wip apartments and houses site

[SgWRX]

not sure what specific critique i'm looking for, but how's this for a start? lighting? this is max9 with mental ray. i think i need some direction for improvements. thanks.

[mikedeerf]

A couple suggestions I see:

-The visible horizon line suggests undeveloped, flat land for as far as the eye can see. Try breaking it up somehow (trees, background image, etc.).

-Your grass texture is pixelating - scale it down. If it starts showing tiling, do a search here. I found a grass texture on this forum a long while ago that works pretty well; sorry I can't remember the source...

-The image seems sort of ... flat. You said mental ray - are you using GI and/or FG? The shadows seem really sharp. The trees especially, the shadows should be softer.

 

Personally, I stick with the Mental Ray Arch & Design material types, and use Mental Ray with Final Gather (no GI yet, though I've been testing it a bit).

 

Your model is a good start, it's just missing ... something. Try playing with the textures, lighting, and background, and see what you come up with.

[SgWRX]

thanks. well here's an intermediate update. the camera angle isn't that great. still working...

 

oh yeah, the grass needs another redo. yeah i've seen posts about blend and mixing noise maps. actually i had one i liked from another file so i'll try to use that one and see how it works. it was a cellular, noise mix or something.

[SgWRX]

update. different camera angle. how's the lighting, grass and general textures. the treeline well, still learning. trees are a little goofy too, just the standard onyx, haven't mapped the leaves or anything yet.

[SgWRX]

another update. i got the tree line somewhat under control. the hard part with the trees (onyx) is getting the coloring where i want. it's hard to predict what the rendered colors/brightness will look like due to lighting in the scene.

 

i did this with 3 ambient occlusion renders. did quite a bit of color correction and brightness adjustments.