The Skinny Inn

Zimzelen

While doing an environment course I took the house parts I created and built a house based loosely on this one in Bernkastel-Kues.

 
Apart from making textures better from scratch I'm not sure how I would improve this or give it more life and personality.
Any criticism or pointers on what I should watch out for is warmly welcome, please DO tear this apart because it certainly could be a lot better I just don't know how yet.

I'll keep making buildings, more modular parts of them for a future project so I want to improve at this as much as possible.

pistachio

Huge hint in your OP: tear it apart. If you're following the ref, break up them lines, change the sizes of the plants, better edge wear! A large chunk of the time in CGI imperfection is the key to perfection.

Looks like a lot of the detail is in the textures, so yes, would work on those. Mess with brick/rock textures, and distort the trusses a bit. If the textures span across the modular set ofc you get that stuff across all the meshes for free. Materials need more definition here too.

HixaLupa

I definitely agree that giving it some wobble like this old building would liven it up a bit! Perhaps have some flowers in the baskets, and the swinging sign and lanterns that are in the ref would help 'place' it in a street!

Zimzelen

I've gotten some suggestions to upgrade the textures of the building so right now I'm trying Substance Painter and am trying to make something better.

pistachio said:

Huge hint in your OP: tear it apart. If you're following the ref, break up them lines, change the sizes of the plants, better edge wear! A large chunk of the time in CGI imperfection is the key to perfection.

Your comment threw a wrench in the work because now I can't stop looking at all the completely straight diagonal lines. I'll crack some corners into it and make it more wobbly. Thank you of course.

HixaLupa said:

I definitely agree that giving it some wobble like this old building would liven it up a bit! Perhaps have some flowers in the baskets, and the swinging sign and lanterns that are in the ref would help 'place' it in a street!

The surrounding would definitely help make it more lively. Though right now I'm busy with some other project, I'll give it an expansive update when I also figure out how to make something decent in Substance Painter.

Alex_J

In the reference we can see the surrounding environment, and in relation to that it looks to me like the subject is kind of leaning like the tower of PIsa a bit to the left. Also, it sags a bit, because it is old. If you know a little about wood and basic framing in carpentry, you can visualize the beams and see what they are doing.

This is just reiterating what others already said, but I think it's important to note why the building is wobbly so you don't  end up with random noise and variation just for the sake of variation.

Zimzelen

First time using Substance painter made me revisit this work only every once in a while. Though I'm okay with leaving this as it is now, I wish I had chosen a smaller project, because out of everything I made in this, the sign with the pretzel was the most fun to make because I was done and satisfied with it very quickly.