Greek Fighting Stage Environment UDK critique please!

aston91

Ghellooo people, basically i am doing a fighting stage for one of my modules at university and looking for some feedback on my progress, this is a fighting stage that would be seen in soul calibur, kind of a reinvention of kratos stage /mount Olympus. any help would be really appreciated.

Thank you

djoexe

Overall, it's nice, but it lack of punch. I defenitely think that a scene of that kind need to be more localized. What I mean is for the moment, your arena fight looks in the middle of nowhere...floating in the sky.

An EPIC background is needed to make your scene more valuable...some fantasy mountains covering up this big empty place. I would also get rid of that kind of rocks you're using around the arena...it just not the right type of rocks you need for that scene. Go rather with sharp edged rocks that looks more fantastic than realistic...just like in God Of War.

Your lighting setup is ok...but it looks like you have not tweak anything in lighting settings. You should also go with a fix custom sky with big clouds in it with highly detailed forms with a sepia tone maybe...to have a 300 movie like style.

Your marble effect need some reflective material on it and to me..there is not enough information coming fomr the marble texture, try to tweak it or find another one.

Adding some blood splatter in some spot could be an interesting way to give a more sadistic feel to the scene. And work more on your spec maps to see them popping more.

I'm not a pro at all but maybe my thoughts will give you a boost. keep it up

aston91

Thanks for the Feedback, I've looked at your notes and added some mountains in, tweaked the lighting and still in progress on other areas. Here it is so far.

AlexKola

I like where you're going with this. I would prefer more of an aged arena, and right now this one doesn't look like it has ever been used. I would maybe watch Spartacus or Gladiator and try to capture the idea that many people have died here and in bloody fashion.

Specifically I think the sand feels too hard. If the sand were a little more irregular around the walls it would give the feeling of something less flat as a whole. I think the texture is probably a little too plain as well.

I'm not sure that there would be these large fire bowl in front of the crowd seating, it seems like they would get in the way of viewing the match at hand. There would probably have been some kind of a railing up there but check your ref.

Also, the large orange bird emboss on the rock noise isn't doing it for me as a center piece for this arena. I don't think they would have had the two combatants fight on rock so maybe you could do something fancy surrounding the platform. It's up to you.

It didn't look to me like you were going for an overly fantasy look like dj had mentioned. But if you are I would go crazy and push it everywhere in terms of the artistry that goes into all of the architecture. I think you should find some imagery that explains exactly where you are going with this piece, highlight which parts of the photos/concepts you are trying to capture and then our feedback can be much more streamlined. All the Best.

-Kola

Parralax

Liking how this scene is progressing, one thing I would point out however is that with the arena being in direct sunlight it would benefit from having light rays enabled on the sun so that they shine around the focal point and the flags (especially the one on the left). maybe add a low level of sub surface scattering on the flags as well.

Zwebbie

Maybe I'm being picky here, but it seems to me that you're better off calling it an Aston91 Fighting Stage, because your imagination had more influence on the result than anything the Greeks ever made. Who never did actually propagate blood sports, those were the Romans.

I mean, you'd think getting the seats right wouldn't be too hard, but even they have issues.

minorthreat

I think it's really good so far. If I were you I wouldn't worry too much about getting it historically acurate. Rather than being a "Greek arena", it's more of a Greek inspired arena. I think one thing that would perfect this scene would be to replace the bottomless void of mist and the mountains on the horizon with a massive cluttered Greek cityscape. It'd be a learning experience.

Philistyne

I think you could halve the height of the marble benches. At the moment it looks like they come up to above waist height.