town scene WIP
 

hi everyone.

i've been working with maya for around 2 weeks now, and have just finished the first four chapters of the maya 4.5 fundamentals book (since i have no prior 3d experience). to sort of practice my skills, i decided to create a town scene of sorts. but first thing's first, i'm starting with a single building. i've posted the image here.

please feel free to give me your comments and suggestions. i'm particularly looking for suggestions on how to make things look more real, as i can't pinpoint exactly what i need. oh, and see the lens flare? i don't know what caused that, now it's appearing in ALL my renders, even after deleting all the lights in the outliner. HELP with that too, please. :D

thanks everyone!

Hey there, looking good :)!
Some c&c, try looking in the hypershade to delete the 'optical fx' Or if you changed it's name look for that :p.

The hill on the back look kind of unrealistic, so if you want to change that it depends on what you will do in the future. You are creating a town scene, so I presum in the final render some building are going to be in front of it? If not, try adding some dirt, colour variations, small bumps in the texture.

Second: The nice thing in the middle is constructed out of... marble? And even if not, it would be cool just to set the reflectivity value a little bit higher, so that it looks more clean :D. The thing on top of it could look really cool if you made it some more transparant and add some colour noise into it, and make it the colour of the rainbow (that way it can look as if it's class, witht the suns ligt breaking trough it and displaying seven colourd. Phew, who needs refractions :p).

I hope I inspired you :D.

thanks!
 

hey thanks for the tips! :)

about the grassy hills and plains, those were actually some of my major concerns. it's mostly a dilemma whether to leave the actual grass to texture mapping or actually model it. thing is though, even if i do decide to model it, that'd probably take years...

so any suggestions on how to make that grass more real? bump maps to seem to make it look anymore convincing, since grass "thickness" comes from the grass blades that populate it.

as for the central figure, i don't know how to describe it's material really. i just saw it used in some of the galleries over at the highend3d forums so i **tried** making my own similar texture via photoshop(on a sidenote, what do you think of the texture?:))

i plan for the material to have a matte finish though, since my reference images of that material seem to have no reflectivity.

i'll check my hypershade for whatever weird stuff i may have put in there. that freakin' lens flare's been bugging me all day. :banghead:

thanks for the suggestions. keep 'em coming everyone! :D

If you don't have much grass ( heh, and a fast computer ) you could always try to use the paint effects tool. Otherwise, you could try and experiment with duplicating your grass plane you have now, put it a little higher in the y-direction and applying a darker, transparant texture, witch bumps a little more random below to make the grass looks 'thick'. However, I think you would have to change the settings per viewpoint, because it ain't grass and it will never be :). But it's a good supstitute and besides, if you reall want real grass you will have to model every single poll, and you will have to do that billions of times :D.
About the building, if you do not make it reflective, try adding some small attributes like scratches or add some dirt. I'm not really the texture kind-guy, so I can only give you creative suggestions :). If you think you have the right texture already, try putting it in front of different colours of light to see how it reacts. This doesn't change anything until your final render, when you have set the sky and such, but since you start texturing the things you make at start, you might want to check that too :).

hmmm i'll look into adding details to the wall textures. i'm not too experienced making photoshop textures yet so this is gonna take some time.

i'll experiment with the grass thickening technique too. sounds good, and if i get it right, that'll save me a few years of modelling grass ;).

oh btw, the lens flare has been taken out. thanks dirack. it was an optical fx in the hypershade after all. :)

Quite welcome :D. Man you're working hard and commenting on your thread as well! :D I like you! I though I was the only one who oculd respond within 10 mins of a post together with dave_bear, but it seems I was wrong :p.

haha preparing for a future in the industry i guess. i gotta learn this stuff if i wanna get into the 3d biz. :)

Heh, then don't react so fast. Everyone in the industry is a lazy sl..... heh, I shouldn't say that here :D :D :D. But I'll give you a hint: 'Everyone in the industry is as fast as Dannngan's response time on IRC'. (There, I said it without being wrong) :D:D

I just very much dislike ideling people in the channel, just as much as being alone in the channel or the fact that the once glorious 'welcome to the house of maya' topic has been reduced to '' . :(

haha i'll work on slowing down my response time then. :D

oh here's something... how big are the textures you use? i use 800x800 textures but the details (cracks, etc) seem to repeat too fast. this is evident when i zoom out and view the grass plane in my scene file from a wider angle. the patches noticeably repeat.

Heh.... :) I don't see why you would have to make textures in photoshop though. Why not make it in maya, it's excellent at it. :D

you mean even stuff like weathered cement, wood, metal, etc? dang i gotta get me one of those maya texturing videos or books.

i just really use photoshop because of the amount of freedom it gives me to work with the little details, although this is the first time i've actually used it for textures. :D

I believe there's a lot about texturing in the manual, and it's all very self-directing, you will learn everything very quickely. Unless your nickname somewhere is Dirack, and you will always suck at modeling and texturing :p :D

haha i'll read up on that, plus continue working on my scene. for now though, gotta head off to bed. it's 330 in the morning over here :D

Good luck and good night. btw: We're really starting to give this thread a post count if we don't stop this :p