Wild West environment

pangarang

Hey guys,

I started a wild west environment earlier in the week and I'm to texturing my props and buildings right now. I'm just wondering how it's looking at this point. Here's what I managed to get fully textured sofar. Feedback greatly appreciated! More to follow.

cholden

at a glance, it's too dark, and the door is too bright (or just right?). Also the proportions seem to squashed and stumpy. As in, everything's wider than it is tall.

A recognizable aspect of old west buildings is that they have a large facade and a smaller building behind that. Where as you have built a building with a sign on top. To me that says "delicatessen" instead of "old west"

Finally, since you're trimming the profile of the building, you will find that modeling the horizontal wood paneling is a waste of resources. Since you're going so low detail on your texturing, I don't see any need in that level of polygon usage.

Speaking of silhouette, try to push that further by adding edges your profile trims to give the building sags and imperfections.

http://www.goldpointghosttown.com/images/Hornsilver%20Real%20Estate%20Office%20&%20Telephone%20Building%202.jpg

pangarang

Hey thanks for the crits and the reference image, cholden! I'm currently adding more details to the scene and I will definitely take what you had to say into account. Here's an update of what I've got for the scene sofar.







Just updated the scene with a number of more props and better, but I haven't rendered any shots yet. I'll update this thread as soon as I get that done. In the meantime, feel free to crit away!

Rick Stirling

It's got an awful lot of perfect edges and 90 degree angles that you might want to mix up a little to give it a slightly more ramshackle look (I'm not saying that they couldn't build straight lines, just that it all looks a little too neat).

Doors would generally have the planks running vertically to require less cutting:




Signs would often protrude from the building to get people attention:






have you watched Deadwood?

SHEPEIRO

right one thing that annoys me with scenes with lots of wood, is people using just one texture.
cut wood has different parts to it, side (long the grain, and ends(across the grain) create two maps and you wil instantly add alot more interet to a mainly wood scene

also make your wooden parts out of planks, with gaps etc it will add polys ut also alot of interest

warby

SHEPEIRO wrote: »

right one thing that annoys me with scenes with lots of wood, is people using just one texture.
cut wood has different parts to it, side (long the grain, and ends(across the grain) create two maps and you wil instantly add alot more interet to a mainly wood scene

also make your wooden parts out of planks, with gaps etc it will add polys ut also alot of interest

*cough* batchability !!! i completely agree though with the top bits of the fence posts for example

i think you are mapping your textures in a way that will appear really low res for people sticking their nose right into it (in case its for an fps) also i think on the renders the shadows are way to dark you can hardly see whats going on you would have a much higher ambient with a sky of that color ... i like the unlit maya viewport shots better than the renders is what i am getting here !

keep on posting there is not enough environments on polycount

pangarang

@ rick sterling: thanks for all those reference images! And for bringing up the issue with perfectly straight lines. I love those images - they've given me some new ideas for props, and some texturing ideas on how to make the objects look a little more worn and used.

@ shepeiro: such a simple solution to add a little mix into the textures, I have to try it out! thanks for that. The buildings are giant poly-slabs with a wood texture applied, but the props are made of individual planks. So I'll need to try that same technique with the buildings and see what I can come up with.

@ warby: yeah, this issue has been plaguing me since the beginning - fact that the textures in my working files always look better than the renders. I'm not sure what I can do to fix that at this point, so if you have any tips, I'd be really grateful.

Thanks for all the great feedback!