So I’ve been using blender for maybe two weeks now about one week of that time has been working on this project and learning smoke/fire/water stuff as well.
I’ve got a basic idea of modeling however, doing the textures seems to be a problem for me…some of them just don’t look that great. So far, the only way I’ve been doing textures is by putting them in blender and playing with the offsets and crop amounts to try and scale them down.
I’m looking for some good tips on how to improve this scene, Hoping to learn from my mistakes so the next project goes quicker and smoother.
Haven’t fully baked the water at the res I want yet and notice I need to change the inflow’s size…probably going to make a cave there for it to come out of.
The front gate just doesn’t look realistic and the buildings could use something, but I’m not too sure what.
wow, there’s some good stuff in there I like the stone walls a lot, and I like the medieval theme
for textures (like the ones on the hills/cliffs), i think using UV Unwrapping might do the trick - however, I’ve only started experimenting with it, so I can’t help much with that…
really cool, mk676! you’re a lot better than I was after 2 weeks… anyway, May the Blending Force be with you
p.s. i’m curious now, where did you get that Stone texture? it looks really good…
cgtextures.com has a lot of great images for just about anything you can think of
I didn’t understand UV unwrapping nor did I know how to use it. Just read a little about it and tried it out with Gimp, awesome! Just need to hunt down some more textures.
Don’t use water sims for waterfalls. Add some white particles falling…
Besides that, water IS NOT BLUE. It may look like it is, when it is reflecting the sky, or the pool is blue.
But water is transparent. Add a transparent material, with a little bit of mirror…
Things that make stuff look unrealistic, is when something looks to perfect. For example, your textures repeat a lot. Try using bigger textures instead of repeating the same one. Draw some dirt to increase the imperfection. You could basically use one unrepeated image for a roof or try to make the repeat as least visible as possible. If you have no skill in making your own textures, i can’t help you.
When it comes to realism, bump maps help you get a more detailed look on your low polygon models. Look it up.
Awesome tips! I finally figured out how to unwrap my meshes correctly and edit them in gimp to look a lot better.
Bump maps, had no idea what those were…add some nice rougness to otherwise flat textures. Think the ones gimp generates look better IMO.
The waterfall just being particles falling instead of the fluid would look a lot more realistic. Saved me a bunch of wasted bake time, I wouldn’t have liked the result enough to keep it.
Thx for the great help, I’ll put the result up when I get the video compiled.
There are, of course, some things about these images that will need to be corrected … the usual “fun with UV-mapping” … but there is also some very fine attention to detail. (That overhead shot of the buildings and the sidewalk is, well, pleasing.) Once you do your next round of cleanups, let us see where you stand.
I like the stone walls a lot, and I like the medieval theme