Reply To: Collab2021-WIP-danmelt

[Kent Trammell]

@danmelt  One of my first Week 2 grades – Nice! The good thing about your mountain is I immediately recognize which one it is from the art 👍

I often see shapes in 2 contexts: Macro and Micro. Macro is the broader shapes that affect the silhouette where Micro is finer details that give a shape tangibility but don’t affect the silhouette much if at all. Currently your mountain is heavier on the micro and lacking a bit in the macro. I.e too much texture stamping and not enough broad shape / silhouette changes.

Now I understand why you went here: Frankly there’s not a lot of macro detail in the tiny sliver of the mountain that we see in the art. And arguably you’ve matched this sliver quite well. But when we see this approach applied to the entire mountain, it’s less appealing.

I’d like to see more macro shaping before adding micro details (texture). I looked into your file (thank you for syncing!) and it took a solid 30+ seconds to open due to using dynamic topology. Multires is sooo much more efficient. So I took the opportunity to record a video of me:

1. Optimizing your mountain via retopo
2. Conversion to multires + detail preservation via shrinkwrap
3. Sculpting macro definition (primarily with scrape brush along with some others)
4. Re-applying texture detail; note the scaling adjustments of the texture in the tool settings)

This is just a work session so there’s no commentary and I recommend speeding up playback. Hopefully it helps illustrate what I mean by the feedback above. Honestly I didn’t take the adjustments far enough. There’s a lot of areas underdeveloped especially neglecting the base of the mountain.

You’re welcome to continue working from the new version I saved (WIP_nature_BG-mountain-A_danmelt_01.blend) or redo the work yourself. Check out the file size savings: 214 MB with dyntopo vs 34 MB with multires!