@oobersli
Thanks for the critique oobersli, and taking my feelings into account

When it comes to some of my current geo choices I can defiantly see your point and I’m actually about to replace the floor with a normal mapped version, but for many of my other pieces there is a lot of different silhouette break that I felt needed actual geometry support so that it could hold its detail better up close. And you kinda touched on it I wanted to show off some more modeling, and your right that today we are all about optimizing, sometimes pushing things that look abit worse but are a lot cheaper, but I feel that is due more to our limitations than actually getting a better artistic result. And when working on an actual game piece it is very important because you can always use that extra stuff somewhere else when your engine can only take so much. But I’m also not constrained by an entire game world with animations and characters and needing to worry about frame rate and such, so some of those extra things wont get used somewhere else. So I felt I could allow myself a bit more spending on details being as that’s what I wanted to focus on. That being said I am still optimizing more because your completely right that is still very important, and I think its all about finding that sweet balance of optimized quality.

So I am continuing to iterate on my textures and models and taking some of your points into consideration to see if I cant get them up another level in overall quality.

As for the reference you are correct I did stray from it and I meant to, the Image was more for inspiration and gave me my basic layout and feel which I then built upon. i probably should have stated this in the beginning and realized this now. From the start I decided to move in a different direction with the architectural style, where the reference had a dwarven ruin kind of feel to it. I wanted to create my own, drawing a lot of shapes and details from art deco style buildings.

and again Thank you for taking the time to look at my work and give me some feed back. it should help me quite abit as i try to draw this project to a close.

Hey everyone,
I've got a bit of an update again, most notably made some lighting changes and added some emissive to accent the scene and hopefully add some visual interest. Also finally added normal and detail normal maps to all the structural assets. and fully normal mapped the tiled floor down to a 32 tri simplified mesh.

The environment is pretty cool but the lighting needs some work. It looks very contrasty and flat because the "sun" is pretty much pointing down. I like your first tests better, they had some cool subtle shadows and were also much simpler. The crazier you get with lighting the harder it is to get it right!

I also believe the textures look too noisy, specially the floor tiles and the rocks. I believe the rocks would look a lot better if they had broader shapes instead of all the mid range details that they have right now.

Anyways keep it up, looking forward to seeing your progress!

Got another update, been tweaking materials and meshes a bit, played with lighting some more and decided to try and set the mood a bit with some atmosphere and snow flurries and some buildup. this will probably be close to what i turn in for my actual assignment grade, but i am definatly going to continue to work on this and hopefully smooth out more and more of the faults in it.











Thanks for all the advice and critique so far guys.

Made some changes to the lighting to draw some interest to some areas. i felt that the inside most halls could use some warmer lighting to both bring them out and push back the cold a bit more. I've also finally managed to setup and render out a Fly through, which is how i wanted to ultimately show off this piece.

hope you all like, as always any critiques are welcome as i will continue to polish it.
But I am also looking to start a new project this month, probably something a bit smaller focusing more on textures. still tossing around some ideas so we will see what develops.

i'll post the video soon, until then heres some new shots of the environment.

Probably a very insignificant feature, and maybe even a temp one, but your moon(s) and sky in general looks very low-res. In your last image this detracts quite a lot from the outstanding quality of everything else in the scene. I also think the background could do with some more high quality rocks and landscaping because towards the lower half of the sky, the scene begins to look confusing and unrealistic because there is no horizon

Hey everyone got my video show of the Palace. hope you like it.

http://vimeo.com/37874431

Originally Posted by nathanbarrett

Probably a very insignificant feature, and maybe even a temp one, but your moon(s) and sky in general looks very low-res. In your last image this detracts quite a lot from the outstanding quality of everything else in the scene. I also think the background could do with some more high quality rocks and landscaping because towards the lower half of the sky, the scene begins to look confusing and unrealistic because there is no horizon

Thanks for pointing out the background, I agree that i should definitely up its quality so that i can take those shots looking outward and still have it look just as good. maybe ill add the silhouettes of structures in the background as well, but we will see i suppose.

So I've been trying to find some time to continue to work on my most recent scene. Pretty much across the board a big critique i have received is that i need to work on my lighting, and especially pushing some of my shadows more to create more visual interests. I made quite a few changes to the lighting, i found that the moon light was washing out most of the scene so i toned it back a bit and tried to get more interesting shadows out of it. and also focused in on light sources more.

so heres some update shots.














As always any and all feed back is much appreciated.

Looking much nicer with the shadows but i feel the blueness of the scene is a little to strong. Just my personal taste.

Originally Posted by Darkleopard

Looking much nicer with the shadows but i feel the blueness of the scene is a little to strong. Just my personal taste.

yea i know what you mean, I have been trying to find a good balance with the blue for a bit now, I like that its helping to push the night time feel and helps the cold bare down on the scene, but It also keeps over powering it as well. I am going to continue to play with it some more, maybe pulling some of the saturation out of the blue will give me a better result.