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[Lance of Longinus]

I've been steadily trying to improve my 3d skills in the last few years to get as close as possible to how professional games look like (and managed to get an internship as a 3d artist in the first half of 2019), though I still feel that most of my attempts are lacking in one way or the other and so I thought I start a thread to get some criticism to find ways to improve, especially as I hope to have lots of things to post in the near future as I want to spend more time working on my main project.

These models here are from an aborted attempt at creating a horror game build around typical horror elements based on my attempt at writing a thesis about creating negative emotions of horror in media. Initially I wanted to make a game as part of it, though I got stuck and failed to create anything resembling a game before the deadline, so now I consider it mostly to be practice for my main project.

This here is supposed to be a humanoid monster with a garbage bag in its head, constantly in a state of suffocation.


Here is the mesh of the retopologized model. I often ended up in situations were I resorted to using triangles.



I made the texture in substance painter and didn't find a way to properly deal with seams, even when using triplanar projection wherever I could.

This here was initially supposed to look like a mutated undead wolf, but ended up looking as a dog after I failed to make it look like a wolf.


Here the retopologized mesh.



This here is an axe and the one model I think ended up the best from those that I made for the failed horror game. Though i still ended up having problems with hiding a seam in the middle of the handle. Not having that seem would result in inefficent use of the texture map space.





This here is an old style French military flashlight similar to the one in Silent Hill Homecoming. I think it turned out mostly alright other than the part around where the light comes out.





An attempt at making a shotgun.





Here a snake. It's lowpoly because it's supposed to be small ingame and crawling on the ground, far away from the camera. I feel rather dissatisfied with it, though at the same time I don't have a clear idea on how to make better snakes.





This was supposed to be a lowpoly spider, but ended up being everything but with 2536 tris. At the same time I didn't find a way to give it the details it needed without having that many.





I'm happy to hear any criticism, suggestions & recommendations about how my 3d models look, the polyflow, my placement of uv-seems, my use of colors and whatever else - absolutely anything that you believe I could do better or where I ended up doing something wrong.

[ThemsAllTook]

Cool stuff! I've been on a similar path. Most of my practice has been on modeling creatures, so I don't have a whole lot of feedback about the props, but here are the things that stand out to me on the others...

On the humanoid, the bottom of the garbage bag reads to me as some kind of molten metal running down his head. There's an edge with a lot of thickness to it at the bottom, and it follows a scrunched up contour that doesn't really look like the top of a bag. I think a more pronounced creased/wrinkled plastic look, and a thinner edge that you could follow all the way around his neck in a relatively smooth circle (possibly with creases and folds) would help it a lot.

There's also something off about the texture on the torso. The best I can characterize it is that I'm seeing two layers of mostly solid colors overlaid on each other - like a piece of wood that's had a few licks with a paintbrush and left to dry. I think some brightness and hue variation in the base (skin) layer to imply hair, skin creases, nipples, and maybe some scars might do the trick. It's all just a bit too uniform as it is underneath the splatter layer.

For the wolf and snake, I feel like the problems with them not looking the way you wanted could have been fixed by using reference photos. The snake in particular seems like it was drawn without any - the head doesn't have much of a defined shape to it other than being an ellipsoid, and the way it attaches to the next seems like two separate pieces stuck together rather than an actual living creature. The wolf's body looks pretty good, though the snout shape and mouth seem a bit wonky - what would it look like with its mouth closed? I don't think the upper and lower jaw would quite mesh together the way it is.

What's going on with the texture right at the opening of the snake's mouth? I'm assuming this is another place where seams are giving you trouble, emphasizing that that's an important thing to figure out how to fix. I'm not familiar with Substance Painter; all of my texturing has been done using Blender's tools for painting directly on the model. It's not perfect, but it does a pretty OK job of painting right over texture seams and joining them together. You can import an image to use as a stencil and paint it wherever you want on the model.

Tarantula looks really good to me, as long as it won't be seen up close with those pixely texture artifacts. Everything looks spot on otherwise.

The topology on all of these looks fine, though the garbage bag monster's shoulder and armpit areas seem a little bit questionable - I'm foreseeing some possible stretching and squishing if he were to raise his arms. If he never needed to do that, though, it's probably fine as-is. Maybe it only looks strange to me because I'm used to modeling in a T pose.

Keep practicing! I'd say you're well on your way already. Definitely look at lots of reference photos, other people's work, and the world around you for inspiration. You can only get better. Good luck!

[Foxwarrior]

If your goal is to make models that look realistic (like what AAA games usually go for), then I'd recommend doing a lot of figure drawing. Seems like you can model fine, but haven't developed a razor-sharp sense of what real organisms look like, so the traditional method of looking at someone and trying to quickly draw an accurate representation of their pose should be very educational for you.