I started this image a little while ago and then stopped while I worked on that forest one posted recently. I am going for an ancient dry desert feel, but keep getting hung up on the texturing. I am still modeling the structure I want in the far back of this scene and since its not the real focus of the critique I am looking for I decided to leave it out currently.
I am using megascans for objects in the scene, they import approximately at the size you see here in the scene. Bu tthe texture feels all out of whack to me, I’ve played with the normals, bump and displacement, but I cant find a happy medium. Has anyone else had issues like this with Megascans, and what did you do to resolve? The objects in the scene are not blended yet, but If you have suggestions on how to make this scene more believable and realistic, I’d love to hear that as well.
I think the biggest problem is that it’s an image without a subject. Nothing visually interesting is depicted. It’s also visually frustrating because I cannot recognize anything in the image. Like what are those objects on the side? What is the ground? What scale is it? Is it supposed to be a landscape?..
Did you use any reference or any images for inspiration for this? It looks like you didn’t. I think you should. I would try looking at reference and inspiration images and photographs and copy some things, details and aspects of the look to make it plausible.
Like for example. I played with Stable Diffusion to generate an image for inspiration:
AI sometimes gets composition right. There are like 6 different planes of depth here(how awesome is that?!), different sized detail and so many things to look at and it looks interesting. You don’t need to copy anything precisely, but you can take some ideas. Like how clear the scale is instantly if you have a few planes of depth and it even turns hazy in the distance because it’s so far away.
Hi Martin, Thank you for your feedback, the scale is a little ambiguous, the subject was excluded from the render to pull focus of critique to quality of the texture. the subject is a larger than life item. So scale won’t be as important to that as it is to its other surrounding items, that are already included in the environment. I see your point about adding layers of depth, and will take this into account when working on the vista and structures in the far back. Do you have any feedback on the textures themselves? Thank You. I am using megascans, not sure If there is another pass of texturing I could look into to make these look better.
Textures don’t really matter when it isn’t clear what is being textured. All I see is a grayish rectangle with some near blobs and some far blobs. Make this grayscale, or even black and white, or view it in solid view with no textures- an image should be legible and decipherable without any texture or color or lighting; that’s what good composition is all about
I know that Megascans textures are pretty much always excellent in general. Like Joseph said - they don’t really matter in this context. The whole image doesn’t work the way I see it. I would start with a sketch and collecting inspiration images, photos and material for reference and then redo all the scene with some visual idea. Then you can asses if texturing needs improvement. That’s my view.