A lot of my latest artwork has been mostly modeling focused, with little time spent on lighting or texturing. I’ve mostly been making high detailed models and leaving them as clay renders. But I’ve been in the mood to try something different lately, and have been inspired by a lot of the great 2D art on CGTalk. I wanted to try and make a dark and foreboding scene with an artistic style. I decided to go with a futuristic prison scene because it gave me a lot of room for creativity and provided that darker setting I wanted.
I’ve always enjoyed setting up lighting, and I knew the lighting in this scene would either make it or break it. It took quite a while to get it right, and I still had touch it up a little in Photoshop. But I’m happy with the overall affect I was able to achieve.
Texturing is another area that I knew would be important for this scene. Unfortunately, texturing has never been one of my strong points, so I was unsure if I would be able to make it live up to the rest of the scene. But thanks to CGTextures.com, I was able to get a good variety of textures to work with and found the few that I needed.
Anyways, here is the scene which I have entitled “The Ward”. I hope you like it.
Feedback is appreciated. I hope it isn’t too dark for those of you with CRT monitors. I made this on a bright LCD, so it may appear darker to some. Let me know if this is an issue. :spin:
not bad. It’s rather sterile for such a dirty enviro. It needs some heavy normal mapping… Maybe some chunks taken out of the walls by insane inmates (or warders…) Right now, it’s a ward. You need to make it THE ward. Give it character. Places can have character too. It’s a good job of lighting tho.
I’ve got some normal mapping going on but if you turn it up too high, it doesn’t look good. Exactly what areas do you think should have a rougher look?
I’ve thought about maybe adding some blood stains to the floor. I’ll try it and see how it goes.
Any more suggestions guys?
EDIT: Just photo-shopped in a big blood stain on the floor. Added a little more of that character you were talking about. =]
I think you got that backward. CRTs are brighter than LCDs when both are set at mid point. (all things being equal, age, uptime) Looks good.
My eye is drawn to the red light, but the pic/composition ends before you see where it is.
Heh, didn’t know that. Always seemed like LCDs have a brighter picture to me.
Yea, I seem notice the red light first and then I move up to the sign on the wall. I wanted to give the feeling of a long row of cells to give it a big feel. That’s also why I made the walls so high.
Seems darker than it probably should be on my CRT to see your work. What I can see looks like a good start.
What??? Since when? Ooohhhh… I just realized we’ve all been using very sloppy terminology!
LCD’s have an inferior black level/contrast range to CRTs, which is why dark pictures always seem “brighter”. They’re not, it’s just that the darks are not as dark as on a CRT. Good point.
I had to update the render because I was looking over it last night and noticed how bad the jpeg compression was. I had to go and re-touch up everything in photoshop, so it may look a little different than it did. But it looks a lot better without all that compression.
