[Kyle]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

This took about a week to complete not as finsished as I would have liked it to be but its as good as I could do with the tight deadline I had.
Would have liked to add more details to add realism but I think its ok.

Comments are welcome!

[NicoR44]

Oops, this one really needs a lot of work Kyle.

[Kyle]

Any chance you could give me some feedback as to why you think it needs a lot of work.
I know some of the texturing is off but I only had a few hours to texture and about 3 days to model.

[NicoR44]

Hi Kyle

Well, overall it's missing realism, at first sight I thought this wasn't a maxwell render.
Materials look dull and the black material is so black that all detail in the traffic light models and building on the left is gone.
The buildings just look like extrudes with holes in them for windows missing detail.
The glass material also looks strange, they are all mirrors, and all perfectly flat, not like in real live with slight variations in the surface (bump map) and very very slightly rotated compared to each other to create those little differences to get it to look real.

There are no signs, no cars or people, the texture of the asphalt has no variations

I don't mean to be harsh, but looking at your other renders, I'm sure you can do a lot better than this, also in the time given.

[Kyle]

These are good points indeed especially the blacks I was finding it difficult to find a correct colour balance.

As for the background of the work, this render is supposed to show concept art for a game idea for an assignment so the models are all low poly and should be able to run smoothly in a rendering engine such as UDK. Also this means most textures are all low resolution.

I used Maxwell Render just for its ease of use no messing around with raytrace samples shadow samples etc. I may do a high poly version with more realism in the future if I get chance taking your points into consideration.

Thamks for your feedback though much appreciated.

[Half Life]

You know I almost said it looks like a Maxwell render of a video game set -- and that's exactly what it was

I think it looks great for what it is

For speed of texturing for projects like this you may want to look at Substance Designer -- a small library can generate a huge amount of variation to enrich detail and keep small file size:

http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/s ... e/designer

Also if you just want to try/use a few premade substances without making your own take a look at this:

http://www.turbosquid.com/Substance

The player is free and comes with a couple really nice and flexible samples -- the wood floor generator substance is worth installing the software for alone (and free).

Best,
Jason.

[Kyle]

Those links are really cool Jason I'll definately look into that program for textures.
Glad you like the render. I recently watched some of your Maxwell VTC videos the other day. You have a great ability for teaching with clear explanations so everything makes sense

[itsallgoode9]

one thing that can be helpful in situations like this is to do some sort of of post processing to give it a bit of style and reaslism. nothing over the top or anything but it can help. One program I use, which i think does this really well is Motiva's Real Camera program. There are others out there and I think you can do the same type of thing in Adobe light room possibly? Basically in Real Camera it has presets for a ton of different brands and types of films, which will affect the coloring and realistically affect the contrast to look more like something from actual film. There aren't a TON of options to adjust in the program but sometimes it is a quick fix to help out images.

I rarely finish an image with out running it through the program, even if i just use it very subtlety.

here is a link to a video showing how it works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw2WlCsDY-c
The images they are using are images that work PERFECTLY with this program and as i've found out, not all do. Some work better than others, so give it a try.

[Kyle]

Thats another really useful program as well I'll definately look more into that software too. I struggle to add post processing to images to make them look proffessional and realsitic.
Its something that Ive never been able to get my head around due to lack of time, knowledge and good references.

My only worry I have about all these programs is that I'm not learning the fundamental ways to do everything. For example using a UV unwrap program all the time stops me from learning how to do it the 'old school' way. Of course I try my best to keep up with these older techniques.

I just worry as a student, that if I get a job after my course and the company doesnt use some of these programs I'm basically screwed as I cant do it the old way.
I imagine these older techniques will eventually fade out in the future though

[itsallgoode9]

Yeah, when you can learn the manual way to do things it is good. With something like this though, I feel like it is only 1% of the total image so it's not something that is worthwhile to spend time learning when it plays such a tiny part in the image. I say, find a shortcut, something that works, and go with it. Something more fundamental to 3d though, such as you mentioned with UV layout, is definitely worthwhile to spend time learning.

Anyways, just keep in mind to give this a whirl especially when you run into a tight deadline and you're image is feeling a bit flat or not how you like. Sometimes you just run out of time so you have to pull some tricks out of your sleeve to help it out.