, so again, thank you!

[Growing up]

There's a lot of emotion here. Lovely color choices all around.

KayaKure responds:

Thank you for notice!
I had the emotions in focus when I made it :)

[Mecha HardSurface Model WIP]

Nice design, both in geometry and in colors. The only comment is on the material settings. Right now it looks plastic, or perhaps painted. If you want a steel look, then you must at least increase the specularity and increase the sharpness of the specularity. For that extra-realistic look, you should also put in a texture that is essentially random lines of random gray-ness, to give a machined-metal look. However, if you like the feel of this current texture, then ignore my comments!

SmokeryDots responds:

This is just a screencap from maya, when it comes to the point it'll be fully rendered and textured.

[Cipher 3d Model]

The eyes need a little work. If he's staring straight ahead, then the pupils should look centered in the sockets. The nose, also, looks too low on the face. I suppose you could say that his entire facial structure needs to be raised/rotated toward his hairline. Last critique, he has Popeye forearms and wet-noodle upper arms.

Otherwise, this is an excellent character and style, and it's clear that you intend to animate this! The character looks eccentric and a good focal point for interesting story lines. I look forward to it.

sirhenrystudios responds:

hes meant to be heavily exaggerated, so yeah I can clearly see what your talking about. Thanks for the feedback man, still got more to model on this, like his goggles and his backpack.

[cubic embrace ~ crimson nights]

Just excellent. VidGameDude has the best content analysis, so I'll focus on mechanistic comments, perhaps straying into content and meaning here and there.

The demon's eyes are perfect with their inhuman roundness and flat, featureless, glowing white color; it gives an otherworldly look of cold and apathy that mixes with the red to suggest a detached malice. The demon's partial transparency and sharper specularity/reflectivity really makes it stand out from the two human sculptures.

The humans material is softer, where the specular reflections and actual reflections are muted and blurred; they aren't made of polished ebony, but more like an iridescent stone.Their features are softer, too, bespeaking contentment and a relaxed comfort. That is mirrored in their entwined fetal positions. If their faces were the least bit tense or worried, the whole image would be completely changed and I would get a sense of terror of the demon. Your choice of expression on the humans suggests safety instead. And all of that is done in a minimalist style, where a line here, a triangle there, and a circular hairline are used to construct a complete and expressive face.

The rest of the details are adjusted to maintain the sense of softness for the humans and harshness for the demon, but it mostly fits in the constraint of the cube. The cube, of course, is the central idea: the simplest element in a space of 3 dimensions, enclosing the 3 simplest components of humanity.

I encourage you to keep exploring the 3D avenue. It will be fascinating to see what you can do!

datamouth responds:

thanks man, thanks for the really awesome review. i like how you tie in the texture to that of their character and identity. the demon being "sharp" while the human bodies being "soft and iridescent. thanks for the amazing review m1kclark.

[Ancient Tomb]

Pros: Nice models, excellent textures, great placement, well-chosen colors
Cons: lighting, specularity, fire, bump maps

Detailed critique: The biggest problem with the image is the specularity. Different real-world materials have different specular highlights, where gold should have a very bright, very white specular color, but wood or stone should have almost no specularity. Right now, your stone-work has the same specular shading as the gold bars and the gold inlay on the altar's base, when we should really see the gold gleaming on that overlayed-circles pattern. The gold bars also have the problem that the reflections are too mirror-like; you want the reflections to be purely gold-colored and to be more obscure than the mirror-like appearance you have. (There are ways to control these settings in any program.) Switching from the gold to the stone, you need more bump-maps. Actual stone is rough, and those textures you have suggest that the stone is *really* rough, less like slate and more like granite. That means its surface roughness should *match* its color, and that illusion is missing.

Finally, the lighting needs work. It is not clear what the lighting sources are, and you have to think very carefully about that. It seems that there are two lamps where the torches are, which makes sense, but you have point-source lights when the light offered by fire is much "blurrier" so to speak. There's a thing called an "area-light" in some 3D programs that would serve you well here: the light is generated across a square instead of all from a point, which gives you softer shadows. Your shadows are very precise and rigid, as if lit from a stage spot-light. It would also be nice to add a texture to the light source (if you can even do that) since the light offered by fire is not as uniform as modern electrical light sources. The last detail is to consider how the light decays: are two torches really enough to illuminate that back wall? Should it maybe be darker? Note that "decay rate" is separate from "brightness", and it can really alter the appearance of a scene when you adjust them individually.

On the other hand, you made excellent use of some nicely-designed textures here! And you mapped them onto geometries that are simple, but they still provide the proper ambiance. The textures are good enough to convince the audience that these items were made before the era of Caesar's Rome. The reason I hammered so much on the details above is that, especially in 3D art, human perception is really good at saying, "How ridiculously fake!" and then your audience will disregard your work even when it is 98% perfect. After glancing at your gallery, this is your best work so far.

Good luck, and I look forward to more!

ghostwalker91 responds:

Thank you very much for your review. I'm sill new to a lot of aspects of 3d modeling, but with each I create and with great reviews like this one I learn more and more about it.