No Mercy Critique #1 - Snow Globe

Hello,

I’ve just completed (?) my latest “masterwork”

Done in Blender 2.71 using Cycles, rendered at 500 samples at 1080x1080. Textures were taken from cgtextures plus some interanally generated ones.

  1. I’m wondering what everyone thinks. In particular with respects to the lighting. Does anyone feel that it’s a bit too low? My idea was to highlight the yellow light sources on the inside. Maybe the shadows are too sharp? I always find the hardest part of a project to be the lighting of a scene.

  2. What about the colors? Do you think that they clash, or don’t go well with each other.

  3. Also if you can notice on the glass there are two rectangle reflections, a bigger blue one and a yellow small one. Does anyone know how to get rid of them?

  4. This ties in to point 3. Initially I used a sun lamp, but switched to two planes with emission materials. When using just the two planes the objects inside the glass globe show up almost completely dark. I tried increasing the size of the planes and the strength of the emission but it didn’t seem to work. I added a point lamp inside the globe to light up the interior as well. I really like this result, but I’m wondering why the light from the planes couldn’t light up what’s inside the glass globe. Anyone have any ideas?

  5. Any other thoughts and general suggestions on how to improve the image?

Thanks in the advance.

Attachments


Those two rectangle reflections, are they emission planes? If tey are it might help to do them invisible with a transparency node and a lightpath node. Im not sure if it helps but you can try to make them a bit lager to, then you have to turn down the emmision strenght. I also think the yellow ligth in the windows are a little bit to saturated. Otherwise it is a fine render.

The primary lighting within the globe looks like it is coming from a point just above the roof, but there is no light source providing that light. It’s not a bad look, but it does make the scene look rather imaginary.

I think if you remove the square reflection on the glass, then you’ll need to remove the reflection from the wooden base as well as the two line up. Possibly a smaller but more intense light source would work better?

I like it, very nice.

What about turn off the lights outside the globe and let a light in the globe shine out.
I guess could be hard to set it up right, but would be like happy christmas :slight_smile:

About the lighting, I think that if you increase the contrast (more light inside, and a little bit darker outside), it will look better. Also, I think that I would make the image a little blueish too, that could set an interesting tone to the image. Of course, you can to this with compositing nodes on your render.

try to animate the snow and add motion blur and make a “blizzard” effect :stuck_out_tongue: also, it looks like its day and night at once, either turn up the light a bit, or make it dimmer and make the lightsorces from the windows and lamps stronger! :slight_smile: love it, great work.

This - exactly!

You could possibly add a displacement noise to the snow to give it a hint of texture - a bit plastic looking…