My first Environ scene
polycounter lvl 17
Hi. I have posted some images of my scene before when it was a working progress. I know I could work on it more but I'm in a school schedule, I have to get everything done to graduate (demo, dvds and website stuff). Please critque my work, I know there are much more things I can work on. I want to get better with each personal projects I work on.
Model: I modeled each building as one object. I know I was told it's much easier to texture them as seperate objects. The Roofs are seperate objects thought...so I can save polys. Here are my WireFrames
Textures: I learned most of my texturing during my work on my environment Demo Reel. So I'm quite a noob on texturing still and need to learn more on this department especially painting matte. I took the pictures that I used as my Reference and texture purpose. there are things like my specs map on my Objects I could have fix if I had more time, they are too shinny.
Future: I know there is so much more I can work on, to get it better. But with school being done, I won't have a powerful computer to work on personal stuff. My comp at home shuts off or freezes whenever I tried to render. So my plan is to work on something much smaller and simpler. I want to take on another project where it will help me more on Shaders, texturing and a mixture of organic modeling.
Any suggestions, critque would be so great. I just want to know what I did worng and right so I can learn from my mistakes and get better.
Here is my Portfolio images.
For textures Click Here , More Images
Model: I modeled each building as one object. I know I was told it's much easier to texture them as seperate objects. The Roofs are seperate objects thought...so I can save polys. Here are my WireFrames
Textures: I learned most of my texturing during my work on my environment Demo Reel. So I'm quite a noob on texturing still and need to learn more on this department especially painting matte. I took the pictures that I used as my Reference and texture purpose. there are things like my specs map on my Objects I could have fix if I had more time, they are too shinny.
Future: I know there is so much more I can work on, to get it better. But with school being done, I won't have a powerful computer to work on personal stuff. My comp at home shuts off or freezes whenever I tried to render. So my plan is to work on something much smaller and simpler. I want to take on another project where it will help me more on Shaders, texturing and a mixture of organic modeling.
Any suggestions, critque would be so great. I just want to know what I did worng and right so I can learn from my mistakes and get better.
Here is my Portfolio images.
For textures Click Here , More Images
Replies
The only major eyesore is the trees. The harsh lighting rendered on these brings the overall scene down a lot. Try working out the rendering or focus on creating better trees in general.
Some props appear to be oddly proportioned, and lack a good shadow or transition to the ground surface.
The materials, especially the metals, have an odd bump and glossiness. As with the props, this throws off your up close or eye level perspective images.
Be careful with photosourcing. It looks like some of your textures are blurry and/or washed out. Also, try to keep your pixel depth as even as possible (difficult to tell if this is really a problem here or not).
Pretty good stuff though. If you fixed up the trees and materials a bit, youd be set with a great looking environment here.
Cholden ist right about the trees looking odd due to the lightning, but most of all do the look wrong since they are placed wrongly. I a city noone would plant trees on such small sidewalks, so close to the building windows etc.
Either make them much smaller or loose them all together as they are hurting the believability of your scene.
Also, along with what others have said, stuff seems a little blurred. If you are using mental ray maybe try using a diffrent filter to render with.
Cholden:
Trees: Here is the tree leaves texture. Is it too busy? Is that the problem? Should I lessen the leaves...or blurr it out more?
Light: I was learning lighting as I about to render it. I also had a night scene. I wanted to do a night to day transsition. One of my teacher told me to nuke out the night scene entirely, cause it wasn't good. Is there any lighting tutorial online?
Props: About that...they where the first thing I modeled. At first I wanted to go for a driving game scene style..in which to keep everything low res. By the end I did changed a few of them...the bench, garbage bin, fire hydrent ,clock etc. Sadly I didn't had enough time to remodel all the rest of the low poly objects.
Texture: Blurry stuff...oops yeah..I kinda took a small part of a picture and extracted it bigger. Which is prolly why the are more blurry that most.
Thanks for responding.
JkMakowka: from the reference they were close to the buildings. I also maded the sidewalk much bigger than the reference...it made the sidewalk way too busy. Perhaps I should've decrese the size of the stems?
The lighting part I need to learn more about, which I know it sucks.
Thanks man.
Katzeimsack: foliage normals? :-p oh man I'm clueless at what foliage means, care to explain? Thank
Striff: I was using metal ray for spec purpose. How's my building specs? too blurry? I did tone it down a bite cause I thought at first it looked too much mirror like. The blurry ness it prolly the texture of the objects..which was my flaut for photosourcing. Man I should blurr the leaves a bit eh?
The curvy orad paint, if you check to with all the scene it will show you that that road is curvy. The other side has an extruting sidewalk.
Props: lol man I notice that when I rendered my scene, saldly I didn't had time to render out my scene again. It was the third time I rendered them. I think the bumpy part is due to my object texturing. I'm still a noob in texturing. Thank you for responding.
change the normals of the leaves geometry!
When you use maya you should select all leaves --> edit polygons --> normals --> Set vertex normal --> xValue=0,yValue=1,zValue=0
btw, you know what'd really help, and add back some fine detail? Telegraph wires. They're the new normal mapping.
A good start!