Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Nice job! I'm a huge star wars fan so I geeked out a wee bit with these! Nice to see Mustafar getting some love. My biggest thing here - is you've done what I always do with my projects and you've gone MASSIVE. I would love to see what you come up with if you spend 3x as long on one environment instead of spreading that time out into 3 totally distinct environments - Still... massive commendation for the sheer amount of effort that would have gone into this! Your lava is brilliant. It's great to see you utilising distance fields and we use them for stuff like this all the time. To quote my lead and reference Star Wars at the same time 'Distance fields surround us, binding the galaxy together'. Nice job on the speeder too! For the first vehicle you've ever modelled I'm VERY impressed! Whenever you're doing hard surface work don't be afraid to put a chunky bevel on your edges (go a bit chunkier than what is there in real life) and the engine will pick up those edges and highlight them and that honestly the only feedback I have on the speeder! Awesome work - keep it up, can't wait to see what you do next.
• It was a brave decision to make 3 environments, but it hasn't quite paid off. The Naboo throne room is a good recreation of the environment, but lacks in a couple of ways. The most standout is the material choices and the textures on the ground. It doesn't quite read like marble, and looks a little low res in places. You could have done with creating the window from geometry and having a skybox outside. The scene would also benefit massively from some lighting changes. The light from the window feels a bit too yellow and the scene could do with bounce lighting to lighten up the shadows and give the room an airy, regal feel. Your Mustafar has some cool technical aspects going on. The distance field lava is great, although a little low res and overwhelming in the scene. Likewise, the Tatooine scene is immediately recognisable as Tatooine, however your composition and framing is hurting the overall look of this. The classic Binary Sunset image is a low camera angle looking out across the sand, this pulled back shot really exposes the weaknesses in the scene. Mainly the material definition of the sand, and how barren (although accurate) the environment is.
• I think doing 3 environments was a bit too much work for you and the quality has suffered as a result. You should instead focus on polishing one environment to the best of your ability. When you think your done, your not, get reviews from artists you trust and implement the feedback, even if you disagree. The throne room is a good size project and candidate for this. It is also easier to execute than the other two. There are many areas of improvement you need to make, but you should first concentrate of taking one topic at a time. Your first and most important area to study is reference. A lot of the mistakes I see here are easily solved with good reference and really spending the time to study that reference. For your next project, aim to have a supporting reference image for every material, light, asset and mood shots for the scene. You should have an image ready for any question I throw at you about the project and tell me how you plan to make it. Then you need to focus on your lighting. No need to dive too deep into the subject right now, but you need to be able to follow and execute on basic physics without producing inaccurate lighting. After this, look into and understand texel density and how it applies to environments. Nothing in your scene should be low res or noticeably different to anything else. I have done some quick paint overs for you. Itch is shit so you gotta copy and paste the images yourself. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ezRL8rS7I47q5T-0Ay2EiCA9SS4oDqGy/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y4u94r6qOesm15OrK6mD1iBSmRnl4UBe/view?usp=sharing