Critique my Stylized Modular Skate-park
polycounter lvl 4
Currently working on an idea I had for a stylized skate park to probably end up being rendered in UE5 or something.
I've been trying some different things like instead of having a cylindrical rail on the top edge of the ramp, a more square like one. I modeled out a bunch of different pieces to be put together but before I go much further I thought it would be important to pause and start texturing a couple objects to see what my workflow will look like to achieve the stylized look that I'm after. I worked on the square rail in z brush a bit and did a little texture work on it in Substance Painter, from this render I can see it could use a little more of something. I do plan to do some scratches that maybe show metal underneath from all the grinding that's been done on it.
My main focus currently is getting the wood paneling on the front of the ramp here right. I decided to try making the material from scratch in Substance Designer and I'm moderately happy with the result. Obviously not a designer pro so I am in need of guidance on the general look. I've included a reference that I had for the wood paneling. I'm not trying to do a 1 to 1 recreation of course, but just something in that same vein. Let me know what you think and how I could improve on the design. I am unsure about if there should be similar paneling on the sides or if it should just be a plywood texture instead, but maybe that wouldn't look right.
Thank you in advance!
Replies
Rough overpaint:
Reduced the gap strength and added some smoothed over fixtures - just an idea. To minimize joints could offset boards by 0.5. Another plywood feature could be knots.
Generally, I would focus on nailing down the look first. Once you identified the important features, you can still make a material in Designer.
Thank you for your feedback, I agree with what you're saying. I'm curious about the smoothed over fixtures. Did you paint over those just to help remove the gaps there or are you saying instead of mini-rectangles, there should be just longer ones going vertically?
Some fixtures/ nails/ screws was just an idea to add some extra, small scale details. Another way to do so, would be to play with the plywood's grain pattern and knots/branches.
To quickly explore different plywood layouts, you could sketch over the base ramp shape. Drawing in the structure beneath might help with the decision making. Here is a rough sketch how an exploration could look like:
But of course, the rule of cool overrides everything 😎