Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• It’s a good start to the creation of game ready characters, just keep practising now you know the rough process.
• Excellent level of documentation. For your research, I would have liked to see more 'real world' references. Looking at historical outfits to really match your 'gothic' theme. Good job for completing your first character! I think your overall method was thought out well, I think just a lack of experience creating characters means there is room for improvement. First of all, not much was considered in anatomy. It's always a really good idea to get an anatomical basemesh down for your character before applying clothes. I see you did the Zsphere basemesh which was good, however that only really added proportions and didn't give much form definition. For this reason it was hard to tell what kind of creature your character was supposed to be. After this, you sculpted all fo the clothes and features straight out of the Zsphere mesh you created. Doing this makes it really dificult to create a clean sculpt. Next time you make a character try using multiple sub-tools to make the different parts of the character. For example you could model the belt separately which would help it turn out much cleaner! Also for clothes, a really nice way to get started is to use Zbrush' 'Extract' function. Your retopology was definitely made difficult by having everything as one mesh. However overall I think you did a pretty good job here. Your UV map is not ideal. It makes quite bad use of the space because of Zbrush's unwrap tool. I always recommend manually unwrapping a character. It doesn't have to end up as one UV island to work. You could have cut the model up into the head, arms, torso, legs and feet. Take a look online at some UV maps for characters to see what to aim for. I like the colours you chose for the character but the texture work is fairly simple. I think in this case the flat colours didn't work. In future try add some colour variation and depth here.
• Hi Jack, I have some recommendations on areas to focus on in your studies to improve the quality of your work. 1. Work off established concepts. Your drawing skills are not as developed as professional concept artists and illustrators. I recommend finding high quality concept work and creating characters based on that, which will allow you to devote your attention to improving your sculpting skills, not your design skills. If you want to be a character artist in the industry, you need to improve your sculpting skills. - Learn anatomy. This is the most critical skill a character artist needs in order to find employment in the industry. Put in some serious hours into sculpting humans, pick up learning resources, follow anatomy tutorials, do whatever you can to achieve high quality results for realistic characters, as you stated that was your goal in your document. - Learn the proper workflow for UV'ing and texturing. Your model is one UV shell right now, it should be split up into multiple UV shells, each element of the character should also be a separate mesh. Think how real world assets are put together, nothing is seamless, everything is built from separate components. There are many tutorials online on how to model assets from scratch to finished artwork, make sure to really study what people are already doing and learn from established workflows. Best of luck moving forward!