Once I finish this view, I plan to add two more, one during a storm with the building on the rock falling off, and the last one with the entire city in disarray.
Any ideas for improvement are welcome.
Hello and welcome to the forum !
It’s a good start, and the natural environment is already very cool !
The shape of the buildings is very interesting too !
Now what is kinda lacking to make it work better is a better sense of scale, and overall logic.
In pop culture a common waterfall is the width of a river.
Now since to us these blue shapes are unknown, our brain process the image to look for clues.
Because we lack human scale reference everything appears to be much smaller that you’d like them to be, since we fallback to that idea that a waterfall is smaller than here.
Pay also attention to the camera position, we are very high , probably as high as the little mountain next to the most right building. This also tends to makes things look smaller.
To make it work better, you need to add human sized elements, like trees, streets, cars, people, birds, boats, widows, stairs, elevators… only a few will already make a big difference.
Now if you really want to push it one big step further, adding elements of a functioning city will help a lot to sell the design.
How do we go from one building to the other ? How the city is structured ? by putting more logic and function we’ll relate much more to that as a city.
One simple way could be to have one main big building, and smaller ones that gravitates around.
And they are connected with some kind of smaller roads.
You can add some kind of a dam that use water flow to generate energy.
Another part could be more dedicated to food growth… with a shape a bit different than the rest. Make your own story like if you’re living here and follow that logic, we might not get what is what but it might feel much more organised and complex.
But of course this represents a bunch of work. You can probably manage to make something cool without all these details, but since you asked for feedback…
I hope this doesn’t sound too harsh !
At least, all the elements are there , but they can be organised better so it can work much better !
I’ve got a question about the rock texture that you’re using , is it something freely available somewhere ? I’m just working on environment right now and this one looks quite cool !
Thank you for the feedback. I agree that it needs a better sense of scale. I will definitely try to add some sort of transportation and experiment with the camera angle. I especially idea of using the waterfall to generate power. The rock texture is Rock 35 from Ambient Cg, and is licensed under CCO.
Thanks a bunch ! They seems to have a lot of stuff that I could use !
Good luck on your scene and I’m looking forward to the next version !
I finished version 2 and spent some time fiddling with the changes. here are the two versions I came up with.
I didn’t like the glass on the railing or the close up building so i removed them and changed the camera angle to make the building on the rock more prominent.
I want to add people to the scene to help with the scale and make it look less empty. does anyone have a suggestion for the easiest free way to do this?
As before, any ideas are welcome.
That’s much better !
Now that you added an handrail we have a strong hint of the scale, the smaller that bridge is, the bigger the building and the waterfall are.
For integrating people that depends again on their scale, if they are very small a simple model with a photo can work : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWq-ZPMhai8
Then the bigger they are , the more detail you need, but I don’t know where to find free 3D scans of people.
Good luck !
That’s a great idea for the people. However, I did some experimenting and found an even lazier method. since this is a still render, I took some photos using a green screen, masked them out, and used geometry nodes to scatter them on the bridges.
I am working on editing the shader to add some variation to the clothing colors, as you can tell it is all the same person.
I have been working on drafts for the other two images in the series:
As before, any feedback is welcome.
Maybe adding some vehicles to the scene could help. Like you could have some kind of aircraft coming from the bottom right (first image) that looks like it’s flying towards one of the buildings, and then have loose lines of similar vehicles going between some of the buildings to give you that sense of distance and size.
