Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• I liked that you were open with your design and willing to let it change through your research. It would have been beneficial to add an extra stage at the point you had decided to go with an anthropomorphic creature and research into other artists interpretations for anthropomorphic dogs or foxes. The model itself could benefit with referencing human anatomy more to get the proportions looking more believable, this is a good collection of reference you could use - https://sketchfab.com/tokechan/collections/human-anatomy-refs One more thing that would be nice to see is adding more narrative with props to the final presentation scene. While the character should be the focus adding small props can really help in telling the story of the character.
• Really good level of documentation here, it was very easy for me to see your thought/design process. If I'm honest I wish you'd stuck to your original brief! Just because a character is smaller and more 'simple' doesn't make it any less of a design challenge. Arguably it's more difficult as everything matters and you must really consider each design element. Regardless, there is a lot of evidence of how you reached your final design which is nice to see. I like the colour scheme you went with as it's quite strong. Anatomy has some flaws here. I find her shoulders to be quite wide and there's also a wide gap between her legs. I think the overall proportions aren't the nicest and this could have been worked on. I think your initial blockout (page 11) has the nicest shape to it, however this has been lost during sculpting. I like the direction the head was going in, it definitely looks fox-like, but more work needed to be done to neaten it up. I think you had a great idea with separating out objects into separate subtools to work on them independently, but more work should have been put into sculpting during this phase before dynameshing. Zremesher is never a good idea for a character model. It creates poor topology and makes it too high poly. The same goes for the UV master plugin. Retopology and UV mapping should always be done by hand as computers simply can't do it well alone. You can see your UV map has a lot of empty space and there's a lot of strange edge loops in your mode. As you're not using PBR textures, more work could have gone into the textures using polypaint. Currently the model features all flat colours, and if you're not using PBR it often looks best to paint in some light and shadows into your colour map. A nice attempt, you have the start of a good workflow that simply needs refining.
• Just keep practising, you seem to know where your pitfalls are, keep using reference, and study that anatomy!
• I have some feedback and direction that should help you improve in the future. 1. Use all of the available time given to you to execute the character to the fullest potential. You submitted the character 18 days early, that's 18 days you could have spent improving the anatomy, textures, presentation, etc. 2. Character direction should be laid out clearly at the start of a project, with a clear character design in mind. By not establishing who or what this character was, nothing really reads as definitive as to what the character is supposed to be, which hurts the design immensely. I recommend working off of high quality concept art by established concept artists, instead of making your own. Figure out where you want to excel in, either concepting or sculpting, and get really good at that one thing. If your skills arent as strong as the top artists on ArtStation. Based on the concepts presented in your documentation, I recommend avoiding working from your own concepts going forward unless if you invest a lot of time bringing up your 2D skills. 3. Anatomy is very important, even for anthropomorphic characters. I recommend doing anatomy studies of humans and really learn anatomy. The book Anatomy for Sculptors is a good start.
• great r+d, having a schedule was a great idea. presentation couldve been improved as it doesnt really fit the character. documentation is good but make sure to think about legibility (white text on that gradient background isnt the easiest to read!)