May Live Critiques - Submit Your Blender Art!

Kent Trammell

This May, all Blender Live Events will be dedicated to community critiques. That means each week in May we will select a handful of Citizen Pro members' Blender projects to critique live during a stream.

If you would like the focused eyes and insight of Kent and Jonathan Lampel to help push your Blender Art to the next level, please submit one of your projects to this thread. Both of us specialize in modeling, texturing, shading, and lighting of which we're most apt to critique. But I'm confident I could convince Wayne Dixon to guest-host an animation critique if we get interest in that.

Instructions for Submission:

NOTE: All active Citizen members have access to watch these live critique sessions and submit art to be critiqued in this thread.

  1. Post an image or embed a video to this thread representing your Blender Project for critique.
    • Optionally, if you have multiple images, post a link to your project on cgcookie.com.
  2. IMPORTANT: Please provide context for the project with a description that gives us an idea of what you're trying to achieve.
    • "I'm going for realism but something feels off and you don't know what..."
    • "I'd like to match the style of ______. What should I do to get there?" 
  • Kent Trammell replied

    thecabbagedetective I love my Switch. Thanks for submitting 👍

  • Asif Hamid(asifh) replied

    Hi Kent,

    Any idea of which submissions will be reviewed today ?

    Thanks :)

  • Kent Trammell replied

    asifh I'm simply going in order of submission, so the first 4 artworks posted are getting reviewed today.

  • Bauke Post(baukepost) replied

    Hey there!


    Here is my submission for the critique session.

    I would like some feedback on:

    1. The topology on the left pad, it doesn't look that great 

    2. The transition from the grips to the body

    3. The lighting

    4. The overall topology

    5. How to create a bunch of small holes just behind the touchpad. When I tried it, the geometry got way too busy and messy.


    Sketchfab url: https://sketchfab.com/models/f5ad7734e08f4f91a3b081d5a406ea32

    Edit: This work is mostly focused on modeling and good topology. Also, I already noticed I have too many edge loops around the pads, so that's already one thing I could improve :).

    Edit 2: The model is now also available for download on Sketchfab. It was rendered in Eevee btw :) (you can see the overlays from the viewport)

  • William Miller(williamatics) replied

    I'm sorry I couldn't attend the live stream.  I was busy.

  • plasmavoyage replied

    Hi, I made this little piece for a large scene and would love some critique on it.
    It's a brazier made of stone, the inside of the bowl is covered in ashes and soot.

    The entire thing is aimed for realism, the more realistic the better, basically.
    In my opinion it looks good, but not good enough and maybe you've got some additional things for me.

    There is no HDR environment lighting, just a sunlight and being the amateur that I am, I tried to set up additional two light sources as key and backlight.

    Here's a link to the project for a view of the geometry.


    Cheers

  • Kent Trammell replied

    baukepost Nice controller! Thanks for submitting and for the specific context - helps a lot when critiquing :)

  • Kent Trammell replied

    @elensanima Thanks for submitting and for the context!

  • Ian Thompson(ianblender) replied

    Did this a while back. Here ya go!

  • William Miller(williamatics) replied

    iianblender Wow!  That looks like something Reynate Martinez would have done!

  • Ian Thompson(ianblender) replied

    williamatics Thank you! I hope you have a cool summer :)

  • Kaj Suominen(louhikarme) replied

    here's the breakdown of the scene now that i found the blend file again, what i also found that i had recorded the design session of 5 hours, so i'll add timelapse here thats sped up 5 times .

    first the wormhole scene, and i used the base from Gleb Alexandrov's wormhole tutorial, so if you want to look the materials just goto Gleb's channel and look it up, actually you should go there anyway and watch everything. guy is amazing. :)

    so back to scene, the big sphere around is the world, uv-unwrapped and has the bottom left procedural texture on it which i did before, in hindsight, could propably use the same material i used to make the texture in the sphere directly. 

    then you have the smaller sphere that acts like the wormhole, trick here is to actually take the camera inside that sphere and also the sub is inside, that way you get all weird stuff going on with the wormhole material. tricky part was to angle the camera to get what i wanted at that time. and then you get the reflections going on forever.

    and then there is the matcap render on bottom right just to show how simple it is without the effect.



    and then here's just clay render of the sub


    and the promised timelapse of the modeling sub. it took me roughly 5 hours to make, mainly due to thinking design choices on the fly. references it took from various nautical vessels from google to drive inspiration from.

    https://youtu.be/birkq15KGpM


  • malhomsi replied

    @theluthier  i just Watch the recorded Stream , and i wanted to thank u guys , very valuable feedback !

    it was difficult to compromised between composition , feels and lighting , and maybe i get lost in some moment,

    i had the feeling that Something was off , and Jonathan pointed it with the skull !

    i used a low strong key light ( a sun light from a broken window) with a very low strenght HDRI , but volumetric  and a heavy dust layer ruined the reflections.

    for the hat ribon ,i was going for silk but i inverse the mix shader ..

    and there is both scratches and spider webs , i was not too happy about the result but i found that it finally serve the feel of an old Photo.

    thank u very much !





  • Kent Trammell replied

    louhikarme Thanks so much for breaking down your scene! The more we critiqued it the more mysterious it became 😅

    It's crazy how simply the scene is yet how visually complex and confusing the final render is..wow

    EDIT: Looking back, I feel that last sentence could be read as overly negative which was not my intention. The confusion is way more intriguing than it is an 'issue' with the render. In a way, it supports the confusion around what a wormhole is. But I also mean to point it out that if the intention isn't to be confusing, it's something to look into an finesse. It seems you understood that based on your response, but when I read my reply back it felt more rude than constructive.

  • Kaj Suominen(louhikarme) replied

    @theluthier Thank you for the critique. it was good, because when doing this kind of art pieces, i'd like to people not to be confused on what they are looking, but intrigued to look longer and find more details. and especially if you have to explain it, thats no good. :)

  • Jelsyn Rivera(luneranimator1) replied


    I did this Thor hammer as something I can put in my portfolio, I would love to know your thoughts on it?

    PS I couldn't see the first live stream because the day of the live stream the power went out in my house and by the time it came back the live stream was already over, but I did see the recording of it and I would love to say thank you for sharing your fonts on it this will greatly help me in the future thank you so much.

  • John Sanderson(procyonlotor) replied

    So I really want to participate in this.  I am currently working on a project, but don't know that I will get it done before the end of the month, so I am putting up something I did last year.  I posted on facebook asking for project ideas last year so I could get some inspiration to practice, and my brother suggested I do a map.  We are both big Zelda fans (Zelda 2 was our first video game, and we played through start to finish before picking up another game), so I made a map of part of the overworld, and made a quick video to get some experience playing around in the VSE.  It's pretty basic on the modelling end, but I would love whatever feedback you can give.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=37&v=5QRZzstOpEE

  • bitblox (btiblox) replied

    Although this is a finished project I would appreciate any critique and notes on what I could do better on, and maybe improve in the future!

  • Kent Trammell replied

    btiblox I saw this in the gallery yesterday! Good work and thanks for submitting

  • Kent Trammell replied

    pprocyonlotor Cool project, John! It seems like a good, complete project/experiment to learn VSE. So I'm not sure what to critique about it. Were you going for a movie quality effect? Or were you going realism? Anything about the project that you're dissatisfied with that you'd like some advice about?