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Low Poly Cabin Scene - Beginner Feedback Welcome!

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beis polycounter lvl 5
Hi everyone! I am a programmer with a desire to develop by quite basic skills.

I wanted to practice my general 3D skills with an environment, so I created this cabin based on this concept from Mauthius Art. I wanted to practice creating a low-poly environment, and this seemed like a good fit. I also wanted to practice hand-painted textures, and actually learn how to do things in Photoshop, haha.

Here is the final render and the 3 1k textures (the fourth was the tree and bush in the foreground):





I have no art background, so I focused on building a solid workflow, trying to be as efficient as I can. I learned a lot through this project that I would do over again:

1. Basically the only reference I went off of was the original concept art; I was trying to see how close I could match the design. I would have spent a bit more time looking at specific materials (especially wood - a lot of it in the scene ended up looking pretty similar).

2. When modeling and laying out UVs, I would have paid more attention to how large the object was going to be in the scene and given it more texel size - pieces like the front door ended up way too small on the texture, for example. I would have looked into how to do the ground plane with tiling so the detail would be sharper.

3. I started by adding smaller detail in the texture that ended up being lost in the final render. By the end of the process, I started to push the contrast of certain elements so they were more visible, but it might have been too little too late at that point.

4. The rocks on the ground should have been geo instead of painted in; they look flat.

5. I tried building some elements of grass and weeds to place around, but I had trouble with a sort of halo ghosting effect around the edges. Don't know if that was a consequence of using TIF, but I ended up scrapping most of them because it wasn't working.

6. I tried to be clever by using only four reusable tiles for the roof, but I ended up running into problems where painting distinct pieces on them kept reappearing. I suspect learning more about how to properly tile would help this.


Anyways, that's it! I learned a lot and I'm looking forward to trying something else in the future. Any comments or feedback would be much appreciated! I probably won't return to this as I feel like I'm getting diminishing returns the more time I spend on it - but anything constructive could be used in the future.

Thanks for stopping by!

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