Looking for ideas on how I can improve environment art

DarkBladeNemo

Hi everyone,

I have been practicing environment art on and off over the years but never had a ton of free time. So I would occasionally do a prop here and there or do a scene and never finish it. EDIT: I want to start doing more scenes but have problems with making buildings and most outdoor things. Scale seems to mess me up really bad.

Well now I have a ton if time on my hands and want to really get into it. I would say my biggest problem is wanting to do everything and then blocking myself when I can't come up with something.

So I would like some suggestions of what I can do to improve and get back into the flow of things. I was thinking start small and make some props but I need some suggestions.

Anything is fine and I will give it my best shot.

Some of my work that didn't turn out too badly:

Thank you in advance.

Eric Chadwick

Welcome to Polycount!

A couple things. You posted in General Discussion, but that's for talking about other people's work. So I moved your topic to 3D Art Showcase & Critiques.

Second thing. If you would like critiques, embed your work here on Polycount. Don't make us click a link to see your stuff, that stops lots of people right away, it's a gate. We're on a site where art is embedded all the time. It's the expectation. We've clicked on your thread, expecting to see your artwork, but now we have to click another link. That makes me sad

More about embedding here
https://polycount.com/discussion/63361/information-about-polycount-new-member-introductions/p1#make

Anyhow, good luck, and I hope this helps you get some good crits!

DarkBladeNemo

Eric Chadwick said:

Welcome to Polycount!

A couple things. You posted in General Discussion, but that's for talking about other people's work. So I moved your topic to 3D Art Showcase & Critiques.

Second thing. If you would like critiques, embed your work here on Polycount. Don't make us click a link to see your stuff, that stops lots of people right away, it's a gate. We're on a site where art is embedded all the time. It's the expectation. We've clicked on your thread, expecting to see your artwork, but now we have to click another link. That makes me sad

More about embedding here
https://polycount.com/discussion/63361/information-about-polycount-new-member-introductions/p1#make

Anyhow, good luck, and I hope this helps you get some good crits!

Thank you for the help. I have removed the link and combined some of my images into one and posted those instead. Will keep it in mind for any future posts.

shabba

If you struggle with scale and buildings - I think a good exercise would be to repeatedly reproduce real life reference images of a street, or something with a variety of shapes/buildings/footprints - and just roughly grey block (blockout/proxy) the shapes, and dont worry about finishing them or detailing them. The goal is to replicate the reference quickly and accurately.

Then post the reference you tried to recreate here, and post your blockout. 

You'll notice some shots have different FOVs or are shot with different lenses that could distort the image. So try to find the most vanilla photos possible.  A great place for this is flickr, or 500px where they post the camera settings used. Which you can reproduce in your 3D application of choice.

Once you are much more confident with scale, and have had many successful attempts - then I would move on to reproducing a simple building from real life. Dont even focus on the props around it, the streets, or anything attached to the building facade that would be considered a separate object. Again the objective is to practice simply. 

Then post the results here, along with the ref you tried to reproduce.

Keep asking for feedback, and keep slowly uping the difficulty as your confidence in your skills grows. 

Best of luck! Happy Arting! See ya next time

JamesBrisnehan

You could also participate in the bi-monthly environment art challenges. You can follow along with other people and pick their brains while working on different interpretations of the same concept art. Working with others can help with motivation and finding inspiration/direction.  https://polycount.com/discussion/216589/the-bi-monthly-environment-art-challenge-january-february-64

DarkBladeNemo

@shabba Should I block out the entire street or just pick a section and do that? I am having a look at a lot of these pictures and a lot of them seem very cluttered and somewhat intimating.

@JamesBrisnehan I wanted to do the Hard surface model, I started but didn't really have the time to get very far with it. Will post pics if you want to see my meager progress. Never got further than the blockout stage

snake85027

Post a few of those pictures. Also do you want to create this for a game engine? If so make sure you set your modelling program in those dimensions. Unreal is centimeters and Unity is Meters I believe. When I make props i usually use a plane at human height and model from that in my modeling program. You can block it all out and combine it to be one model as  basic shapes and piece by piece replace it with standalone models. Using google maps is great as well. They have measuring tools for measuring the length of streets , buildings ect, on the height you might have to take a educated guess by looking at the objects around the building,people,cars,ect or that usually 1 floor is 10-12 feet and go from there.

DarkBladeNemo

Well I have been busy with this subway for more or less the entire day. The basic blockout for the subway tracks are more or less done. I think my scale looks good might need to tweak a few things here and there. I'm trying something based off work by Brian Recktenwalk. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oOOZ9O

Thoughts on it so far? Currently I'm not 100% sure about the tracks but I'm going to keep working on it. The initial blockout of the bigger shapes didn't take too long.

I will need to look at some references to get a better idea of what most of these objects look like.