Reply To: COLLAB 2021 – WIP – duerer

As I said during the stream, let’s talk about your chimneys! First of all I really like the additional color details you’ve added via the layer painting method! Distinguishing the mortar and varying the brick colors is a nice upgrade.

I’m not 100% sure if you’re finished to you but you’ve reached a finished state to me. If you were planning to do this things below, humor me. But I’ve mastered your chimneys and optimized them in these ways:

• Collapse color map layers. Maintaining the layers is very inefficient which is fine for a WIP but definitely needs to be collapsed to a single texture in the end.
• Shrinking all textures to 1K. I didn’t see a notable visual difference between 1K and 2K versions of your textures. So 1K it is of course optimal.
• Removing the second chimney. Your chimneys look similar enough to warrant duplication over separation. I think the idea behind keeping them separate was the function of the chimneys inside the house, which is a valid thought. But now that we’re at the end, I think we’re going to have to cheat the chimney’s interior position. I.e they will not necessarily align on the outside and inside. So it’s optimal to think of the exterior chimney as detached from the interior.

The texture savings from the above methods takes your 51 MB total down to 4 MB. Again if you were planning on doing this already, good thinking! You’re welcome to run through the process for experience but I’d like to keep the mastered version as is.

In closing I want to offer a suggestion. It’s something you can take or leave. Between Collab 2020 and Collab 2021 I’ve learned that you are an incredibly detailed, technical 3D artist. You work intricately with modifiers, object relationships, and outliner organization. There’s nothing wrong with this, especially not in your personal projects. But I must say that I’m a little scared of your .blend files 😅 Your final chimney file isn’t bad but your axle from last year and your house blockout from this year was dizzying.

Again there’s nothing wrong with this so long as you can make sense of it. But when working on a team project it helps a lot to consider the other people that will need to interact with your scene. In other words keeping the file simpler than complex goes a long way.

Sorry for the wall of text – I’ve been meaning to find time to express this feedback for over a week. Most importantly you have been an amazing team leader! Lobbying for your team members, very present throughout the forum, going above and beyond with the house blockout, AND you created a solid asset that will be featured. Thanks so much! As always it’s a pleasure working with you, Ingmar 🤝