Looking for Honest Feedback on My Stylized Game Environment!

Filipp

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a stylized game environment inspired by League of Legends and Arcane, and I’d love to get some harsh, no-holds-barred feedback from the talented folks here. Whether it’s about modeling, texturing, lighting, or anything else, I’m open to all critiques—big or small.

Here are a few areas I’d especially appreciate feedback on:

1. Does the environment reflect the hand-painted, stylized art style well?
2. Are the ground textures, vegetation, and assets visually cohesive?
3. Any tips to enhance the scene overall?
   
   

I’ve uploaded additionally:

• A PDF (3.6 MB) with an overview of the project.
  
  

I’m happy to discuss any feedback—no matter how tough it might be! Your insights are invaluable, and I’m excited to improve based on your suggestions.

Thanks a ton in advance for your time and thoughts!

Cheers,
Filipp

Fabi_G

Hi, cool project!

I would say if the goal is to support a moba/ rts style gameplay, the environment has to much contrast overall. Ideally have some units/ heroes in there throughout the creation process, so you can balance everything in a way so the gameplay elements read well. Perhaps you can add some parameters to your materials so you can dial it in in-engine. Generally vertical gradients can help to make things more readable (for example make trees stand out from ground).

Regarding style, I believe it currently looks more bumpy pbr than hand-painted, with some textures looking like sourced from photos.

The grass being distributes so evenly introduces noise/ contrast, especially with the colors being so different to the underlying ground texture. I would try having some groups of gras in select places. Particular where assets like rocks intersect with the ground, so the intersection appears detailed.

The paths currently seem backward to me: I would expect stone slates being placed in the middle of the path, where's frequently traffic. Perhaps look into mixing a mask into the blend (heightmap?) to achieve a more interesting/ varied transitions, currently the blends borders look repetitive.

For the final presentation, I would add some beauty shots without any OS UI. I don't know if you did this, but through-out the process, it can help to take screenshots and paint on top to quickly explore options.

Keep it up!

Filipp

Fabi_G said:

Hi, cool project!

I would say if the goal is to support a moba/ rts style gameplay, the environment has to much contrast overall. Ideally have some units/ heroes in there throughout the creation process, so you can balance everything in a way so the gameplay elements read well. Perhaps you can add some parameters to your materials so you can dial it in in-engine. Generally vertical gradients can help to make things more readable (for example make trees stand out from ground).

Regarding style, I believe it currently looks more bumpy pbr than hand-painted, with some textures looking like sourced from photos.

The grass being distributes so evenly introduces noise/ contrast, especially with the colors being so different to the underlying ground texture. I would try having some groups of gras in select places. Particular where assets like rocks intersect with the ground, so the intersection appears detailed.

The paths currently seem backward to me: I would expect stone slates being placed in the middle of the path, where's frequently traffic. Perhaps look into mixing a mask into the blend (heightmap?) to achieve a more interesting/ varied transitions, currently the blends borders look repetitive.

For the final presentation, I would add some beauty shots without any OS UI. I don't know if you did this, but through-out the process, it can help to take screenshots and paint on top to quickly explore options.

Keep it up!

Thank you very much for your honest and detailed feedback! I appreciate it a lot.

Regarding the vertical gradients, I completely agree with you that they would make the overall look much better and more distinguishable. However, I'm not sure which gradient colours to choose and if I need to keep the gradient colour consistent through-out all other assets. Could you please advise me which gradient would work the best in my case for the trees and maybe rocks?

Thanks for the feedback about my materials. I'll try to make it more obvious that my materials are hand-painted.

That's a great idea to cut out grass where it should be placed, intersected and put the same colour as the ground colour (green). I'll certainly do that.

I see what you mean by backwards, and your idea about having a stone road in the middle of the paths could work amazingly well! 

Thank you for the last tip as well! I'll keep this thing in mind for the final presentation.

Fabi_G

Hi! Multiple ways to get a gradient mask across meshes, to then use in the shader to modulate values/colors. For example the gradient could be stored in a UV set, vertex color, generated from the y-pos in the shader, ... The way to go is something you have to decide on.

Noren

Agreed with everything that was said so far. 
One reason for the grass being so high contrast seems to be that the tufts are mostly unlit. Maybe a translucent/transparent shader that can't receive shadows or needs some serious dialing in? Either way, it's a major problem that needs solving. 

There doesn't seem to be much of a color scheme and the values and saturations are all over the place, making it hard to tie things together with the lighting, which is very harsh right now. The main light source is also close to the camera, which can make things look flat. Some elements seem to lack shadows. I can't tell if that's due to the perspective and light direction hiding them or maybe the shader as well.
You did differentiate between the "game" elements and the background, though, which is good, but if you limited your BG to a smaller value, hue and saturation range, they could stand out even without being primary color (which isn't bad per se, though) and you could use a more subtle lighting with less harsh shadows. If everything harmonizes well, you might not even need additional lighting (and therefore normals) at all.

The round bushes seem a bit out of place. They also seem to be lit from different directions. That might be, again, due to a strong perspective and directional light from the front, but in some instances, it looks like there might be some problems with normals as well (you perhaps have used projected normals to make the leaves blend in / have an overall softer impression, but in the process, some things might have broken or gotten switched around).

The water barely reads a such. Depending on style, you can get away with a lot of simplification or even without sharp highlights, but right now, the surface mostly reads as some cloudy noise. It might be a bit better in motion, but ideally, it can be identified immediately in screenshots as well. You'll probably want some transition at the edges (e.g. froth) and a different geometry and texture underneath. Currently, it looks like it is simply overlaid over the normal path texture (would make sort of sense if some paths will be covered by water dynamically, but even then you'll want to work on the readability).

The stone slabs are too uniformly colored / have too little detail (within the slabs, the slabs themselves almost seem too small) and the small pebbles on the ground texture are spaced out too far and evenly. This might be less apparent when you replace the path with stones and the ground texture ends up being less prominent as a result, but it's one of the elements that do lack a distinctively painted look. The best elements in my opinion are the rocks, especially the stretched out rock ranges. It mostly seems to be lighter peaks/edges, but that's a common property of a more standard stylized look.

Lastly, the scale seems off for quite a few elements, the most obvious example being the large conifers that look like scaled up versions of the small ones (needles and all). The conifers also offer an opportunity to go for a more clearly stylized and simplified look. With a distant camera like that, you don't need to have individual needles in your texture. Likewise, you could  simplify your grass texures (a bit more compact than having invididual long blades of grass standing next to each other).

kanga

If you want a thread preview shot change your first image to .jpg, .webp doesn't show up.

Filipp

Noren said:

Agreed with everything that was said so far. 
One reason for the grass being so high contrast seems to be that the tufts are mostly unlit. Maybe a translucent/transparent shader that can't receive shadows or needs some serious dialing in? Either way, it's a major problem that needs solving. 

There doesn't seem to be much of a color scheme and the values and saturations are all over the place, making it hard to tie things together with the lighting, which is very harsh right now. The main light source is also close to the camera, which can make things look flat. Some elements seem to lack shadows. I can't tell if that's due to the perspective and light direction hiding them or maybe the shader as well.
You did differentiate between the "game" elements and the background, though, which is good, but if you limited your BG to a smaller value, hue and saturation range, they could stand out even without being primary color (which isn't bad per se, though) and you could use a more subtle lighting with less harsh shadows. If everything harmonizes well, you might not even need additional lighting (and therefore normals) at all.

The round bushes seem a bit out of place. They also seem to be lit from different directions. That might be, again, due to a strong perspective and directional light from the front, but in some instances, it looks like there might be some problems with normals as well (you perhaps have used projected normals to make the leaves blend in / have an overall softer impression, but in the process, some things might have broken or gotten switched around).

The water barely reads a such. Depending on style, you can get away with a lot of simplification or even without sharp highlights, but right now, the surface mostly reads as some cloudy noise. It might be a bit better in motion, but ideally, it can be identified immediately in screenshots as well. You'll probably want some transition at the edges (e.g. froth) and a different geometry and texture underneath. Currently, it looks like it is simply overlaid over the normal path texture (would make sort of sense if some paths will be covered by water dynamically, but even then you'll want to work on the readability).

The stone slabs are too uniformly colored / have too little detail (within the slabs, the slabs themselves almost seem too small) and the small pebbles on the ground texture are spaced out too far and evenly. This might be less apparent when you replace the path with stones and the ground texture ends up being less prominent as a result, but it's one of the elements that do lack a distinctively painted look. The best elements in my opinion are the rocks, especially the stretched out rock ranges. It mostly seems to be lighter peaks/edges, but that's a common property of a more standard stylized look.

Lastly, the scale seems off for quite a few elements, the most obvious example being the large conifers that look like scaled up versions of the small ones (needles and all). The conifers also offer an opportunity to go for a more clearly stylized and simplified look. With a distant camera like that, you don't need to have individual needles in your texture. Likewise, you could  simplify your grass texures (a bit more compact than having invididual long blades of grass standing next to each other).

Thank you very much for your honest feedback. It was very informative and thanks to you and Fabi_G my scene got looking better by adjusting the colours, tones and other things you advised to do, which enhanced the environment look for sure.