A Day in the Park
Blender 2.63, Rendered in Cycles
688,258 Vertices, 11,000 Particles, 102 Passes, 1 hour 58 min render time.Originally was going to do 500 passes, but noticed in the last 20 passes nothing changed in the scene.
I like the textures and the time of day lighting. I thin you could use a group of mesh objects with more variation for your particle grass, or at least more random length to get a better ‘kept but wild’ look. I like what you did with the plants in the planter, matches the background photo pretty well.
Thank you for the Critique Craig, actually the grass was made with 4 different variations, each variation had 4 blades of grass. One of the variations only went to the hill, another one went to the edges, while the other two were everywhere. I dont like the way the grass came out on the hill, probable should of combed it a bit, but was afraid it would not look natural if I did. As far as the plants, I was originally going to do warm colors, but decided to go with cooler colors to match the rest of the scene, including the backdrop.
BTW, also thank you for liking my FB page.
you know, after looking again, maybe it is the length that is throwing me off - look back at your backdrop photo, and see how there are areas that look combed because they are freshly mowed - only the longer areas are near tree line. Maybe just reducing the length/size of the particles…
Overall, still good stuff 
grass looks bigger than its actual . rest everything great
The angles on the stone walls are too sharp imo, and they could use some bump. The walls, that is.
I find the shadows are too dark, unless You are going for a late afternoon, in which case the light ought to be more orange.
The gras blades look to straight, as though they were hard and sharp.
Right now, it looks too obvious that the grass is a particle system using the basic child particles, it would’ve been better to try to go with the ‘interpolated’ children setting instead.
Also, the brick wall also seems a bit low-poly and could easily use an edge-split modifier with smooth shading enabled, I’m also not noticing much in the way of bumpmapping so it’s currently looking like a photo mapped to some geometry (you can also fix that through use of a subsurf and a displacement modifier if you have the RAM).
Don’t take it too harshly, you’ve made a fine effort on all of the remaining elements, just keep on learning and you’ll improve.
Hey, this scene looks oddly familiar…:eyebrowlift: Besides the other’s critiques, I’d say work on the transitions. The path connecting with the flower box, the background and foreground (colors seem a bit off there, making the transition obvious), and perhaps improving the textures. The grass also looks a bit sharp, so try to decrease the random direction, and add more particles while decreasing the amount of children.
You did a good job matching the lighting, and I like the bench.
Keep it up!
Jonathan
lol, dont worry, I dont take critique harsh or personal. That is what critique is for after all, to help improve an artist right?
Thank you about the suggestions of the interpolated children, I think I actually already have it set to interpolated (checked, and I do have interpolated checked), will have to check again. And you are right, I dont have any bump maps on here. I will be using them here soon. I got 2 gigs of ram, so subsurf and and displacement is a no go, especially with the amount of particles and vertices currently on the scene.
Yes I know the angles on the wall are to sharp, didnt even notice it till after I uploaded here. It is one of the things I plan to fix, see above.
It is suppose to be a late afternoon, was tying to match the shadows, as far as color, length, and direction. I think I pretty much nailed it. I will do as you suggest on changing the color of the sun, right now its a light yellow, with a hint of orange on it, so I will add a little more orange.
Umm, honestly not sure what you meant by oddly familiar?
Ok, so less children, adding more particles, will try that here soon. Might not be till after I upgrade my system. Should be doing that here soon. Adding a new Nvidia Card so I can do GPU rendering instead of CPU, and looking at adding at least 4 more gigs of RAM. Currently only have 2.
Also wanted to point out the grass I have: here is a screen shot.
Attachments
To my experience, you can get a more natural appearance in the interpolated children if you turn the ‘virtual parents’ slider all the way down, you should also, instead of using 4-blade grass objects and four particle systems, you should use single-blade grass objects, bundle them all into a group, and set the particle system visualization to ‘group’ where you can then set it to randomly select an object for each particle.
Just looked into it, and actually I have the virtual parents slider all the way down. Reads 0.000.
Not sure if I follow what you mean on the last part. sorry.
Was going to add the .blend file, but seems I am having problems uploading it here.
Umm, honestly not sure what you meant by oddly familiar?
Haha, it just reminded me a lot of my scene that I made for atutorial I wrote on Blender Cookie.
I guess it’s just a coincidence! Anyway, perhaps you can get some good grass tips from it.
Ahh ok, you were the author on that tutorial. Actually I followed your tutorial for this scene, since it was the first time I was making grass. Did not try to duplicate the scene, but there were alot of similarities. I also used the material node setup for the grass. Followed the floor plan of a garden for majority of it, and the bench was something I made a long while back. I believe I made the chair back in 2.49.
I actually submitted this scene on CGCookie giving the grass tutorial credit for it: http://cgcookie.com/blender/images/a-day-in-the-park-2/