First outdoor scene

This is my first attempt at an outdoor scene. I’d like to get suggestions just about everything, from modeling to texturing, lighting and post processing.
Please don’t be too harsh, I am still learning.


Good effort so far. Some things that come to mind:

  • Scale seems a little off. The size of someone who could use the bench would find it very cramped within the cabin, the fence would be knee height. The ivy leaves look too small too. Try putting a to-scale human character into your scene for checking scale (even better if you have a rigged one, then you can pose it in likely positions).
  • No obvious entry route into the cabin. If the foor is out of view then it looks like it would be very hard to access on either of the steep slopes. Try flattinging out the ground next to the door, and along a logical pathway, to make it a believable scene. In general the grass looks completely untouched, almost as if no one sits in that chair, or uses the mill. Maybe that is what you are going for, but it doesn’t make much sense. The grass is short, so suggests that it may be either cut or eaten, yet there is not sign of life that would be related to either of those.
  • Repeating textures on the fence are visible.
  • Hard edges on some objects visible (perfect 90 degree angles - try beveling, knifing, or sculpting in some variation)
  • Straight lines everywhere. In reality, especially in wooden stuff that is left outdoors, perfect straight edges are less common. They may be very close to perfect, but slight anomalies in places can make it looks more natural.
  • Not enough dirt. This is an artistic consideration, but the believability of the image is not helped when there is no visible dirt (moss etc) on objects. Some carefully added grunge can make a scene look much less manufactured. The metal on the chair is quite glossy for something that is outdoors.
  • Eroded pebbles in the stream. Almost any stream I can recall has pebbles and rocks of various sizes and at various stages of erosion.
  • No water! If the water wheel is supposed to be dry, then I would expect that there would be a bit more overgrowth beneath it, or at least beside the old stream bed.
  • Variation in grass length. If you think some places are less likely to be cut, then put some longer grass there (e.g. near the posts of the fence/along the stream bank?)

Thank you very much for the suggestions. I’ll try to implement all of them…

About water… well, I plan to add it but not being water easy to deal with (I tried both the fluid simulator and SPH particles with disappointing results so far) I wanted to focus on the rest of the scene at first…

I tried to implement most of the suggestions. Here is an (hopefully) improved version. I tried to add water but I can’t manage to pull this off decently.


That has helped make things more convincing. I agree about the water though, I suspect it will be tricky to generate with a simulation.