For the most part this look great. The only thing that I can see is the street texture seems to tile too much. I think if you work on the shading it has, try to get as much of it out, it would look better.
very nice, lighting is a bit harsh though, I suggest you get some DOF in there to take away the crispy bits in the background (hard to focus the eye)
do that and it'll look like I'm playing GTA4!!
just out of interest but have you tried rendering this with ambient occlusion turned on? I mean, not suitable for game purposes but could make a very nice render
Shadows are too sharp, did you use ray tracing? In a scene with that much light you'd never get sharp shadows, they are bombarded with bounce lighting and the edges are softened. Next time you're out and about take a look under a car, and note how soft the edges of the shadow are.
Try using shadow map with a higher sample setting, since it is what 99% of what all engines use. You can also try area shadow, it would be the most accurate but could take a while to render or advanced ray tracing with the shadow spread cranked up to give a nice soft edge. This won't be as accurate as area shadow, and it will take longer the softer you want the edge so I suggest only using ray tracing when you need really accurate shadows.
Other Crits:
- The brick bump seams to be going the wrong way, mortar in not out.
- The brick is really noisy.
- The brick trim is odd and out of place for trim, try using another material. Check out photo ref of brick buildings for trim ideas.
- The street is really banged up and dirty but the sidewalks and buildings are clean.
- Flatshaded/wire views and texture sheets?
I think you should give a bit more thought to the colors and composition, right now everything looks busy and there's nothing directing my eye telling me what to look at. That white and red brick building is especially contrasty, so if anything, that's what I'm looking at the most, however it's not the most interesting thing in the scene. Try to get your color pallets to jive with each other to give this environment a mood.
Biggest flaw I can see is the lighting. Add some soft shadows from the light source, tone down the light too, it would never be this strong. Also, add a slight fog and haze to the scene to give it a little depth.
I agree with Odium, you should look up the term "Z-Depth Map" its map of your render that allows you to do several things, like create a realistic fog effect, get good DOF and blurs going, check it out, its VERY handy for adding realism to your scene, in addition to Ambient Occlusion and the standard passes.
Whites. There are just too many strong white colors. I dont think there's anything like that in reality that's so white and almost shiny. I'm talking about the building with all the white stuff going on.
Also another of the brick textures seems to be.. wrong. The shadow part is on the upside and the light part is on the underside. I think it should be the opposite. It's the texture separating the really white building with the other building on picture 1 and 2. Most evident in pic 2. The same happens on the building in pic 3.
Oh... after re-reading the thread apparently Vig already pointed it out even though I do think he took what's important in reverse order
also on pic 3 looks like you have the brick normal coming through the white sign. Can we get some wires and pic 4 a little larger if we get a bigger pic we might be able to see where the lights coming from.
It's pretty noisy to me. I don't know why, and maybe it's just me, but my eyes can't seem to focus at all on any particular area. They just start moving around like crazy looking at the images. I would probably guess a little bit of it has to do with the lighting.
I think a few things to add to what every one else all ready said is I would recommend to do some random minor glitches to the windows and the wall textures, right now it looks like every single window i'ts perfect I would break a few here and there and change the frame shape on some not all, and if you do that to the wall too like some spray paint or rotting/Cracked Brick those two things would add so much more natural realism to the look of the environment, other then that I think you heading in a good direction, just keep working some more on it and I look forward to see it again when you get done ...
I am going to echo what Flewda says, its very noisy, I think its the sharpness of the brick textures. Some of them look a bit stretched too. You need to place the objects better, so you can get more of a contrast out of it. I suggest moving the telephone pole, so that it can pop out more. I didn't even know there was one there, until I really looked. Also, don't tile the texture to much, its really noticeable. Keep working on it.
I added the fog a little bit, ambient occulsion, and sharped the image in photoshop. Personally like sharp pics. I will fix the wire after, and it's probably gonna be my final render, but still, all critics are welcome. Thank You very much.
cill stones on the lower windows are massive. There like a foot thick or more.
scale on the bricks for the yellow square I drew in is massive. I've never scene red brick that huge or cinderblocks painted like that. It's almost to big for cinder block even. Use your door as reference to scale. The door is about 8ft high.
How does that fire escape work other then to kill people?
You have what looks like a light leak as well.
Good job so far. This is stuff that jumped right out at me.
I think the van in the background is hurting the image more than helping. most everything hides its lowpoly look besides the vehicles. This has a nice feel to it, really well done. small corrections here and there, but overall really nice.
The line represents the tallest you'd want a normal human to be in order to fit through those doors. The doors are too small, and the windows above the doors shouldn't be there if those windows are meant to be seen through. Either they're way over the heads of the people who would be in those buildings, or they're at their feet on the second level.
Either that truck in the background is twice as large as it should be, or the doors are too small. I suspect the latter. That would also go some way towards correcting the texture scale issue mentioned already by IronHawk, tho I tend to agree that the bricks are distractingly large on that building. The door in the background with the wooden pallet next to it (at least it looks like a door to me) is about the right height. Maybe even larger than that would be safe.
So I'd say axe the windows directly above the doors there, make those entries a bit larger and bring the other windows right there down a ways so they're more accessible to the video-game people who live in those buildings.
I think the van in the background is hurting the image more than helping. most everything hides its lowpoly look besides the vehicles. This has a nice feel to it, really well done. small corrections here and there, but overall really nice.
i think the van adds a lot of character and even though its low-poly its just far enough to trick the eyes to thinking its more poly's than it actually is.
Add an AO pass (you said you did, but I can't tell). Most games coming out use AO as a post process so I wouldn't worry about if its feasible in games or not.
Your pixel density is inconsistent. For instance, the light post wood texture is much blurrier than that garbage bag directly below it, or the red brick to its left.
Opacity is broken on the wires. It looks like your mask may not be true black.
Your normal maps, particularly for the bricks, don't seem to add anything to the material. What I mean, to be specific, is that they just aren't working. There's methods for achieving really good bump information when working on brick textures. You need to have the grout be on a different bump distance than the brick, make sense? Shouldn't take long to do in Photoshop.
Remove your hard corners. Since you're using a repeating texture, you can't bake a high res for this (without using a second UV channel, anyway) so one way you can do it is like this:
Wheres the stuff we'd see on the road? Other than some textures with dirt on them, some planks of wood and some garbage bags there isn't much visual noise happening on the ground level. Decals, papers, shit, gum, piss stains, used condom, used needle, McD's Bigmac container, pile of garbage with bugs flying around it, tire tracks, cracks, pebbles, a hobo's house, the legs of the hobo inside his hobo house, shopping cart, wood skids, old/unused sidewalk signs, etc. etc. are all ideas.
What's the point of interest for your scene? Right now its all on this medium level of interest - nothing out weighs itself in terms of importance to the viewer. There's nothing happening, no story. It's just.. an alley. Yay.
Where are the wire frame shots? They'll help us help you even more
One real big that i see right off the bat is on your brick normals,they seems to be generated in photoshop and using the diffuse as the base to generate them. Try not to do this,i imagine its why your normals look so noisy because they are created using a noisy brick texture.
Good normals take time to make and shouldnt ever be made using the diffuse. I could be wrong but the results i see ive seen countless times when new artist try to generate normals in that fashion.
I think you'd have better luck lighting the scene with a sky light, and a few bounce lights. The shadows are still off. The sky suggests mid-day where shadows are almost obliterated by bounce light, especially the farther away they get from the object (area shadows do this, all others do not).
But the shadows are long and don't fade over distance so it looks like evening or early morning, but thats not the same story the light color and intensity are telling.
The power lines have a funky haze between them. Looks like its an opacity map causing the issue? Might be better to create them out of actual 3 sided cylinders.
It's kind of odd seeing a bricked up window have older dirtier brick then the building. Normally the building has been around a lot longer then the brick used to secure the window. Maybe they got a deal on recycled bricks...
2nd story loading dock doors? No crane? How does that make sense...
It's unclear how your modules are built, in a way thats good, its something every modular design strives for. But in this case I think they might used incorrectly or not at all?
also your main brick texture, wel the one on the bridgy thing has a very repetitious pattern of brick colour, this more the typre of brick work done on a fancy house or something, builders would not use such for a warehouse and it just looks very repeated instead. id mix them up to make it more random.
i also totally agree with what people have said about your brick normal map, it makes every thing look very noisy. try creating your normal map by builing up a greyscale height map by selecting varoius colours of brick in the diffuse and filling them with a light coulur, say mid grey on a black back ground, then you can use the eefects on the layer to create good glow falloffs. that way you can acheive good indentations on the mortar. finally use the diffuse (grey scaled) to just add a bit of surface roughness (say 20% opacity). additionally crazy bump can be used to get a very rough map which sometimes i overlay in areas to give bits a more broken, or worn feel.
hope that makes some sense, i dont do things exactly the same every time i make a height map, so play around.
another thing is that brick textures, bricks are slightly too tall and need to be shrunk vertically.
and another thing (only one more promise) id remove the colour from the map from the bin bags, make a good normal map and give them some spec it would work perfectly, and give some nice contrast to the diffuseness of everything else.
your so close to a great env. a day's work id say keep it up
One thing i can recommend you try,as you work with a tileable texture like brick,have max open with a little cube with the textured tiled a few times. As you work you update from time to time and check out how does it look,is there too much lighting,one details that sticks out or large elements that stick out as well and adjust it until you have that right balance.
Another intertesting thing you can do with bricks once you have a good brick base,make a few variants of it. Some with damage,missing bricks or cracks. Then give your mesh a good uniformed tile,then make a multisub material apply the base brick and give the rest of your i.d s to your variants and make slices in the mesh and change ideas in areas so you can add lots of interesting information that blends in perfectly with no signs of seams if done right.
One thing i can recommend you try,as you work with a tileable texture like brick,have max open with a little cube with the textured tiled a few times. As you work you update from time to time and check out how does it look,is there too much lighting,one details that sticks out or large elements that stick out as well and adjust it until you have that right balance.
sod that, add a directx realtime normal mapped shader to your material (presuming your using max, if maya then swap it for a similar) and hit the reload button every few changes, the more you can instantly see the effect of your texturing changes the better you'll get, plus you can see it on the actual mesh with no render time.
i usually set up a save action in PS and have a texture refresh script in maya so its a case of two buttons.
ps be safe and always save befor editing textures using a realtime shader in max as its a bit flacky in my experience and ive had max dissappear on me plenty of times with no auto save thingy, if your just editing the texture though no work is lost.
Replies
do that and it'll look like I'm playing GTA4!!
just out of interest but have you tried rendering this with ambient occlusion turned on? I mean, not suitable for game purposes but could make a very nice render
Try using shadow map with a higher sample setting, since it is what 99% of what all engines use. You can also try area shadow, it would be the most accurate but could take a while to render or advanced ray tracing with the shadow spread cranked up to give a nice soft edge. This won't be as accurate as area shadow, and it will take longer the softer you want the edge so I suggest only using ray tracing when you need really accurate shadows.
Heres a guide a wrote up on lighting it outlines most of the tools and their settings.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=51209
Other Crits:
- The brick bump seams to be going the wrong way, mortar in not out.
- The brick is really noisy.
- The brick trim is odd and out of place for trim, try using another material. Check out photo ref of brick buildings for trim ideas.
- The street is really banged up and dirty but the sidewalks and buildings are clean.
- Flatshaded/wire views and texture sheets?
Also another of the brick textures seems to be.. wrong. The shadow part is on the upside and the light part is on the underside. I think it should be the opposite. It's the texture separating the really white building with the other building on picture 1 and 2. Most evident in pic 2. The same happens on the building in pic 3.
Oh... after re-reading the thread apparently Vig already pointed it out even though I do think he took what's important in reverse order
Off to a good start though. Keep it up.
I added the fog a little bit, ambient occulsion, and sharped the image in photoshop. Personally like sharp pics. I will fix the wire after, and it's probably gonna be my final render, but still, all critics are welcome. Thank You very much.
cill stones on the lower windows are massive. There like a foot thick or more.
scale on the bricks for the yellow square I drew in is massive. I've never scene red brick that huge or cinderblocks painted like that. It's almost to big for cinder block even. Use your door as reference to scale. The door is about 8ft high.
How does that fire escape work other then to kill people?
You have what looks like a light leak as well.
Good job so far. This is stuff that jumped right out at me.
The line represents the tallest you'd want a normal human to be in order to fit through those doors. The doors are too small, and the windows above the doors shouldn't be there if those windows are meant to be seen through. Either they're way over the heads of the people who would be in those buildings, or they're at their feet on the second level.
Either that truck in the background is twice as large as it should be, or the doors are too small. I suspect the latter. That would also go some way towards correcting the texture scale issue mentioned already by IronHawk, tho I tend to agree that the bricks are distractingly large on that building. The door in the background with the wooden pallet next to it (at least it looks like a door to me) is about the right height. Maybe even larger than that would be safe.
So I'd say axe the windows directly above the doors there, make those entries a bit larger and bring the other windows right there down a ways so they're more accessible to the video-game people who live in those buildings.
i think the van adds a lot of character and even though its low-poly its just far enough to trick the eyes to thinking its more poly's than it actually is.
Good normals take time to make and shouldnt ever be made using the diffuse. I could be wrong but the results i see ive seen countless times when new artist try to generate normals in that fashion.
But the shadows are long and don't fade over distance so it looks like evening or early morning, but thats not the same story the light color and intensity are telling.
The power lines have a funky haze between them. Looks like its an opacity map causing the issue? Might be better to create them out of actual 3 sided cylinders.
It's kind of odd seeing a bricked up window have older dirtier brick then the building. Normally the building has been around a lot longer then the brick used to secure the window. Maybe they got a deal on recycled bricks...
2nd story loading dock doors? No crane? How does that make sense...
It's unclear how your modules are built, in a way thats good, its something every modular design strives for. But in this case I think they might used incorrectly or not at all?
i also totally agree with what people have said about your brick normal map, it makes every thing look very noisy. try creating your normal map by builing up a greyscale height map by selecting varoius colours of brick in the diffuse and filling them with a light coulur, say mid grey on a black back ground, then you can use the eefects on the layer to create good glow falloffs. that way you can acheive good indentations on the mortar. finally use the diffuse (grey scaled) to just add a bit of surface roughness (say 20% opacity). additionally crazy bump can be used to get a very rough map which sometimes i overlay in areas to give bits a more broken, or worn feel.
hope that makes some sense, i dont do things exactly the same every time i make a height map, so play around.
another thing is that brick textures, bricks are slightly too tall and need to be shrunk vertically.
and another thing (only one more promise) id remove the colour from the map from the bin bags, make a good normal map and give them some spec it would work perfectly, and give some nice contrast to the diffuseness of everything else.
your so close to a great env. a day's work id say keep it up
Another intertesting thing you can do with bricks once you have a good brick base,make a few variants of it. Some with damage,missing bricks or cracks. Then give your mesh a good uniformed tile,then make a multisub material apply the base brick and give the rest of your i.d s to your variants and make slices in the mesh and change ideas in areas so you can add lots of interesting information that blends in perfectly with no signs of seams if done right.
sod that, add a directx realtime normal mapped shader to your material (presuming your using max, if maya then swap it for a similar) and hit the reload button every few changes, the more you can instantly see the effect of your texturing changes the better you'll get, plus you can see it on the actual mesh with no render time.
i usually set up a save action in PS and have a texture refresh script in maya so its a case of two buttons.
ps be safe and always save befor editing textures using a realtime shader in max as its a bit flacky in my experience and ive had max dissappear on me plenty of times with no auto save thingy, if your just editing the texture though no work is lost.
Thanks for the critics, everyone.