Your pieces show an attention to detail that serves you quite well, however your individual prop and material work is lacking, and your composition tends to be unfocused and far too busy. To me, there are 3 main problems, each feeding into the other:
1. A lack of compositional hierarchy. The narrative of your pieces is either unclear or non-existent. This is the biggest issue.
2. Poorly considered lighting that clashes and bleeds with and into itself, and obfuscates the scene rather than clarifying it.
3. Materials are cloudy and don't read very well. Prop modelling is occasionally not detailed enough, or has issues with proportion that suggest more attention to reference material is needed.
Your cyberpunk plaza is probably the strongest piece, and it's clear you've put a lot of work into the set dressing. However many of the renders are very hard for me to read (almost tiring), as there's simply too much going on without a clear focus. Shapes blend into each other and detail collapses into noise. You haven't done much to help lead the viewers eye around or give space to rest. The outline FX seems like an afterthought, and at times makes it harder to distinguish silhouettes. It's also over saturated and the fog and bloom smears the image out. It's difficult to get a sense for the scale of the place, and there are objects that are clearly out of proportion, such as the signs on the walls or some of the barrels.
The lighting here is more consistent than your other pieces and the conceptual idea behind how you've lit the cityscape, balconies and food-pit differently to try and create a visual hierarchy is good, however it doesn't quite work as you've not achieved the same with your layout design and prop placement.
I think some composition and lighting studies would serve you very well. The notion of frequency hierarchy that is discussed in this tutorial (for texturing) also applies to composition, and I think is a very useful way to think about your scenes: https://gamebanana.com/tuts/11530 (It will also help with your materials ).
Best of luck, let me know if you need any clarification.
Replies