For anyone who's curious, here are my thoughts on CaS. If you don't have the patience to read this wall of text, skip to the bold text. I won't claim I know how to make good CaS, but I do know how to properly evaluate them. I judge CaS by three criteria: aesthetics, creativity, and coherence.
1. Aesthetics - determined by item choice, color coordination, and physical proportions. The 1 + 1 = 2 of CaS. IOW does it look good. Matty was so dominant in this particular field back in the day, that the community began to neglect the other two CaS criteria in favor of random pocket stickers. Not to detract from one of the forum's greatest artists, but many talented people didn't get quite the attention they deserved.
2. Creativity - finding new CaS techniques. Means very little without good aesthetics to support it, but important nonetheless. Art begins from the self. If something is beautiful, who cares where it came from. However, the moment you share your art, it becomes subject to social values. Inventions become property of the inventors. When we see beautiful, but unoriginal art, we respect the art's originator, not the art's conveyor. IOW Sephiroth looks cool, but you didn't make him. Recreations are mostly exercises, but it's still f***ing awesome to see Dante duke it out with Cloud in SCV.
3. Coherence - Unity of purpose. What separates good CaS from great CaS. Every choice must have a reason, and every reason must lead to one theme. The evaluation process goes something like this: What is this CaS's theme? How does each piece contribute to this theme? Does this piece need to be there at all? IOW Sure, a pocket sticker would look cool here, but does that make him more of a knight? Just to clarify, I spam bump-mapped stickers as much as any other bloke. My upcoming OCs for example lol.
I couldn't agree more with all that is very well written here.
For me, a good CAS is first of all a strong theme followed by coherent execution, and by coherent i mean that all of the CAS parts must work towards the theme, and none against it.
By parts i mean body, face, colors, patterns, stickers, voice, special equipment usage...thumbnail and name (if not a 3P) !
The most coherent CAS will always win me over particularly aesthetic ones, or even creative ones with overbright colors, and awkward design choices, or plain technical mistakes...
Yes, there are limits and deadends, but we all have shown since game release the countless ways to think outside the box and beat even the most stupid glitches of the editor and use it as a gimmick to add value to an idea.
The number of time i have read genious, awesome, gives me an idea in the misc. threads is astounding, especially considering the limited number of active and regular posters.
After close to 250 CAS, i realize i barely scratched the surface even after doing countless recreations, OCs and 3Ps, only storage space and my real family and profesional life had me cool it down a bit.
Because it is fun, even though i agree with you that while it isn't hard to get attention (especially for us "popular" CAS makers), it is still very difficult to ignite artistic debate like this one.
Emotion is the key word with art :
see, your Algol above doesn't move me, while your Anubis and George W. and Volvo transgenre will always stay in my soul as creative and coherent CAS, whatever the improvements Gatsu and I suggested...
If i had to point out a specific area of improvement for all your CAS, it would be color palette coherence, and for that i would suggest you do recolors, a very good exercise where you can see first hand why the most subtle colors (with little hue and a touch of this or that) can create the most sublime aesthetics once matched, paired or used together.
Take note of some of them, and don't forget matching a few parts of your CAS with similar colors can do wonders (which might require changing the color depending on the part to create the visual match)
Oh, and I really liked the way you critized my mayan CAS, and totally agree with areas of improvement, i saw the exact same things as you did, yet failed the creative juices to give it another shot, after updating a couple of them already.
