Environment Work

Seere

Hi everyone,

been browsing these forums for awhile now. Thought I would make a post and hopefully get some tips on how to improve. I'm in my last semester of post-grad college for 3d art. I am doing environments for game's.

Any good/bad comments you can make will be most appriciated. So I know what i'm doing right and wrong.

Thank you for taking the time to view my work.






This one is a work in progress. I still have texture tweaks to do.. but had to hand this in for this latest semester as it was.



3d Game Environment Artist
www.davidsawchuk.com

vofff

your two last pics are extremely dark.

Rurouni Strife

I checked out your portfolio. First, you should probably redo your website. There are tons of threads and a few stickys about how they should look or the best way to make them. Second, I thought your WWII pieces were better than the ones you had up here. With the Japanese picture, the grass looks to be a Maya paint fx or something that was used to create it for the render. That won't fly in a game engine. Most grass is 2 intersecting planes or more. Your actual models in all three works look pretty good, what hurts them I think are your textures. It seems that some of your textures are procedural and created in the 3D package? It's most noticeable on the sewer image on your site.

Look at a lot of the WIP threads here, and search for Adam's Evil Genius Base project on these forums. It's a great starting point for learning a lot about pretty much everything. Good luck on your revisions and job search!

pliang

For the house scene, the night time scene looks like you may have simply dimmed the background which is not how night time works. Usually you would still have some skylight going on with shadow/background colors pending on time of the evening. The sky would be mostly visible too unless it's a stormy night.

Also the lanterns seem really big in scale, may want to keep in mind that when objects in a scene are off in proportion, the lighting will appear less convincing or realistic by the looks of what you have here.

As for the house itself, architecture wise it doesn't really say Chinese to me, unless your reference say otherwise.

If you have some more time, you should consider adding more to the scenes so that you will have multiple interesting angles to show as well as a focal point in the scene, the scenes don't seem to tell me much what's going on.

dlx

You have some good ideas started in the house scene above. I agree with pliang. Add some more to the scene so you can try different camera angles. The current angle is causing an overall flatness to the scene. The main focal point is the gate and stairs but the camera is aligned flat to them. Moving the camera and rotating it 10 0r 15 degrees would make a huge difference.

You also have some "bad tangents" that contribute to the flatness, like the top of the roof lining up with the left mountain behind it. The roof line should be more deliberately above or below the line of the mountain to create more separation between them. The top of the gate also lines up with the bottom edge of the roof, flattening the space between them.

Just like in a drawing, the way these major lines intersect give the viewer depth information which he uses to understand the space. Lines that seem to be continuous (like the curve of the mountain down to the roof) will appear to be at the same depth.

Some depth fog would also help this scene. Your closest objects (tree) and your distant objects (mountains) have the same range of value and contrast. A little atmospheric perspective goes a long way.