Probably a bit late to the crit front, but I'm seeking some advice on where to go with the scene. Ideally, I want to make this into a portfolio piece to help land my first job. At the moment most of the textures are in, knowing how to wrap the scene up is difficult. What areas does it need work on? and is it done incrementally or each area tackled separately?

If anyone wants to go shopping there its the Galleria San Federico in Turin

Its an interesting scene but i think the lighting could do with a lot of work. The second reference shot you posted would be a good place to start. Examine the light and where they are placed and how it falls on objects. Try to replicate it. Hopefully this will help you scene in terms of atmosphere.

Seconding your textures are lacking specular and thats the one thing in the ref which is prominent. The lack of it and a lack of shadow and texture detail is killing a lot of the forms of your models. Marble is quite a glossy texture and theres lots of it so it should be reflecting its environment if you can. The textures also lack lighting information. It looks like you have got a tiling texture for most of it and applied it to a lot of objects without much thought as to where the grime might be picked up? Specifcally looking at the green marble when i say that.

If i was you i would deconstruct the scene into its base modular elements. Go to town on those elements then rebuild it. When i say go to town model the high poly's, normal map the stuff, occlusion map and specular if you know how and reconstruct the scene in engine. A lot of the scene is modular so pay lots of attention to the modules and you will increase the overall qaulity of the scene.

Hope that helps. I think it has potential

Seems like a good piece here Target. The scene,as frubes mentioned will be a lot better if you get ur hands on the lighting and shading part. I believe this is a real time screenshot from Max's viewport,which seems interesting. It is obvious from the reference that the scene has to purely benefited from specularity and reflections all over. This leaves with carefull texturing and shading work. For instance the floor,needs to have the falloff reflections which is so vital to a marble material.
A HDR lighting solution will largely add a great mood to this scene as this scene relies more on a strong exterior day light which is lightign up the entire mall.
Then comes the interor decorative lights with emmisive nature.
you can quickly try a mockup in photshop for the lighting compositions and exposure. If you are doing this for any realtime game engines like Unreal,you will benefit more with the tools available there.
Man! why do you have cars in there ?
Keep it coming
Vj

1- your vertical scale is off everything seams too wide and low.

2- too much dirt in the glass arches, a fairly expensive but good reults method for this would be to duplicate the faces, have a low-ish res full window behind like you have now with the glass included, maybe a touch or ref mapping. and a smaller higher res but highly tilable map infront with the frame on . get them matching up and pushed infront the right amount and it will fake the parrelexing you see in the photos. it will also look cleaner unless you look more directly at it.

3- round windows are too saturated

4- too much noise and diffuse is hiding the forms in the marble work, maybe some flater spec would help bring them out. possibly make it darker aswell to let the spec do most of the work.

5- consider rivising the way your making the floor patterns as it looks too low res, if you cut along the patterns then make some tiling plain textures and trims that would probably get more res for less mapping.

6- fake some reflections in the floor, if ypu cant do realtime, good way to do this would be to screen grab the sections of level, blur and darken them then stick them on flipped simplified geom underneath. if they are very blurred then the fact that characters/ vehicles are not in them will not matter. this may sound hacky and old skool but ive got some real nice effects out of this which are still not possible with todays tech.

7- and lightning, thingk others have mentioend it but heres my take. less ambient and more bounce light, try to keep some of the darkened corners and strong lighting of the pics while making it more readable

hope it helps. could really come together with a few tweaks

Thanks for the tips and advice, at the moment it feels like everything I'm doing for this scene is going wrong, its getting very frustrating. UnreaEd likes to crash regularly and my workflow generally sucks. And I can't seem to get the wheels lit properly. All in all its not looking good. Does anyone want to finish this for me, then I take all the credit?

I've updated the floor tiles and saved a lot of texture space as a result - Thanks Shepeiro!. Still need to get more definition there though, it seems bland.... The mid section looks too puke coloured and crap so I'll have to sort that out. I'm getting loads of jagged edges, moreso than when I had one massive 2048*1024 texture for the floor. Still loads to do.



Forgot to add Frubes: what is the best way to use specular and specular power? In 3ds max I get the jist with the glossiness, but in Unreal it seems quite laborious to get the same results.

Specualr power controlls the falloff of the highlight.

attach a constant to the specular power and crank it to something like 50-60 to get a smaller, glossy style hihglight. the defauly value for spec power is 15 i think. You can also create a simple grey scale gloss map to define areas of diffferent gloss values on your object.

Got the entry in on time, but it was rushed and some elements were solely unreal ed controlled, such as the specular. It was messy. Learnt loads from the experience, will try to improve.