m1kclark's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Allstars Logo]

Quality mismatch

The guitar looks awesome, and so does the inksplat. But the microphone and "Allstars" banner look cartoonish by comparison. It looks like two different artists mashed their stuff together.
The image itself is awesome, with the guitar and microphone surrounding the star and the banner placement (and I love that inkblot) but the devil is in the details here.

[game element#6]

Great ideas, but

The designs are nice, and the color schemes are highly stylized. These would make excellent game images (which was the point, judging by your title). However, the background doesn't match at all (what space-faring civilization uses papyrus?) and the logo looks a bit ... phallic. Were you intending to use this in a game, or just as a resource for other game programmers?

[Zari Unkillable]

Dark Tower

Reminds me strongly of the more abstract art images that accompany Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Which is a strong compliment!

<deleted> responds:

indeed! i love the dark tower. thanks for the kind words dude.

[Another Guitar]

Half way

Everything made of metal looks spectacular (that's a "specular" pun!).

For everything else, I have only one word: BEVEL. Keep it up, German.

HermanThaGerman responds:

Tried to bevel it but it didnt work out correctly for some reason P:

thanks for the feedback!

[AnneMarie]

Uncanny Valley

You should look up "Uncanny Valley" on Google. Briefly, the face needs to be more realistic or more cartoonish, because in its current state it looks frankly creepy. It's also obvious in places that this has few polygons, and the "smoothing" around the low-poly objects looks awkward (like on her bangs, or her hairbow). This is a good first draft, so to speak, but it does need work in the details.

adamkav responds:

haha I know the uncanny valley well, your right too, she has fallen in there. I messed up her hair with soft selection and couldn't get it back, might just remodel the hair altogether.

[Study room]

Best yet

This is some of your best work so far. Some of your work has this level of scope, and some of your work has this level of realism and looks photographic, but this is the first picture I've seen with both scope and photographic quality. (It looks like you added graininess in the post-work, which was an excellent move!) The textures are all fantastic and used perfectly. And I think your object design is great, too, specifically the pieces of art near the window, the design of the chair, the clock, and the items on the desk. All around, a wonderful piece of art that I (honestly) believe belongs on display somewhere.

<deleted> responds:

Thanks for a very useful review!

[Spas-12]

Excellent geometry, but...

So, the model itself is great. This is the basic structure of a truly believable shotgun, and well over 50% of the work has been done, and it has been done well.

There are a few things that really hurt the model itself:
(1) More beveling and/or smoothing. Almost all the edges are too sharp.
(2) Reduce the reflectivity. The finer details very hard to see right now.
(3) The pump has two issues. It needs more room to move back and forth to reload, and you should make a "hole" in the pump for the shaft. We need to believe that the pump moves on the rod, and isn't attached to it.

Otherwise, this is great work and I can't wait to see more your stuff!

Dawn-Breaker responds:

Thanks for the proffesional critisism!

I was aware that at some points ,I started getting lazy in making parts of the shotgun seem more individual and actually being a part of the shotgun rather then being there.

For example; the mounted shoulder support piece was quite a problem as I used boolean to create the holes in it and end up having allot of unpractical edges in the mesh ,I deleted as many as I could but it still excits out of quite allot of mesh supporting edges. and this making it quite a click by click job to add some chamfering to the edges and making it look more bevelling.

Basicly I still didn't find out what the best way is to decreate zones of mesh in a mesh.. or something

Other then that I put on the standard Autodesk metal ontop of the weapon as I'm lazy and personally like the material ,its good for that "showcase" feel and for a mental ray material it renders quite fast.

Anyhow. I shall keep these things in mind as I continue modelling new things :D

[Water cup]

Dude!

Given the complete lack of freely available, accurate water simulations available in the world today, I'm going to assume you manually inserted every defect, drop, and curve in the "water" object, in which case ... SWEET. And even if you didn't do it yourself, it is an *excellent* use of automation to an artistic end, and deserves props even so!

Vertlain responds:

This one was made manually. Idea behind model: shredding the glass in right way and then adding tons of smoothing modifiers, some noise and of course changing the angle of refraction and... voila! So it wasn't all that difficult. Thank you for insight comment! :)

[Fel Tree]

Looks plastic

It totally looks like a plastic sculpture. I realize that might not be a good thing, since you were going for a "tree" look, but it says something about the realism of the lighting and textures!

<deleted> responds:

I never go for a photo-realistic look. I always do things that are stylized. However, I agree with your point on this. Thank you for the feedback and for thinking it deserves a 10.

[Space Bug Forever]

Master modelling!

The design is absolutely flawless. I'd love/hate to see that thing moving. One aesthetic comment: reduce the highlights on the armor. It looks like you've got a mirror effect going, and you should tone it down to improve the realism.

Savory responds:

Wasn't shooting for realism much, mostly the picture I had in my head