hey been following this thread for awhile now

looks awesome man, but i agree with hessi, the lighting still needs alot of work.. it still seems really scattered where the eye should goto, what kind of lighting setup are you using?

at the moment the piece leads the eye right to the top of that broken building because there seems to be a hotspot there, but doesnt really make sense since it seems the sun is behind the building, maybe try moving the sun pointing towards the scene rather than behind everything. then the stuff in the foreground would be lit up alot better and contrast more with the stuff goin on in the bg

have a look at some call of duty screen shots and see how the lighting is done in there

might i suggest some distance fog? it'll add some depth

anywas just a couple thoughts , hope it makes sense. keep goin this thing is lookin hot!

whats with the random blurry bits?

That's coming along nicely! I would call this one done especially since you seem like you want to move on to another project and I don't blame you. It's not that this one isn't an awesome display of environmental skills, because it is. But you could be tweaking it for weeks and I doubt the time invested in tweaking will only be marginally productive when you could bust out another scene in that time.

I really like the addition of the car. Very interesting detail, having the door ajar is icing on the cake! Perfect use of car to its fullest. Having the car half on half off camera adds to the scene as a whole, it lets me know there are other things around the camera I can't see, makes me want to look around and explore. Something you want to foster in portfolio pieces =) Nice work!

Crits, (if you're still interested in tweaking it to death):
- "whats with the random blurry bits?" The jig is up =/ post production mess ups? I'm all for a slight retouching when you're working on "beauty renders" slight color corrections, a tiny amount of DOF added, some shadow retouching, and maybe even fake some bloom the same way any game engine would, but don't over do it to the point people notice.

- The shadows are too sharp. With the sun setting, the light hitting the street is more or less going to be indirect which means its bouncing off of other things on its way from the sun to the street. Which defuses the rays and blurs shadows. If you're using shadow maps you can turn the size down and the sample area up so that line will be less sharp. You want people to know the buildings shadow is there but not really define it that sharply.

This just looks like a new light colour setup with an added vehicles. I can see you added shadows to the piece, but they're entirely too light and blend in with the rest of the scene too much. While some visual noise is good, when the piece is nothing but visual noise there's overkill and the piece's lighting and naturalistic fidelity is lost.

To demonstrate, with this new piece - when blurred - there's still no contrast besides the sky & the main geometry. The car adds a nice chunk to it.



The more I see this the more I think a faster solution would be to adjust shadow colour and opacity, then move in the composition to show LESS of the scene. Since you probably don't want to re-do the art for this piece, I think adjusting those to things and tightening the view would work. Focus on a few key areas rather than the whole thing.