Is my skill good enough?

News & General Discussion
1

hey people,If been modeling and texturing for a little while now, and i whas wondering if my 3d art is good enough to sell(at a small price) i can model pretty much anything exept characters(still learning).

i dont have a real portifolio but i have some images of my models, if you can take a couple of seconds of your time and tell me if my models are good enough it will be very helpfull

i use 3ds max and blender, and gimp for texturing

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2

here some more

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3

It’s all very nice looking. I think your work and services are good enough to sell.

Edit: when I say that, I mean the models, not the textures.

4

Thank you very much :slight_smile:

5

There’s a little texture stretching, the textures are a bit low res from what I can see, and there’s a lack of general specular mapping, there’s a texture seam on the chess piece.

But the modelling is more than good enough. Currently not good enough to sell imho, but almost there. Consider working on the uv maps a little bit more and they will be :slight_smile:

Since they are props you may wish to investigate baking a “complete map” into it - ie containing subtle light, shadow and shininess along with the texture itself. They can still be lit in game but contain much more ooh factor. I see you did use the AO maps as a base for the textures, but a complete map will also brighten areas and colour them (if you use colour in lights).

6

Yeah i started the UV’s not to long ago, agreed that they can use more work, never though about baking a complete map, ill deff check it out, thanks for the info hippocoder :slight_smile:

7

You’re off to a decent start but you’re not at a selling point yet.

Your textures need a lot of work - currently it looks like you’re just splatting photographs over some UVs without any thought as to the forms or uses of the surfaces you’re representing are. The crate, for example, should be made from planks joined together, but you’ve got one big photo of a flat wood surface across the entire side of it.

The nail gun… thing… is just some colours with a bit of grunge on. You want to wear the edges a little, ensure that scratches don’t run amok across the model, play with the specular definitions to define the parts as either metal or paint or plastic, etc…

The desk is just a really grotty metal texture slapped on the model, stretched in all directions. The desk wouldn’t be that grotty and if it was, it’d only really be places where it’d get roughed up and on edges where the paint would be worn down.

There’s no real consistency to the texel resolution, either - some parts of the model have maaaassive texture pixels, some have really crisp ones - you want to keep the texture pixel size fairly uniform across the entire model.

8

One very important part of selling (and buying) 3D models is the amount of polygons and the topology the model has. A simple prop can’t be used in a game when it has for example a poly count of 20.000 and up. So you could post a shaded-wireframe version of the model and/or show the amount of polygons the model has. Also, you could show the UV map and texture. Some models that are for sell doesn’t have a very efficient UV-Map.

Good luck!

9

The models are there.

10

It depends on how optimized those models are.

If you can get models looking really nice, with low polys. sell.

if you cant, you still need to improve.

textures/texture mapping is definitely letting you down atm.

11

Your work is close to selling point (depending on the price you’d be asking). I’d say realistically you’re at the budget end of 3D work, which is fine because there is a market for it, and if you can be making some pocket money off a sale or two it might help keep you on track to improving your work.

Some pointers:

  1. Improve your AO bakes. Really: No grain, no seams, no hard edges except where necessary. Perfect AO is a must.

  2. Don’t try to sell models that it would take a beginner a few minutes to make, unless your texture work is exceptional. Your pawn, for example. If it had an amazing texture, definitely sell it, but as it is it’s a few minutes work.

  3. Improve your textures. Instead of just wrapping a generic tile-able material on your mesh, work on ageing your textures - dents, scratches, scuffed edges, stains, etc. The difference between amateur and professional 3D work tends to be history - professionals make their objects look used.

  4. Again on textures: Gamma (and/or contrast and brightness) should be consistent, as should white-balance. Google these things if you don’t understand them. Texel ratios, too.

  5. Create constructor sets. Instead of a pipe, make a collection of pipes in various states of wear and function, with different bends and joints and connections. Constructor sets are useful because they can be used to build more complicated structures with minimal modelling skills.

  6. Instead of creating work ‘on spec’ (meaning on speculation) look at what the community is doing and target your work appropriately. If it seems everyone is making realistic war simulations, you might want to work on realistic war simulation models rather than fey mushrooms and rainbow sparkles. Though that would be rad, too!

  7. Look at the current market. Is your work better than what’s out there? No? Then how can you make it appealing? Maybe you can find gaps in the market and fill them, or maybe you could ignore point 6 and go and make a collection of models entirely unrelated to everything available.

  8. Generic art direction is probably best. If you decided to make a collection of props which look like they’re out of a van Gogh painting, then anyone purchasing them will probably want the rest of their game to look the same. Generic might be boring, but it’s also safe.

  9. Consider providing props with multiple variations in mesh or texture and/or states of destruction. It’s a cheap way to break repetition in a game’s art.

  10. Learn the critical aspects of making assets for games. Texture atlasing, topology for static and/or deformable mesh, uv-unwraps for efficient texture use and lightmapping, etc.

12

Agreed, uv’s is what im going to work on, thank you very much for your help, its this kind of stuff that can really help me in the future :slight_smile:

13

i can model low and high poly’d, that’s no issue

14

anyone can model high polys

modelling low polys well is where the talent shines through

15

+1