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Unbelievable man! Amazing stuff 🔥🔥

Hell ya @SamLoboda these rock

Some tweaks to the furniture, tested some different compositions to reduce noise. Might bring this shape language over to the other side of the room as well.

got some time for ref searching; you'll need a few variants of each object and surface the main reference contains - the main ref can't really be trusted to give you enough details and answers (what does the wear&tear on the wood floor look like? How many meaningfully different vials, jars and flasks with different labels and liquids do you need? Exactly how does a set of surgeon tools look like?).

You don't need refs from the same sources or refs of objects that look exactly like the objects in the scene. Just get enough to get an idea of what you're looking at - ornate, Victorian, wooden furniture will have a lot in common. While searching you'll probably find a lot of things that you might like more than what the main ref provides. You need some variants of each object because that's how you get enough depth to pick and choose what aspects of each you can use.



While gathering references; since this is a somewhat realistic scene you should try to stick to actual photo references. Reusing other people's art (especially 3D art) is a bit risky because you might end up repeating their mistakes. Also, holy shit search engines suck these days when there's so much AI stuff everywhere - be very very careful when looking at AI generated images, because there are mistakes everywhere and they might end up providing inaccurate answers.
In short; Bad references are as bad as no references.

Now that I've more or less come further than I did before it's hard to write this thread like "feedback to my former self", so I guess this will just turn into a WiP thread where I make some jabs at my former self, "this is what you should have done".

Did some further tweaking of the lighting to get a softer result. I know you would have preferred a much much darker lighting but it's important to keep the scene bright enough so that it can be seen - You've made the mistake too many times where you put months into a project only to end up with "moody atmospheric lighting" that just obscures way too much and looks terrible on high-contrast screens.
It's good to make sure that as much of the image is somewhere on the grey-scale spectrum and not completely white or black.

(here you can see the brightest and darkest areas in the above image, only the windows are peak-white and only pitch-black in some tight crevasses facing away from the light)

I also scaled up the floor and walls by about 25% to make the room feel less cramped (again, this is why it's important to not commit and start texturing assets too early). There's a lot more breathing space in general; Some areas that feel too empty right now will be filled in with more assets later, either more copies of already planned assets or maybe something new to make the scene a bit more varied.


I did some really dirty paint-overs to figure out how to fill out the rest of the scene, mainly the areas of the room that aren't in the original reference.
It's a good idea to per-visualize before committing too much time into modeling anything, just don't spend too much time on it. Try to get more used to doing these (I still need to). A little warning though, while working, certain art directors will like seeing these paint-overs a bit too much - this might lead to you spending too much time on them. Don't implement any feedback into the paint-overs, just keep the notes and carry them over to the actual 3D work.

I want to add a very large shelf/bookcase, on the wall opposite to the windows, with one of those ladder you can roll to the sides. This shouldn't be too much extra work, since I'm already planning on making a bunch of glass vials, flasks and jars and a few books as well.

Along the wall opposite side of the door is a bit hard to figure out, I get too many ideas. While it's not supposed to be the main focus in the scene, it's okay if it holds some interest. I still need to nail this bit down a bit more and make sure that it's not adding a bunch of new assets to make.

Lastly, the real focus point of the scene. I feel like the pale corpse is a bit too boring, so I painted a purple humanoid monster mid-autopsy instead. This is what I really meant before when I said "make the scene yours". This is *your* portfolio piece, not a commission or something that needs to fit someone else's vision or art direction. It also means that you don't need to make an anatomically correct human, which honestly helps. Now it's a monstrous feature that the proportions are off.
The main point to keep in mind about this focus point is that it needs to be bright and colorful, in contrast to the rest of the scene which is pretty cold, moody and monotone.

Either way, the next step is to figure out all this a bit more. And now it's high-time to look for more references.
I'm okay waiting with this until now because I'm just doing this for fun. I'll manage the scope later but for now I'm not worried. If this was in production, aka under time restrictions, this is one of the first things you should start with. All assets will need to be time estimated and fit into a schedule so you can't just wing it. Also, some assets might require special technical solutions (like a special shader for the the glass vials, flasks and jars) and that might impact how you should prioritize certain assets or avoid them entirely. But again, I don't have those restriction right now and I sure as fuck won't put them on me in my spare time.

@Neox Hell yeah ! These costumes struck me as something straight out of a N64 Zelda spinoff.

If you haven't already I'd suggest playing with per-face micro-atlas texturing on these (if you plan to have them be unlit, that is - although it can work along subtle realtime shading too). It's a bit counter-intuitive and definitely requires some getting used to but it could work great. Not only is it great for controlling colors (as color edits can be performed on the palette as a whole, as opposed to having to deal with individual materials) ; but it can also be leveraged to control shading, by defining specific shadow colors per swatch. So for instance a lightweight material can be given a rather bright shadow color to simulate light passing through, as opposed to a solid/heavy/opaque material shifting to a darker tone.

Here's an example with a 2-tone setup but it can be taken further to simulate more shading steps, or even bounce lighting.