Feedback

Previously I've mentioned about small little bits of feedback and other note worthy moments where my work has changed, this small piece will be about how I ended up molding my work into what it is now. After getting the base structure down I wanted to get feedback not only on this scene but my one previous. This will be feedback from people who are currently working in the industry and how different companies have different levels of requirements. 

I firstly asked the two people I'm talking to who are in the industry at high tier companies Luan Vetoreti & John Barnard for feedback as it was easy to sneak into the conversations we were having. One working at Splash damage currently (John) and one working at Foundry 42 (Luan) or as most people know it CIG (Cloud Imperium Games). 

Johns feedback,

'Hey dude.
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, it's been a crazy bust time for me as usual. (Working a full time job and then coming home each night to work on my own porfolio - it's exhausting!)

Your images look really good, honestly they're a lot better than what I was producing at Uni :) Really nice work!

There are a couple of things that jumped out at me that could be improved, and I'll try and explain them below.

Scene A - The overgrown railroad scene:

So, this is a great scene. I love the foliage, and the colours are really nice and vibrant. I particularly enjoy the way the green vegetation contrasts with the blue mist, and the red light in the background is a nice touch! 

The only issue I can really see is that there's something off about the shadows and rendering on the foliage. There are some really dark areas in the scene, that look to be caused by shadows not rendering correctly on the leaves of the shrubs and trees. 
Some leaves look entirely black, and the ground beneath them is really dark too. This is giving the scene a bit too much contrast,
This looks like a lightmap problem, but I can't be sure. Are you using baked lighting for this scene? Make sure you don't have overlapping UVs in your lightmaps.

I *think* there's some fancy shader setup you can do to allow some light to pass through the leaves (giving nicer shadowing), but I don't personally have experience of that. Google might be able to help, I'm not sure. 


Scene B - The destroyed building scene

This is a really great start, I think this will be a cool portfolio piece. As this is WIP, there's a lot more I could critique, but I imagine you're aware of most of it already. 
The main thing really is that the damaged sections could be a bit more convincing. The roof that is collapsing in looks a little bit like it has melted, rather than having cracked and collapsed. You really need much harder edges here to give the illusion of destruction. I would advice to create a few seperate "chunks" of damaged concrete, and arrange them around the opening. I would avoid having the damaged pieces a continuation of the main roof, because it is more difficult to create the effect you're looking for. 
You could cut a simple hole in the roof mesh, then dress around it with some nice sculpted assets. These are a bit extreme, but are nice examples:

https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/001/236/203/large/ben-wilson-asset-renders-b.jpg?1442757559  

https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/001/236/202/large/ben-wilson-asset-renders-a.jpg?1442757556  

The same could be done for the floor section. What you've got there is cool, but you'll want to dress around that hole with lots of separate broken ceramic tile meshes, lumps of rubble and debris. Don't let people see that tiled floor material blending into the soft edges near the hole. 

I think those two things will help sell the "bombed" feeling dramatically. You just need to create a few nice lumps of debris and don't be shy about scattering them everywhere. This is how we do it for gears of war. It isn't an elegant process, we just go crazy with debris meshes. 

Look at this guy's stuff, he's amazing at that sort of thing:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/596qP  

For example, in this shot, the hole in the road is just a single straight line cut, but the area is dressed with a lot of separate rubble meshes:
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/933/228/large/matthew-cooke-viaducts-01.jpg?1467442180  

The only other thing I could say (and this is pure opinion, so feel free to ignore),  I'd be tempted to raise the roof and pull out the walls a little. Try and make the room a bit larger. It will help you to sell the scene, and give you more freedom for taking nice screenshots from different positions. If this is the home of a collector, you might want more room where he/she could have been displaying the artefacts. It's a great idea to keep portfolio pieces small (or you'll get bored before you finish them), but this looks a bit cramped for the story you're wanting to tell. 

Also, the room is currently very square, you may want to consider breaking up the shapes with some more interesting meshes for the walls and ceiling.

Again, I apologise if you'd thought  of all this already, it is difficult to tell with a work-in-progress scene. 

What you've got so far is fab, can't wait to see the second scene finished! Hope some of this feedback has helped, if only a little bit. 

Best wishes,

-John'


This was the email he sent me after I had messaged him with my portfolio and a few up to date screenshots of the older environment. The feedback given here is one of the reasons why I ended up redoing my roof and many other small assets, looking at the way debris and the way destruction falls on an area is never linear, there is always a different outcome every time. This made me realize that the roof was off, the debris needed a little work as well as maybe doing some bigger or larger assets with rebar flying out of it would enhance the overall feel of the place. This feedback has shaped the way I'll be looking at environments from now on especially seeing as he's given me some details of how the Gears of War part use their assets.

Luans feeback,


'No I remember these 🙂 Been pretty busy only now getting to look at these. Anyhoo, so, your forest scene I think is looking a bit like an old CG render, I think you could do with looking at better ways to do foliage (shader wise), using sub surface scattering, etc. Your materials do need some work, everything looks made out of clay (this applies a bit to the other scene too). It's not your textures that are the problem, well, not really anyway though they could definitely do with a facelift. But it's worth looking at some more variation in roughness and certainly can do with a higher texel ratio on a lot of your objects. Everything is looking a little low res. The mud and the train tracks look particularly low res.  After that you really need to look at the lighting, You have this sunny day lighting but then the background of the scene is dark with a starry sky? It's very confusing. Consider maybe using dynamic lighting for things like that, with a nice hdri on your sky light. The trees look like they have a lot of shading errors on the leaves, I think you need to look at weighting the normals correctly on the leaves. But yeah, for that one, a lot of material work and lighting needs to be tidied up 🙂

For your second scene, again, things are looking really matte and low res, and it seems like on the floor you have these tiles that you're doing some sort of vertex blend into a dusty material? It's losing all of its normal information and just doesn't seem very integrated. Especially when you consider that the tiles wouldn't bend downwards towards the hole, and rather, be broken to hell and back if the roof caved in on them 🙂 Your debris could do with a bit more integration into the rest of the scene. perhaps a lot of smaller debris scattered around could help. The walls are very obviously repeated, and seem to be very wet for some reason? Overall the impression of the scene is quite soft, I think it'd be worth really driving the debris and destruction part and applying some of the same things I said about your forest, whereas the lighting and the materials could do with some work, and the impression I get from the scene is that everything is very clay like.'

This was a Facebook message that was sent from Luan, again this was way more interesting to read than for someone to tell me where I'm going wrong as it has pointers and directions I need to focus on rather than someone telling me something and forgetting it two seconds later due to the amount of feedback at once. I'm normally very good at remembering ideas/concepts but when it's written down it's much easier. Luan even suggested me to send him his work when we were in person so that way he can critique it properly as well as have me remember it. This is the way he prefers to work and it worked for me also. As for the feedback itself it all made sense in terms of where I need to head and what I need to do. It seems my assets are fine but my materials and lighting need work which again agreed they do, the only other asset that needs work again is the roof with minor bits of debris. This feedback as well helped me realize that I really need to work on the scene as a whole if I am to meet the requirements of the industry as well as the requirements for my University project.

My next professional feedback aside from lecturers was from a environmental artist from Darewise, Kemal Yaralioglu. This was vocal feedback but I will be asking him at a later date for feedback in writing as we've been connected on LinkdIn for a while and I've personally appreciated his work so hopefully he can give me feedback on mine if he's not to busy. As for the feedback given vocally I'll try to paraphrase most of what he said.

'The overall scene is good, the only things that can contribute more to the scene is bringing the blacks up. Personally I would try to make the scene less single sighted and bring the whole scene together using story telling. A good idea of this may be to make it night time, add some candles into the darker areas and get the scene working better from there. Other ways are to lead the eye around the scene more by either opening a door or changing the lighting to come in from a different angle. Other than this the environment as a whole is good, well put together but using just detailed lighting mode would allow you to further your environment as you wouldn't be worried about color. The sequencer is overly long and you'd lose attention too fast, I would bring it down to 30 seconds or less and just quick snaps of the scene from odd angles to avoid showcasing the whole scene whilst keeping the viewer entertained. As for the Artstation everything seems flat, to change this you would have to do a lot with lighting. Other than this the whole feel of the Artstation is nice, just improve lighting and maybe remove the wall texture as it's not the best and a lot of people have done it.'

I honestly really appreciated this feedback as before we started he asked me if I'm alright with him being brutally honest. Knowing that he was being honest I'd say the feedback went well and there are clear areas in-which I need to be working on. I'd say the best thing I got out of this was the feedback on the Artstation as it is the only feedback I've received from a professional as of this date, most seem to ignore my messages because they're busy. I think if anything I took a lot of good lighting tips and tricks from Kemal and also a good amount of texture quality from him in terms of putting it into my portfolio. This information will for sure help in the future especially from a presentation stand point.