How to give Proper Constructive Criticism (AKA: How to be a hat-*shot!*)

[Velen]

Prologue

When I go around the hack-related forums on KCMM, I often notice that people will often blindly praise the creators of even mediocre hacks with some high praise. This may be all well and good if they need a confidence boost, but in the long run, it is not good for the ego. Hackers who are given too much blind praise will eventually reject any form of good constructive criticism because their ego will have been inflated by getting so much praise that suddenly getting a post that gives actual constructive criticism will be seen... Well, rather foolishly as mere hating.

Constructive criticism is something there is a severe lack of on KCMM. So I am going to write a small guide on how I give critiques on hacks. I'll start with g basic guidelines of giving a critique.

Guideline 1: Show respect.
This basically means to try to be polite. Sometimes you may be irritable, or may even heavily dislike the maker of the hack, but that is no excuse to not try and be polite... The only exception I would ever give to this rule is when something that you critiqued is so obvious, and yet people are completely oblivious to it. Even then I would not recommend getting harsh unless people start really getting really "in-your-face" about your criticism.

Guideline 2: Be constructive and coherent.
Being coherent is a golden rule of critiquing, proper punctuation and grammar is extremely recommended, otherwise your critique may just fall on deaf ears and nobody giving good, valid criticism likes that.

Being constructive is a bit trickier than having proper grammar. If all you do is babble on and on from one random thing to the next without any coherent sequence, and fail to give any specifics, people will be a lot less willing to listen to you, if at all. So being specific and going over things in a sequence helps get your critique more positive and accepting responses.

Let me give a quick example: say you see someone made a not-so-good looking texture, and you feel the need to critique it:

"the texture needs work."

This violates the second guideline. It's not being specific, or giving any details on what needs work or what is even wrong with it in the first place. By comparison, this version is much better:

"the texture needs work, the colors are a bit to dull, your details could be more defined...-and something seems off about the design on his back, is it supposed to be that way?"

That, by comparison, is a much more constructive critique than the previous statement, and provides details on what the critiquer (that is, YOU) think needs improvement.

Now that I have gone over the two basic guidelines, let me give you the third and final guideline:

Guideline 3: Pictures and/or examples are always helpful.
Having pictures of what you are critiquing will always be helpful when giving a critique, especially when they show specifically what you think is wrong, or in need of improvement. This is because, as the old adage claims: "a picture is worth a thousand words", and if you tend to be wordy with your critiques, pictures can help make them much more concise.

How to Critique What.

When you critique a hack, it's never a good idea to critique hacks all based on the same criteria. All kinds of hacks affect different kinds of things and as such should not be subjected to the same exact criteria, every single time. I'm going to give you the criteria I give for certain kinds of hacks.

Textures

Textures are often considered the lowest level of hack due to how relatively easy it is to simply take textures, paint parts a block color, and call it good. The reality is that textures are the most important kind of hack there is. Even more than imports and vertexing. Textures are the things that provide the little details every character has, from eye color to the denim on a pair of jeans. When critiquing a texture, I look for the following things:

Color Consistency
In a character's design, most every character has some shade of color on them. For textures, if colors aren't consistent, it can make the texture look weird in some situations. So I always keep a lookout for color consistency for this reason. Color consistency is especially important when making textures depicting specific characters because color errors will be more glaringly obvious to avid fans of those characters.

Noisy Pixels
Noisy pixels are pixels that are easy to see in a texture. Noise pixels are off-color pixels that often appear around edges of colors that have been sharpened in programs like Photoshop. They are also the grey pixels that appear when the edge of a color is blurred, or that appear when the colors are indexed and decreased. These pixels can be pretty hard to spot unless you look at the textures themselves, unless they are glaringly obvious on model viewer in Brawl Box. Getting rid of these pixels will increase the recurred overall quality.

Detail
When texturing, details are important, especially on models with nulled normals. Lack of details on a texture makes for rather sub-par texture, and if you're looking for downloads, is not the best way to get them. Details such as shading on models with nulled normals are extremely important, and leaving them out makes the artist of the texture look lazy or uncaring of the quality of their work.

Now for...

Vertexes
Vertexes are the next step up from textures in terms of difficulty and the time needed to perfect and make. Vertexes involve actually changing a models shape in order to turn a Brawl character into someone already in, or not already in Brawl. Due to the very nature of what vertexing is, however, it is subject to less scrutiny than some, for me however, the difficulty of the hack does not affect my critiques, no matter how difficult it may be. In vertexing, I look for the following:

Accuracy
Accuracy is something that is always important in vertexing, since most vertexes are made to look like characters not naturally included in the game. I usually only get severe with this if the model's overall appearance does not match the character in question a good example of this is the vertex off Goemon from "Legend of the Mystical Ninja" on Ness. The head looks okay, somewhat, but the overall model's appearance is still Ness. This also applies to the vertex's textures, and the texture also falls under the same scrutiny as a normal texture alone.

Clipping
Clipping occurs when one part of a model goes through another part, like a hand through the head, or a leg through something else. This issue doesn't often occur, but should be noted if it does.

Stretching
Texture stretching is a common problem with a lot of vertexes, and as such should be minimized as much as possible. This should be noted if the vertex contains a lot of stretching.

Now we come to Stage Hacks.

Stage Hacks

This section will be short for one reason: it is merely a [censored]tail (mainly) of vertexing and texturing. The other things to consider are whether the collisions are correct, and whether they have errors that cause freezing or not. Otherwise, Stage Hacks really fall under the aforementioned guidelines I gave. Now for the last kind of hack I really critique...

Model Rigging

The newest addition to Brawl hacking, and with new kinds of hacking come lower standards...for MOST people. Not for me. Model rigging involves directly taking models and rigging the bones of Brawl characters to them. This comes with a single inherent problem that most all current model rigs have:

Naturalness

When I talk about naturalness, I am talking about: does the model that has been rigged move according to the models anatomy? This is very important in model rigging, because the bones and the way they are rigged not only affect how the model moves, but also the overall appearance of a model in some cases. Two models I have critiqued recently: Zero and X, are two examples of naturalness, one moreso than the other.

X's Samus rigging at the time of his release heavily violated this needed trait. The legs bent at the calves rather than the knees, the waist looked unnatural, so did the rotation of the arms and legs, and the arms did not bend naturally at the models elbows anatomically.

Zero's problems were more subtle, or were simply intentionally ignored. The problems required me to take screenshots and put them into collages in order to demonstrate how bad they really were. The reasons for this were the assumption of "since its Beyond, it will be perfect", yet Zero had problems that would be noticed by animators, or simply turned a blind eye to.

Epilogue

I'll keep this rather short. Now you know a bit more about the how and the why of my critiquing. Thank you for reading.

[SJS]

Cool, I think. Not sure how to critique this tutorial (since you didn't cover it in this guide). You should consider adding a section like that.

[Velen]

Cool, I think. Not sure how to critique this tutorial i u(since you didn't cover it in this guide). You should consider adding a section like that.

This is more for telling people how I do things when I critique something, as well as a little about how to properly give a critique to someone.

[Protoman.EXE]

I realize this is a serious topic, but i lol'd. This was very good on how to give constructive criticism, which im not good at lol, but i enjoyed this, especially on vertexing. I've seen quite a few where they aren't even finished, and they look really bad. (Some of which i made, but at the time i could only use the original method of Vertexing, where you cant see the model) Anyway, good job on this.

[SiLeNtDo0m]

I noticed there isn't a section on giving PSA or animation criticism yet (the former probably being the most difficult hacks to critique because there's so much more to take into account).  Will there be one at all?

Apart from that, great work for doing this topic Velen.  Hopefully it'll teach someone something XD 

[LC-DDM]

Yeah, it really helps having tutorials on being rational and critique on a day and age where everyone thinks a half-assed model with the bone joints misarranged in the wrong points and make the import look like a horrible vertex. If only certain people would just be more thoughtful when working on their projects, and be more apprehensive on the critique recieved.









But more importantly, I want to learn on how to be a hat.

[Velen]

I noticed there isn't a section on giving PSA or animation criticism yet (the former probably being the most difficult hacks to critique because there's so much more to take into account).  Will there be one at all?

Apart from that, great work for doing this topic Velen.  Hopefully it'll teach someone something XD 

For PSA, probably not, for Animation, probably when I get home. I spent all of two hours typing that first post on my phone. X_X;