Long time member, first time poster. Here is my first completed environment. C&C appreciated.

bipolarbear45

Hi there, 

So I have been lurking around here for quite a while but never really felt like I was at the point to share my work.  I recently have graduated from college specializing in 3D Modeling.  I finally feel like I am at a point that I am proud of the work that I have done.  I would love to hear what you nice people think.  Any thoughts that you all have are welcome. Thank you for looking. 

Blouko

I'd love to see screenshots from different angles, looks great!

Brian "Panda" Choi

I want more shots and breakdowns, Thomas.  This looks liek a decent solid sstart

bipolarbear45

I had made singular assets before and small scenes all through college but this was the first time that I actually set down to make a full environment.  This is also the project that I realized that I wanted to specialize in environment art.  I made a lot of the small vegetation in 3DS Max, the rocks and the large tree trunk in Zbrush, and the other trees and billboards in Speedtree.  A lot of the textures are taken from textures.com as my texturing work needs improvement, especially with substance.  It is all rendered and lit in UE 4.  

I kind of set it up to look decent from this angle so I don't really have any other good screenshots. I will try to make some more here in a little while.  I did play around with some different lighting settings before I settled on this.  Here are some of my test shots:



For this one, I was trying to make a spooky, horror-esque look to it.  I thought that it turned out to be a little too dark and you lose a lot of the detail in the scene.  I was a fan of the fog so I tried it with the lighter lighting to see if it looked better in the daytime. 


At this point, I realized that it was the fog that was causing a ton of the detail to be lost and blurring the further parts of the composition. I dropped the fog and made the current final render.  The last lighting test that I did was something a little unrealistic.  I had originally planned to have a few more supernatural elements in the scene to spice it up a little but cut it in the end as I felt it was unnecessary.  This next one was a render to fit that sort of feel.  


I still feel like I could have worked with this a little more, especially change the skybox to make it fit better. Ultimately, It just seemed to blanket the scene with light which isn't what I wanted for it. Finally, here is a screenshot of all of the assets that I made for the project.  My teacher joked around calling it my asset pack. 
  

I do wish that I had more assets like vines, mushrooms, Pinecones, etc.  I think that it also needs more color and contrast in the scene.  I am working on a new project now that will definitely have more color to it.  Still, I would love to hear what you all think. I hope I didn't write too much.  It was actually really helpful to kind of write all of these thoughts down for the first time.  

Blouko

You definitely didn't write to much. I do think the second image stands out better than the final one too much, with the loss of detail it focuses your eye on the fence, which could be a good thing. Although, it might be too strong, it looks a little weird on the left side, where the water is. Anyhow, nice work!