Road to Bastille

3dmangini

Hey everyone.

I am a student in my graduating quarter at the Art Institute - San Diego and I wanted to share some of my work with you all. The scene was modeled in Max/Zbrush and rendered in UDK.

I made use of tiled textures and modular wall pieces for most of the architecture as well as tons of decals to remove the "tiled" look.

I don't have much time left to make changes but any recommendations or critiques are welcome.

Thanks

CrackRockSteady

Looks really good! The only thing that stands out immediately is there is a pretty obvious lightmap seam in the tunnel under the clock.

Are you planning to post any wireframes or textures?

3dmangini

Thanks for the reply. I'll have wireframe and texture breakdowns ready soon.

And that lightmap issue will be fixed as well, there are a few of them lurking in the scene.

Samfisher84

looks really cool, give us some texture planes and modular pieces?

sltrOlsson

I think it looks super! I feel that you can do more with the lighting. Have you tweeked and used the SSAO? Have you played around with the lighmass settings?

It feels like that corner with the stands don't get there appropriate focus. .

ParoXum

Road looks too bright compared to the rest of the pavements.

It looks like you symmetry'ed the main building which is good, but you can see the texture flipping in the middle.

Shogun3d

Very nice work. Darken up those roads along the edges, you can vertex paint if need be or through the textures. It will help pop out the terrain a bit and give the scene a bit more natural feeling.

I think your lighting could be a bit more pronounced as well, for instance the castle area looks flat from the bottom, if you provided a strong directional that brings out highlights and provides more shadows, you'd get a much stronger composition.

Otherwise looking good, the shops look great.

WetWired

Looking pretty good all round so far, one thing that jumped out at me though is the 2nd shot, for some reason having the small (I assume bell tower?) pieces on either side symmetrically seems to break the composition for me, it's starting to look busy and lacking definition. They're currently tiering up towards the middle drawing your eye in but where your eye rests is just empty sky.

I'd either thin them out or have a larger main tower in the center.

3dmangini

Wow, thanks for all the feedback guys.

@CrackRockSteady & Samfisher84: Yes, I have some with me to show today.

@sltrOlsson: I have tweaked lightmass and SSAO some, but not to a major extent. Should I try to squeeze more contrast out of it?

@ParoXum: I agree the road can be darker and it's not helping that the sidewalk is dark and sitting right next to it. Will tone down the value.

@kaburan: The road is currently setup for vertex painting, although I agree the edges can be more defined. Darkening the dirt tilable used can address that since I tried to paint that in along the edge. Also more dirt

@WetWired: A middle piece of the tower would be a great idea because currently my lightmaps aren't agreeing with symmetry. That's my biggest problem is that visible line down the middle.

3dmangini

Here's some model and texture sheets used. The first two are some of my tilables used on the centerpiece building. They were sculpted in Zbrush and baked down.

The houses are comprised of the modular pieces shown along with supporting trim pieces.