m1kclark's art Reviews on Newgrounds

[Naked Rain]

Nice! I love any art that uses lines or drops and varies the density to evoke shading. That's good stuff.

[Magnolia Tree]

Carck: photos are permitted of real-world art because the fact of the photo isn't the thing being submitted. I think this still obeys NG T&Cs.

I second the fact that this goes under "Other", not "3D Art" which is more for 3D model CGI. And the photo is blurry and the lighting choice doesn't really do it justice. It looks to me like you put a lot of effort into color contrast, and the poor photo quality effectively neuters that aspect. It's hard to get a photo that really evinces all of the good points of a physical piece of art.

[Lighthouse Render]

Hmm. Not much to it. It's clearly a lighthouse, anyway, so good job there. But this is a low-poly model with no textures rendered at low resolution. It's so unfinished that I don't know what comments would be useful. You could anti-alias your image and bevel some edges, I suppose, but it's not clear what feedback you are looking for.

[M.C. Escher - Drawing Hands]

I love Blender. Therefore, a few tips:
(1) You don't have enough polygons. Your other images are for game environments, but since this is a static image you need to pump up the detail. That should be wonderfully easy using a Blender modifier called "SubSurf".
(2) Did you know that you can make a linked duplicate? You can select the upper hand then use Alt+D to create a linked duplicate, which is the lower hand. Then, any edits you make on the upper hand will also be made on the lower hand simultaneously, in realtime.
(3) Nice use of cell-shading, but it's kind of at odds with the detailed wood texture. Pick one: photo-realistic or cell-shaded. Either would look great.
(4) When I hold a pencil (Escher, too) my pinky is curled more than my ring finger, and my ring finger more than my middle finger. On the lower hand especially, that looks like an awkward pose for a hand. Also, the wrist should be narrower.
(5) If (and only if) you go for a photo-realistic approach, then bevel the edges of your pencils. Real pencils don't have hyper-sharp corners. (To bevel, go into edit mode, select all the points, then use W --> Bevel and play with the settings.)
(6) (This is not a criticism, but an FYI.) Have you tried playing with the lights? Using an area light would really affect the shadows on this one, and perhaps you would like it better.

It's a great idea, and I like your imagination. I just think there are technical weaknesses in this image. Good luck and I look forward to future art.

[Draconian air elementalist]

There's an incredible amount of detail on the face and the left hand, which give the image its feel and let the audience know what this is about. Unfortunately, that level of detail isn't really matched anywhere else, and the overall image is weak because of it. The top third of the image is great, and it might even have been better if you had cropped it that way, because the bottom 2/3 is just kinda there, not adding anything.

[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.

[Behind The Mask]

I'd like more information, please!
1) What program(s) did you use?
2) Is that character model from scratch?
3) Who designed that poster in the background?
4) Is this intended for a video game, or as a pure 3D-Art image?

mascerrado responds:

1) MAXON Cinema 4D
2) Yup!
3) Me
4) For my studio annual mag

[Sherlock]

The eyes are anatomically too small, and the eyebrows should be a little more sinister to give a real Sherlock effect.

tlishman responds:

Thanks! This is work in progress.