By The Sea

This is my second full blender project after completing a couple tutorials series. Tried the best I can at texturing, however I get the feeling the sunset is pretty amateur. Any critiques would be greatly appreciated, thanks!


The water’s surface looks a little too much likea solid surface. It might help to give it a glass shader instead, or to lower the roughness.

Also a quick question, is the sun only composited in, or is there a lamp/emitting circle there?

The water was originally a glass shader however I changed it to try and look a little more realistic. I’ll try that though and post the result. Also the sun is a sphere mesh with an emission. I was trying to make the sunset as authentic as possible. I don’t think I succeeded.

This will fix alot of problems in the picture:

  1. Decrease roughness on water.
  2. Extend the water mesh to the left, or replace the empty space with land or something cause right now you can clearly see that the water is a quadratic mesh. The horizon is the only place where you are allowed to have empty space (Sky).
  3. Planks are too tight and has the exact same uv mapping. Try varying the mapping and separating the planks a bit.
  4. Add a plank benearth the other planks (it should go from the bottom of the screen to the pole at the end, on the right side) as structural support and realism.
  5. Maybe make the clouds continue “towards the sun” or “downwards toward the horizon” to actually show how the sea extends endlessly.

Perspective could be better but i’m bad at making good perspective honestly.

deck looks like it is made out of identical boards and the wood grain is overly contrasted and the wood is too brown. the color saturation is too high. the perspective might be better from standing on the dock. And it would look better if it felt like the dock was directly in line with the setting sun.

The boards are identical because they are one mesh in an array. I’m trying to think about a better way to do that and remap textures. I’m still really new however I’ll definitely post my next iteration.

It would probably be good for you to set up a low, directional light-source (basically corresponding to the sun …) that will cast angled light upon the deck, then actually re-work the structure of that deck so that there are gaps between the boards and irregularity between them. (Each board should not be a carbon-copy of the others.) Work with the texturing so that the boards look more weathered. (These boards look like they just came straight from a YellaWood® display at Home Depot!)

Also consider adding more posts, and maybe being a bit more imaginative with regard to your camera positioning. Consider how you wish to present this dock.

For instance, a rather interesting treatment can be obtained by using a zoom lens, positioned further back from the shore, to create a “fore-shortening” effect. It works in Blender just like it does in real life.

As far as the sea goes … you should make an artistic decision of just how “stylized” you would like your image to be. My eye is perfectly willing to accept it either way. But, what you’ve got right now is a very angry​ sea … underneath a seraphic sky.

In reality you should be able to see ~12 Km far at the horizon, here you have the sea extending just some tens of meters; try and put another large plane extending far away toward the horizon.

paolo

Thanks for the responses. I actually took a second pass at the final. Added an HDR Sky, changed up the boards and the water. Going to work on the poles as they look pretty bad.


  1. Now the pier is too orange, and it looks like the light is coming from the opposite direction to the sun. You could try and place a sun lamp in-front of the sun, facing toward the camera. The actual sun will be still visible, but you add extra light to illuminate the pier and water.

  2. The sun looks like it is floating in the water (because the water slightly wraps around the sun).

I’ll give that a try, thanks for the feedback!

Try changing the background to a transparency and put a plane as an emission behind it. I find this gives pretty good results. you will have to adjust the intensity of the emission to get the effect you are looking for . but it give a very realistic light to the rest of the image.

Made one last pass. Changed the position of the light lamp to the other side to follow the sun. I also composited some mist in the very back to dilute the point where the water ends. Not sure how it turned out.


The point/advice is valid, but I’ll add the link related to the number

If the horizon is at 12km, the observing point would be 10.24 meters off the water level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Distance_to_the_horizon
which it could be if the waves are that big, but then that’s also one big dock.

I definitely did not account for any actual scale. I’m told that one way to make a great scene is to account for realistic scale. Is there a way to make meters come up in blender when you’re sizing everything. I won’t be applying it in this, but for my next one I’d like to.

hey hey,
the hardest part about the perspective.
if you look from a height of 0 the horizon will be in the middle of the image.
your perspective is a little bit heigher (around 60 cm, according to the top of the wooden poles. mabye it is better to make the camera at human height (1.65m)
and extract the sea to the height of the sun (in this image) (and offcourse move te sun up.
good luck!!

the reflection on the wood looks too orange? and the light on the water too yellow I think. The water is looking much better and the sky is looking really nice. and the sun looks good too. I am sure it would not be easy to change the color too strong effecting the scene, but maybe you could try moving the sun farther away, but trying to keep it large, or turn down how much emission is effecting the scene?