My First Rendered Scene - Seeking Critical Feedback

Hi Folks -

Been at CG and Blender for about 6 months now and have put together my first scene. I’d appreciate good constructive feedback. In particular, composition, color and lighting - but anything really. Only trying to get better…

Thanks,

Dave

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well done. try adding something to look at. the scene is quite empty at the moment.

Hi!

First of all, good job for being so new! Like that there’s a story in it. :slight_smile:

Here are some notes that I found, some of them might be above your skill level, so if you’re unsure how to do that particular thing don’t be afraid to ask, search for tutorials etc.

Here we go:

  1. On the window, you have the text: “Homade Pie”, better change this to “Homemade Pie”.
    Homade can be misinterpreted with a “Ho” aka. prostitute made pie. ^^

  2. You have some black lines to the left on the road that I don’t understand. Maybe you had something particular in mind, but I cannot understand what it is.

  3. The lighting from the window seems too yellow. Try to get it more orange and warm, that will make it more inviting.
    A good tip here is to user a node called “Blackbody” you can find it by pressing CTRL+A (In the node setup) and press “Search” and then type “Blackbody”. To get the right value you can google “kelvin scale”. In the room Blackbody should have a value of 2800-3500.

  4. The light from the streetlamp are almost too blue and dark. If you would photograph a lightsource in real life the camera would almost take the light as white because it’s so bright. Try to make the source brighter without making the surrounding too bright. (I hope that make sense)

  5. The snow looks good but the footprints are almost too close to each other. If the person was walking slowly or dragged his/her feet behind there would be a different pattern. Maybe wobbling a little because people have a tendency not to walk so strait.

Except that there are some small details like the texture on the Seats.

Other than that: good job!
I really like how you made the snow detail on the steps. Keep up the good work!

Thanks very much for the input.

In response, No, it was not meant to be “Ho” - made pies. Glad that was caught… and funny.

The black lines on the left were meant to be snow-plow marks, but that was a part of the scene I was most unhappy about. I didn’t originally want any street showing, but couldn’t get a realistic camera angle for that. I will probably remove the lines, leave wet asphalt road and the mounded snow. The mounded snow begs for sculpting work, but I haven’t learned those tools yet.

The lighting I was attempting was a contrast betwen Cold and Warmth to drive the scene. I was using blue and yellow to do this, but I now realize that was a cartoonish way to look at it. I am familiar with blackbody radiation as an approach to color, and will take the suggestions to adjust both the Diner lighitng as well as the Streetlamp lighting. I will try to work with an HDRI night sky to bring in a blue tone to the snow.

As for footprints & spacing, I’ve had ample opportunity to observe them closely this winter, and I didn’t. I used reference images from pictures around town for the buildings, but thought I could do footprints from memory. I won’t make the “from memory” mistake again…

When I’ve made some adjustments, I’ll post in Finished Works.

Thanks again.

Dave

The changes sound good.

Can’t wait to see the finished result! :slight_smile:

It’s probably a trick of the lighting, but the diner appears to extend into the stairwell. Not sure how to fix it.

Regarding the street, plows try to avoid scraping the asphalt pavement, but when they do get set too low, the blade tends to ‘chatter’ leaving marks similar to those in the image. Of course, the operator would try to avoid doing that the whole length of the street, since it’s hard on both the snow plow blade and the pavement.

I can’t imagine someone trudging home in the snow missing his doorway like that and having to backtrack, so my take is the protagonist came down the stairs, headed for the foreground, changed his mind for some reason, turned and left via the background. Might be interesting if the footprints looked like he began running around the first lamp post, and maybe indications of a body laying in the snow in the far background. Dun dun dun… :wink:

Orinoco -

Thanks for the input. I see what you mean about the diner appearing to extend into the stairwell. A top-down view would show that it doesn’t. I think it’s the perception that the brick on the right side of the doorway is a brick piller which runs into the diner vs. just a brick front building face. I can pul the diner seating forward some to eliminate the confusion without compromising anything.

More interesting to me is yur comment about the un-seen “protagonist”. My attempt was to show someone trudging through the snow, walking past the inviting warmth of a diner, and deciding to turn around and warm up with a cup of ‘joe’. So the doorway is the diner rentry, and is spilling light like the diner.

For the snowplow, to your point, I am using a B/W mask which factors a mix shader of snow and asphalt texture to create the lines. I could change the the asphalt texture to something which would appear as going down to the pavement. I need to spend some time looking at reference images.

Not sure I want to take it to a murder mystery just yet, though…:eek:

Dave