Suspended in Time - Critiques needed

NomadSoul2501

So I created this scene as part of an Art-test.
I'm rather happy with how it turned out, but it wasn't quite there yet.
So I figured I'd turn to you and ask for your help.
I want to finish the piece, put it into a full environment and texture it, but before I do that, I want to lock down composition and modeling.
Working on this environment was tons of fun and I really want to see it through.
So please, any comments on what I can do to improve it will be loads of help



























To flesh out and explore the piece further I imagined a short story to go with the environment. You can find it here: http://www.g-cg.com/content/?p=425

glottis8

looks really nice man.

Wonkey

Pretty sweet, I can't wait for the textures!

n88tr

very very nice.

NomadSoul2501

Thanks for the encouraging words guys.
I'll work hard and make it as awesome as I can.
I really need to figure out where I went wrong though, so please be harsh in your critiques.

MainManiac

How exactly would one go about texturing this? Seems like theres alot of little rock chunks, how do you handle those at a good timing?

tkkstar

I'd say there is a great roadmap to a good piece but as far as being practical I'd agree with Frell. It might be an enormous task to texture all those rock bricks. What I'd suggest is model and texture a grouping of bricks (3-6) and then copy and paste them and modify as you wish.

The shadows from the grass planes are showing instead of the alpha. But the alpha for the tree leaves are working correctly.

A good way to look at your project now might be to step back and work on the project by a piece by piece basis or even sectioning it out. I'm sure it will help you see in what direction you want to go.

Will Faucher

frell wrote: »

How exactly would one go about texturing this? Seems like theres alot of little rock chunks, how do you handle those at a good timing?

Modular brick/stone sets. As well as tiling textures. Simple.

ariofighter

I think the thing that I love the most about this piece is that you set it in the open, well kind of. So many of these Angkor Wat projects are dark and burred in a jungle. You were able to get a similar environment buy placing it on a cliff with a nice blue.

One of my crits would be in the first shot you placed the pillar of the bridge covering a large portion of the temple entrance. So my eye wants to see more, but there is a big chunk of foreground in the way. That could just be a problem with me though.

I do have a question about the vines that surround the main tree. How did you model them? Did you use a spline or just extrude from a cylinder?

NomadSoul2501

@frell and tkkstar.
Thanks for the comments guys. Which bricks do you mean?
The caved in roof, the walls or the walkway?
There's only 4types of roof blocks, 6types of walkway bricks and
the walls are for the most part flat with some imperfections.
I was thinking of a lot of tileable materials as most of the geometry
is stuck into eachother anyway and so seams wont be such a big deal
with some carefull uv-mapping.
Also, most of the pieces are modular to begin with.

I think I'll do a couple of paintovers to set the mood and then approach it
as tkkstar sugested on a section by section basis.

@ariofighter
Unfortunately I cant take any credit for the concept.
It was for an art-test so the setting was given to me, I was encouraged however to
add to the piece and so I added a lot of things, changing the build of the temple
and the surrounding courtyard.

The roots I did by extruding along a spline using the nurbs tools and converting to poly.
Then I used construction history to fine tune the paths.
For the vines, I converted the tree to a live surface so that I could draw the curves onto
the geometry and then connected them by curve snapping the different vines together.
After that I extruded to polys and cut holes into where the vines meet. Finaly they got merged into one mesh.