Chinese Restaurant (3-D Environment)

CounterSeal

Hey everyone. First time posting for critiques here, but I would just like some critiques and comments on this restaurant piece I did for my portfolio. This is a relatively low poly, Chinese restaurant of the Qing Dynasty era (1600s - 1800s) meant for real-time rendering (these shots are rendered in Maya via mental Ray for the sake of presenting in my portfolio).

As you can see, I'm not really going for realism as I've tried to bring out more contrast with more saturated red and brown hues. My primary references were from the restaurant in Jet Li's Fearless and several reference pictures of Qing Dynasty furniture and architecture.

I'm mainly looking for critiques on the lighting and texturing, but feel free to critique or ask any questions on any aspect as you see fit.

I'm graduating from university in a few weeks and am currently putting all my pieces together (this being one of them). I've already been getting critiques from my peers, classmates, and instructors, and would just like the thoughts of fellow Polycounters as well!

System

Feels like you badly need to bake some ao into those textures and make a nice lighting setup, maybe with some glow effects. A few of the wood textures seem blurry, the plates are too low poly and not sure why you used mental ray for rendering? It isn't doing anything for your scene.

pliang

The main problem is that there's very little clarity in the wood, they seem more blurry with the muddy saturated colors of the wood. For the wood, especially the paneling there should be more contrast and less repetition.

The dining ware could be taken to town than just setting them up in idle.

I know you're not trying to be dead on authentic but it is better to have something to base on, I would like to see your research into this.

It just seems Asian, not exactly Qing era as not too many elements indicate the time period you're aiming at.

--Complaints from Chinese Guy--

adam

Were these rendered in Max?

CounterSeal

Thanks for all the responses so far!


@GCMP: Most of the textures do have AO baked in, it might be harder to see due to Maya blurring up the render. However, even then, for example, you can clearly see the shading in the corners of the main staircase where the steps and the barriers meet. Yes, there is a glow effect utilizing a glow map on the lanterns, I spent some time adjusting it, but I assume you are saying that they should glow even more?

@pliang: Yeah, the bluriness is probably due to the Maya render where I failed to check off the default filtering Maya applies to all textures. I've fixed that and the renders look sharper now, I'll have new renders posted up later. Besides the blurry rendering, the reason the wood might lack clarity in the details is because they're supposed to have been painted (where the usual details in wood are probably saturated by the color of the paint), but I understand what you're saying, and I think I'll give some more variation in the types of wood I have.

I know that I can add so much more to give it more of a Qing era look and feel (without factoring in deadlines), but at the very least, to my knowledge, the type of furniture in the scene was not used in China before the 1500s. China was under progressively more Western influences during the Qing dynasty. More types of woods were brought in, allowing more decorative furniture and "contemporary" styles for the time. I was hoping the furniture would give the "Qing" style away, but I totally understand what you mean when you say there aren't many elements to indicate the time period.

Here are some of the references I used. Keep in mind I used reference mainly for the architecture and modeling rather than color palette.




@adamBrome: These were rendered in Maya via mental ray. I figured I'd have some fun using MR instead of exporting it into an engine since I already have two other portfolio environments in Unreal.

bugo

looks a nice place to go eat! i like it