Sword in Stone - Critique appreciated

ThatHucGuy

Hi everyone, i'm pretty new to unreal and would like to get some feedback and advice on my current ue4 scene. 



So far, only the sword and shrine are made by myself (however the sword will be reworked). The foliage/trees comes from the Environment Set from the Unreal Marketplace and the ground textures from Megascans.




Feedback/critique is very appreciated and will help me improve and go further.  

Eric Chadwick

What kind of inspiration are you looking at? Are you trying to match a particular concept? A scene from a movie?

References are key to any project. How are you planning out your scene, and what do you hope it will look like? It would help to show what you're using, so we can offer better critique. 

kanga

The grass clumps look to be about a meter high. Great move to set the figure in there to see the scale.
If you are setting up a scene then it might be an idea to have the surrounding support the narrative. If the sword was the hero of the scene then it might be an idea to make a setup that leads attention to the principle objects.

ThatHucGuy

Eric Chadwick said:

What kind of inspiration are you looking at? Are you trying to match a particular concept? A scene from a movie?

References are key to any project. How are you planning out your scene, and what do you hope it will look like? It would help to show what you're using, so we can offer better critique. 

Hi Eric, I planned at first to do a forest scene with a sword stuck in a rock. The shrine was added during blockout because I thought it looked empty. For the lighting/forest scene references I'm trying to get close to these images. I chose to go with a golden hour/sunset time of day for the lighting/colors.





I also worked on the lighting yesterday and got these results.

kanga said:

The grass clumps look to be about a meter high. Great move to set the figure in there to see the scale.
If you are setting up a scene then it might be an idea to have the surrounding support the narrative. If the sword was the hero of the scene then it might be an idea to make a setup that leads attention to the principle objects.

Hey Kanga, my initial narrative idea was to have the sword/shrine feel abandoned/uncharted by having ivy crawling on it of it and mossy parts (I'm still looking on how to do it though).

Since the sword is relatively small inside the scene, I have been thinking of reworking it in term of design and make it stand out by having the blade being blue with a emissive or adding a blue-ish tint.

You are also right for the foliage, it is pretty high and will reduce it soon as i can.