Would like to hear what other people besides my friends think.
Ah the immortal words that lead a person to Polycount. I hope you mean them though!
I just accidentally my post, so I'll write it again in brief:
Your render is too dark and too blurry, its hard to make out what you have in your scene. Never hide your work! Use lighting to draw focus, not to hide. For the blurriness, render out your image at a much larger size, or render them at a very very large size and resize that image in photoshop to a smaller image using 'bicubic-sharper'. Photoshop is good at keeping in detail and giving nice anti-aliasing this way. If you don't understand bits of that, give any terms a google or check out the link to the polycount wiki in the top right corner of the site.
You have a long way to go, but a good start. If you want to make game art, google UDK or Unity and read up about these very accessible game engines you can use to display your work in real time.
Too goddamn dark, your lighting needs a blue 'night sky' light and then orange-ish lights for the lanterns. It looks like you've got rough material transitions there on the ground, everything is kind of simplistic and sectioned off. I think your scale might be off as well.
it's a good start, but i agree with what most others are saying, the lighting could use a bit of tweeking. It's really hard to crit when we don't know, what you're aiming for style wise. To me the build looks very simple, you can easily tell how it's built, which is not usually a great thing.
The seems between your textures are really really obvious, the textures themselves need a bit more love.
And the scale seems off. Try adding in a block roughly the size of a person, it helps to get perspective on how big things need to be.
Also adding in a normal map and a spec map, and even a glow for the lanterns can make a huge difference, but i reccomend trying to fix the textures and scale before attempting any of that.
As said by many others, lighting needs to be improved majorly. Also looks like you could use a bump/normal map in that stone path to add more detail. It's a good layout and starting setup for something that could become crazy detailed if you put some more time into it.
Too blurry. Too dark. Needs more head room, more space at the top of the composition. The scale of the textures are off. Needs a sense of scale. Keep working on it man. Good luck.
Replies
What do you want critiqued, specifically?
I just accidentally my post, so I'll write it again in brief:
Your render is too dark and too blurry, its hard to make out what you have in your scene. Never hide your work! Use lighting to draw focus, not to hide. For the blurriness, render out your image at a much larger size, or render them at a very very large size and resize that image in photoshop to a smaller image using 'bicubic-sharper'. Photoshop is good at keeping in detail and giving nice anti-aliasing this way. If you don't understand bits of that, give any terms a google or check out the link to the polycount wiki in the top right corner of the site.
You have a long way to go, but a good start. If you want to make game art, google UDK or Unity and read up about these very accessible game engines you can use to display your work in real time.
The seems between your textures are really really obvious, the textures themselves need a bit more love.
And the scale seems off. Try adding in a block roughly the size of a person, it helps to get perspective on how big things need to be.
Also adding in a normal map and a spec map, and even a glow for the lanterns can make a huge difference, but i reccomend trying to fix the textures and scale before attempting any of that.