m1kclark's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[H3 monster]

That's a good object design, but your choice of colors, textures, and lighting will make or break it. Hope to see it in full color sometime soon.

[Goddamn raytracing]

That shouldn't have taken 6 hours. I think that you need to go through all your surfaces and tell them only to render one pass' worth of reflections. In Blender, for example, you can change a setting called "depth" under the Ray Mirror options. If you set "depth" to 1 on object A and on object B, then you will see a reflection of B on A and a reflection of A on B. But you won't see A's reflection on B's reflection on A.

Let's make that clearer: when you stand between two mirrors in real life, you can see yourself many times. The "depth" setting cuts that off; if you stood between two mirrors each with "depth" 1, then you would still see your reflection in each mirror, and you'd see the left mirror reflected in the right mirror. But, you would NOT see the right mirror's reflection of you in the left mirror. There would only be two total reflections of you: one left and one right. Increase "depth" to 2, and there would be four total reflections of you, two left and two right, because each mirror is reflecting the other mirror's reflection. I don't know what program you are using, but find that setting and see if you can turn it down and decrease your render time without ruining the image.

Now for the advice I've give to almost every 3D artist here on NewGrounds: BEVEL YOUR EDGES. That is the first clue that an object was made on a computer, because edges in real life just aren't that sharp, particularly at 6874 x 2184.

But your textures are awesome and once you get it more efficient, your use of ray-tracing is excellent!

[3D Radio collage]

To supergandhi64: this is 3D art, meaning it is computer generated.

To artist: it looks nice, and I am a big fan of the soft lighting and the curtains. The one and only critique is that there isn't much to it; it's pretty minimalist, though, so maybe I'm missing the point.

[Pokeballs in the Woods]

That's a really well-done immersion of your models into the scene. At first glance and even at second glance it looks real. I admit that I had to stare for a long time, looking explicitly for flaws, before I found any, which says something.

The greatest strength of the model is also its only weakness: the lighting. The softness and color are perfect and the shadows cast by the pokeballs are wonderfully matched with the shadows of the tree on the ground. It's the direction that's a problem. All the other shadows are going from the bottom-left corner to the top-right corner, while the pokeball shadows are going straight left-to-right. But seriously, that's the only flaw I could find after staring at the thing for 10 minutes. So I'll go ahead and give 5 stars, because nobody likes a nay-sayer.

BlazingEclipse responds:

Lol wow, I don't think I would have picked up on that. Good eye.

[Kervamps Zbrush Sculpt]

As a quick job, it's excellent. If you wanted quick tips to improve, then try adding more details in the texture at the back of the head and on the clothes. There's so much detail around the eyes that it feels like other parts of the image are empty. Otherwise, it's a good extrapolation of the reference into the 3rd dimension.

crashadams responds:

I didn't expect anyone but Jouste and the other game artists in my sketch group to see it...was more focusing on form for this practice session but I'll put more time into different areas next time.

I do agree about the clothes, should have extruded them a bit thinner on the collar there too.

I like the renders in your gallery, you use Maya? Max? Blender? I use Maya for base mesh before moving to zbrush normally, this time I went dynamesh all the way.

Thanks for the critique! *Jouste style virtual high five*

[Batman 3D character :D]

Excellent idea, but the really-low texture resolution ruins it. In fact, you should make the gloves, boots, and utility belt into separate 3D objects with their own textures. When you do what you did, which is to apply a single texture to a single 3D object, then you have to make a choice: either you turn on interpolation and hard edges (like between pants and boots) disappear, or you turn off interpolation and the texture gets pixelated as hell.

Great idea, imperfect delivery. Good luck.

[Ruined Building :D]

This is fine for a video game, where the computer has to render the scene in real time. The texture has the right level of detail and the proper resolution, but is still missing something. The geometry as well seems lik a good polygon count for a game and detailed enough that we know what we're looking at, but at the same time seems too sparse.

I know how hard it is to include ever more details in a 3D scene, but the bare spots on the upper wall of the building and the homogeneity of the grass all suggest an ... emptiness, as if there's something missing given how detailed every other part of the scene is. I think the real lesson isn't that you need more detail, but you need to make every part of the image an equivalent level of detail to the other parts.

Also, you should make sure Infinity Lane doesn't own the image. Because you could be liable for copyright infringement.