I’ve been working on a nativity scene. The render took a little while and blender was running slowly. (Due to all the particle effects and not the best graphics card.)
Please tell me what you think. (The picture is high resolution 2500x1875)- http://jworld2.sitesled.com/thenativitylarge1.bmp
A couple things- I know the lighting is wrong for the nighttime scene but It’s the best I could do right now. Also the models for Mary, Joseph, and Christ are very simple because I don’t have the least idea how to model humans. The sheep is also very basic (I hope you could tell it was a sheep)
If anybody wants the blend file so they could help me with it then just ask.
For starters you should really use jpg for sharing your pics on the net. Ive got a cable connection and the pic still took about 5 mins to load. Imagine if I were on dial up :-s EEEEK!
Anyways, First I think its too dark.
You have a spotlight shining on the barn but wheres the light coming from?
Im assuming thats the north star… Very nice touch.
The wood material on the barn look to neat and uniform.Almost like they took a peice of plywood and cut it into smaller planks. You might want to make a few variations of the wood material and offset the texture a little to help break it up.
I think you also used to many stars in the background. Plus its too black, I would use a cloud texture and have it affect the color… prehaps use a dark gray.
You might want to add a little mist as well. To help it fade into the background.
The grass looks nice but is prehaps a little too green. Again a texture might help in adding a little variation between the blades of grass…
Anyways its a nice idea 
just keep at it… and remember use jpg from now on will probally increase the chances of feedback as well 
EDIT: and yes I knew it was a sheep
Yeah, bitmap kills. I can’t load this thing.
Update- I’ve changed it up a little bit. I changed the lighting by using ambient occlusion so that it is brighter. I also used less stars and made the background lighter (not much lighter though). I used some mist and made the grass a more yellowish color. And I used Jpg format! yay!
For those of you still not able to see the original, here is the jpg version- http://jworld2.sitesled.com/thenativitylarge1.jpg
Here is the updated version- http://jworld2.sitesled.com/thenativityverylarge.jpg
Some constructive criticism:
-
Is the nativity floating? How did they manage to get a massive sheet of bedrock to be invisibly supported and then build a nativity on it? My suggestion is to either have the barn sort of carved out of the side of the mountain with some sort of retaining wall (whether it be the barn itself or some stones piled on top of each other.) The stone slab sitting there just seems to look out of place.
-
The grass looks good in large quantites from a distance, but at the bottom of the image where the grass is closest, it looks sort of strange because it is one long piece of grass located so far apart from the other pieces. If you are going for the “brush” look (brush being field brush), I would suggest them being closer together and instead of having one solitary blade of grass, have small clusters of them. My knowledge of that area is minimal, but I would tend to think the brush should be more of a pale yellow, sort of a tan. Maybe if possible, add some rocks and stones and make the ground less perfect. It’s a bit too smooth.
-
The sky looks great. I know you commented about this, but your light source should be coming from behind the barn rather than behind the camera (judging by that star). My suggestion is to either rotate the barn and move the star to one side of it so that the camera could see the star and some of it’s light being reflected onto the scene. Or you could tear a hole in the top of the barn and have a pseudo light source shining in.
Any thing else… let’s see. As far as modeling humans, I’d check out the “Adrianna” tutorial for modeling the heads and the Joan of Arc tutorial for modeling the bodies (I think it was the Joan of Arc tutorial at least…) or if you end up going for the cartoon look, you could always texture a face on there and be done with it :).
I hope that didn’t sound too harsh (I really didn’t mean it to, but I always feel that my criticism posts sound harsh…). Great job though.
feihongjr: From what I learned in my space class, Polaris (the north star) isn’t the brightest star in the sky, simply it is a northern circumpolar star that resides right on top of our axis so when the earth spins, it is always in the north. The star that was present on christmas night was supossedly Venus and Jupiter’s paths crossing creating an extremely bright object in the sky. Also, (I am a bit sketchy on this) but I read somewhere that there might have been a supernova (exploding of a supergiant star), that night also which makes three bright objects in one place look like a really bright star.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
Thank you for your comments.
Tango- No, your criticism was not harsh at all. I appreciate the criticism and getting help with my work. Whenever I ask my family what they think they all tell me its perfect and they don’t tell me how i could fix it.
I will continue working on this (won’t be today though. i can’t work on it today.)
1 Like