Cyberpunk blender EPQ project - feeback needed please <3

catalinalou

Hi everyone, feedback on my cyberpunk street welcome! be harsh! its not fully finished yet but any blender/ general design advice would be amazing   
also, the lighting seems kinda off, its very dark for the amount of neon lights, so any tips with how to fix that would be appreciated!

stray

Hi! I can't really comment on enviro works, as I have zero experience with them myself, but... overall, it's not really obvious what is the focus of these images. The signs seem dominate everything almost completely, obscuring the street itself.
As for Blender: what engine are you using for rendering? From the looks of it I'm assuming it's EEVEE with some Bloom enabled, and the neon signs are just emissive material? If so, by default emission can't contribute to the scene lighting I think. You may want to look into "baking indirect lights" or something along those lines for it to work. There also doesn't seem to be any ambient occlusion anywhere, but it's hard to tell.

catalinalou

stray said:

Hi! I can't really comment on enviro works, as I have zero experience with them myself, but... overall, it's not really obvious what is the focus of these images. The signs seem dominate everything almost completely, obscuring the street itself.
As for Blender: what engine are you using for rendering? From the looks of it I'm assuming it's EEVEE with some Bloom enabled, and the neon signs are just emissive material? If so, by default emission can't contribute to the scene lighting I think. You may want to look into "baking indirect lights" or something along those lines for it to work. There also doesn't seem to be any ambient occlusion anywhere, but it's hard to tell.

hii thank you for your reply. I noticed that the scene has so much contrast with the neon light i totally see that. I definitely assumed that the neon light with bloom would be strong enough to light the scene but i guess not. Ill look into indirect lighting and ambient occlusion. Thank you so much!!!

stray

catalinalou said:
the neon light with bloom would be strong enough to light the scene

Note that the bloom itself is a post-process effect (and as such, in last few Blender versions it actually was moved to Compositing completely), it doesn't have any influence on the scene, I'm afraid.
Maybe it's better to leave it disabled until after you establish main lighting on the scene (though disclaimer, again, I've never lighted an environment, so I don't know)

catalinalou

stray said:

catalinalou said:
the neon light with bloom would be strong enough to light the scene

Note that the bloom itself is a post-process effect (and as such, in last few Blender versions it actually was moved to Compositing completely), it doesn't have any influence on the scene, I'm afraid.
Maybe it's better to leave it disabled until after you establish main lighting on the scene (though disclaimer, again, I've never lighted an environment, so I don't know)

That's really good advice thank you. i set up all the bloom affects in compositing tab, but i will take that advice and disable it for now so i can get solid lighting in place first. I'll experiment with the colour of the lighting so it seems it could be coming from the neon lights. thank you

Eric Chadwick

I would recommend looking closely at real-world locations that use a lot of neon lighting, and try to replicate that look and feel.
 
For example Ginza district in Tokyo comes to mind, especially the back streets which are not so intensely lit as the main streets.
https://whenin.tokyo/Tokyo-s-Best-Backstreet-Alleys


Remember that neon lights will cast light outwards onto nearby surfaces, so that means each of your neons should cast a lot of spill lighting into your scene.

zetheros

maybe you can post some screenshots with the lights disabled, it'd be easier to see what needs improving. From what I can tell though, IMO it needs more dirt, trash bags, dirty needles, etc. It's also supposed to be cyberpunk, but I don't see anything futuristic that would make it cyberpunk, this just looks like Tokyo to me

ThisisVictoriaZ

really good advice above! I recently watched this course on artstation learning https://www.artstation.com/learning/courses/0ol/introduction-to-modular-architecture/chapters/zYEK/intro Its free to watch, and while you're not using unreal I still think its a decent reference or inspiration for putting together a scene like this, with cool idea for graffiti, clutter, and using lights in combination with emissive neon signs. Imo your scene feels way too clean like zetheros said, it doesn't really feel like anyone uses that space at all. I would find real life references and try to compare the differences between them and your images, and pick out things you like about your references to add to your scene.