Small Hand painted Broken Castle - Blender

ThisisVictoriaZ

This is my first ever model in blender! I recently graduated so i wont be able to use Maya for very much longer, so i felt like now would be a good time to try to learn blender. 
Modeled and sculpted in blender, painted in substance painter, and rendered in Marmoset. 



If anyone has any useful blender tips let me know! I could use all the help I can get 

HarlequinWerewolf

Hey, this is a good start. I can't comment on Blender as I've never used it (It's on my list) so I'll just briefly touch on the textures and render.

The grass is very cute and clearly cartoony whereas the 'castle' has less defined areas of shadow and highlight and much more muted colours. I would really lean into the cartoon feel and dig up some stylised stone references to build the texture.

I'm not entirely sure what's happening in the window. It looks like it's trying to be a reflection but there's no shine over it if it is meant to be glass.

As for the render, generally handpainted works don't use dynamic lighting so I would switch your materials to Unlit. This is really obvious in the shadow over your clouds which. This should help brighten your colours as well.

Also, I would say this is more of a tower than a castle but I don't know why it's here? Is it a ruin? There's rocks on the ground so maybe, but there don't seem to be missing rocks from the structure. Who do you think might have lived here? This tower looks quite small too. I'd maybe make the bricks a bit smaller or just make the tower taller. (You'd have to scale up the stump too) 

I'd love to see what references you had here and what kind of style you were going for. I think that would help with critiques too. And out of curiosity, and only if you're happy to share, what course did you graduate from? I'm super curious to see if you come back to this project I hope something I said helped, but bear in mind I'm not an environment artist and don't use Blender so take my advice with a grain of salt.

ThisisVictoriaZ

@HarlequinWerewolf thank you for your comment! I'll be honest that I didnt use any reference at all when making this, this project for me was mostly just to get used to the tools and interface of Blender, I feel like if I had any reference at all this would be alot better and have much more context.
I understand 100% what you mean about the style differences, again I think this would be fixed with reference but I've struggled with that in the past so I need to make sure I keep a solid style in mind in the future!
I graduated from an art school in Chicago in the US! Not sure if I'll return to this or change it, but I'm excited to learn more about blender and get better at using this program!

HarlequinWerewolf

Ahh ok, so you were working on this more for getting to know Blender than anything else? I think it's just a case of practice and practice and good luck with learning

ThisisVictoriaZ

So I know in the above comment I said I wouldn't come back to this but I actually found myself wanting to learn how to do unlit texture rendering in marmoset so I made some minor changes to the materials and got a plugin for Marmoset! I like how this looks a lot better 



Heres a link to the plugin I used in case anyone is interested: https://gumroad.com/l/iQYA#

HarlequinWerewolf

Looks better already just being unlit And as much as I do love that plugin (I've used it in the past) you don't need it to show unlit textures. In your material settings in Marmoset, under diffusion set it to Unlit. 

ThisisVictoriaZ

:0 I had no idea thank you for showing that!