Trying to make a Mausoleum, but something does’t look right, any advice on how to improve this?
I want it to look more foresty and more rural and gothic and have like a path with grass on the sides.
It already looks pretty good as a base in my opinion. You have an idea where details can be. What can i advice you… hmm…
- Is it final crop ? I mean you have few plans here but you can’t see them as i imagine. If you know what i mean… All of this is like on 1st plan. Check some reference for still like this. Maybe try to work on 3 plans. I think you should play with depth of field. Try to put some stuff on 1st plan… Make it blurry… same with 3rd/4th plan etc. Depth is pretty important in my opinion.
- Textures and material. You have ivy and stuff… But they usually don’t grow on sterile base (if you know what i mean. Sorry english is not my native and i was pretty immune to languages since i was a kid : ) . Try to figure out some moss, fungus and stuff like this on walls, some rust on metal etc.
- Light is pretty flat… Try to find one area you want to focus on (the gate seems be legit but you will probably need to change composition a bit) and play with a light to make observer focus on it. You don’t want to all be lightened
I hope i helped a bit Have fun and I’m waiting for your further work Cheers
Couple of things:
First of all, your columns and walls look like they are covered with stucco, a very odd choice of building material for a mausoleum, because stucco needs a lot of maintenance. I’d change the material to some kind of stone masonry, granite perhaps, or marble.
Second, your ivy leaves are too small. Take a look at this house covered with ivy.
The doorway is about the same size as your gate, but notice how much larger the leaves are in the photograph than in your render. Increasing the size of your ivy leaves might give you some of that ‘foresty’ look you are after.
Finally, mausoleums don’t get frequent maintenance, at least, not the spooky ones. So consider dead leaf litter on the ground rather than suburban lawn type grass. For a ‘gothic’ look you’ll need gothic ornamentation here and there. The gate and fence would be an obvious place to start.
Hey, thanks for advice! Yeah I’ve got various plans for this, see I wanted to have a woodland walkthrough yet having it cryptic. What I really don’t like is that mausoleum cave, as it was supposed to be a tunnel but I needed to cut off the horizon, maybe I should play abit with mist and fog!
I agree, I need to add small details in. I think maybe more trees, more like aves and less ivy. And maybe have a lesser detailed mausoleum in the distance and have fog that fills the horizon.
Totally agree!! Lighting is something I really didn’t do much on, I tried a 3 point but yeah it does look flat!
Cheers it helps! 
Thanks dude, definitely helped!
Yes is see, the ivy looks too fresh and young doesn’t it. And yes textures are something I’ll work on, I won’t to add dirt streaks and grunge maps so will have to play in material composite. The 'mausoleum itself, I am not happy with, I will make a more Gothic one and have it in the background with loads more tress. I want to add fog but not sure how, if u could send someone my way or link me to someone, I would be very grateful! Yeah I see, I am in town today so I’ll get some textures and materials! Thanks for the inspiration, I’ll add some features and tweak stuff!
Cheers 
You might find it easier to create that fancy gate in a vector program like gimp or illustrator and then import it into blender as an svg. Once imported just convert it to a mesh and extrude. There is no way I would try to get those curves in just blender
You’ll need to do some serious thinking about your trees. Mausoleums are built in cemetaries, and cemetaries have a peculiar relationship with trees.
On the one hand, trees provide a park-like ambiance and shade for visitors coming to see their departed loved ones. On the other hand, tree roots play havok with foundations and digging (an obvious concern in a grave yard). So you want trees close enough to provide shade, but not so close their roots will knock over headstones, tip grave markers and break mausoleum foundations and walls.
I’d just like to addthat of all the aforementioned thing, lighting is the biggest thing in need of nailing down. Get that to near-final stages, and you will instantly see everything else improve (and it will let you see more easily what’s to be fixed and what’s fine).
Thanks guys for the replies, sadly, when I was creating it, I CTRL-J The Ivy to the stone posts, which means I cannot edit the Ivy in the scence, so I have decided to re-create the whole scene, which I think will be a better idea as then I can remodify the scenes I didn’t like, which was the Mausoleum Cave and the Ivy Gen.
Will update later
good luck