Dark Souls inspired environment | Feedback needed
Hey there,
I recently put together an environment and tossed it up on ArtStation, hoping to get some feedback to help me figure out what needs tweaking. Unfortunately, it hasn't really gotten much traction there. I read that Polycount is a better place for feedback, so here I am.
I'd be happy to hear any thoughts or critiques you guys might have. Thanks a lot, in advance!
And, if I've ended up in the wrong corner of this site, my bad - I'm still finding my way around.
In case the link is not working here are some pictures. (There is also a video in the above link. Not sure how to upload videos on here)
Replies
With all the fires that are roaring in that room, shouldn't it be bright instead of dark in there? It's very hard to see and the lighting makes the fires seem more like arbitrary graphics instead of selling the room as a real place. I think the floating embers are too large and could be a bit more subtle. I also find for presentation purposes that you don't need to show off PBR views for your environments. In my experience it's rare to see people showing it off and only makes the work look amateurish.
I do think the layout of the room is really cool and I like the branches reaching into the scene from the outside, as well as the branches / roots inside the firepit.
I bet somebody here might know how that works, or it might be googleable. But I think the general idea must be that you try to keep the total values within a range, and so long as they are within the range, then you adjust the screen brightness to shift the total range. That way no matter the monitor, at least the value range is always correct.
So what you might be able to do on your end is make sure that the difference between lightest values and darkest values is not too great, such that perhaps in the shadows we can still at least faintly make out some sort of forms. I dont mean to shift your thinking to a totally technical way, but more to think about the rendered image as if it were a painting. You want to think about how it reads to the viewer as complete thing, whereas if you are learning 3d it is very easy to get bogged down in the details of each little thing, and then by time you get to the final image it is hard to evaluate it as a whole.
How you accomplish this would likely be by first adjusting the bounce lighting and falloff of your existing lights. And then if further tweaks are needed, you might adjust post process. I am not expert at these things, but if I am on right track and somebody knows more, hopefully they can share a little more detail.