Blizzard Student Art Contest - Environment

mynamesbryan

Hey everyone my names Bryan Marony! this is my first post on polycount so im excited to share my work with you and get some feedback! im currently enrolled at the Art Institute of Orange County, working towards becoming an environment artist in the industry!

I started working on a Pandaren environment for the 2013 Blizzard student art contest a couple months ago and i submitted my environment last sunday! i would really appreciate some post mortem critique so i can use what i learn from this project on future ones

Mist

It certainly looks like WoW's style, but im not intimate with the games so I wont critique there.

Howerver, the 1st thing that strikes me is that there is no focus. The train is in the foreground but gets drowned out by a lot of noisy details in the background, so the eye has trouble picking stuff out. I'd position the camera in a way that the eye focuses on the train and dragon, with a block colour directly behind it (perhaps the trees). It may not matter in the game engine but makes a world of difference for presentation.

I'd put some tufts of 3d grass in between the stone floor tiles, sparingly, just to break up the tileing

The stone under the barrels look odd to me, they dont seem to gel with the stone wall very well.

The only other thing that bugs me is the semi-circular wheel cover on the train has no metal trim on the bottom part, but it's a minor point.

Apart from that I think it's a good piece. (The dragon is very nice)

Hope that helps.

ashleighmills

I love the idea of a train station, and I think you have some nice shapes going on.

I agree with Mist that there's no focus. You probably could have just done the train as your only large structure and really made that thing awesome. Some of the textures, especially on the train, look unfinished. All of the metal on the train looks pretty rough.

You did get a lot accomplished though and I like the idea a lot.

tottot

Looks great, some of those assets look straight out of MoP! I agree with the above comments too, play around with the composition and I think you'll be set!

Brian "Panda" Choi

Agreed. Liking everything (you're art makes me cry cuz I suck), just need better composition.

Elod.H

Ahh, I am in joy and in pain at the same time . I wanted to enter the contest, but realized 2 days before the deadline that it is only for U.S/Canada students... oh well . And I`m happy because this picture brought a smile to my face .

Love your idea of a train station. You really do have a feel of MoP's art style.
The only thing I would recommend is to focus a bit more on bounce lights in your textures. For example, I feel that the cabin's color could have picked up a slight red from the wood on the lower part and a bit blue on the upper part. In general, I feel the cabin's texture lacks in terms of richness in comparison with the other textures, but all in all it is a wonderful image.

Best of luck to you!

Add3r

Looks great man! I love the train station idea, and the capturing of the WoW style is impeccable The focus comments are good points, a good focal point would have brought this great piece to the next level. Great job man, you will definitely be a solid contender in this years competition.

mynamesbryan

Thank you all for your critique, I'm stoked to hear from you all how much you think it resembles MoP!

I definitely see what your talking about as far as composition goes and not having a strong focal point so ill try to work on that. I'm not going to lie trying to tell the whole story in one jpeg was way harder than i thought it would be, but I'll keep what you guys have said in mind as i work on future projects and touch this one up.

As for the metal i think I'm going to go back and give all the metal another pass so it receives the attention it deserves.

Thanks all for posting!