City Scene...Still in progress

[Hugh]

One day I'll actullay finish this thing...

I'm still looking for some critique..... 8)

I am also looking for a way to dirty things up alittle...especially the asphalt.

[TheAllusionist]

I actually think this is a pretty cool technique Hugh use on this one. It was a visualization for downtown improvements for Pontiac MI (correct me if I am wrong) where the City Council wanted to see what it would look like and have some PR material for the public. Hugh took digital pictures of the buildings on the street and made geometry based on those images and mapped the images onto the geometry, so this is basically what the downtown area under review looks like plus the improvements.

Thanks for posting Hugh, I am going to investigate this technique one of these days

[Anonymous]

[color=white]Hi,
I have some suggestions for you :
Your images look “plastic” and “flat”, the textures are low quality and repetitive, the background sky it`s on the vertical plane, the contrasts are dizzing; the second it`s dark and doesn`t have details.
I think it is better to change all the astfalt and that yellow sidewalk.
You didn`t specify what program you have`d used. An skylight and some normal lights will make the scene look more realistic (or a plug-in that used a GI ).
Anyway, nothing it`s more realistic then the reality itself, so use some real pictures reference to see haw it looks a “day in the city “ at a certain time.

[dfinlay]

your textures look fine, but like you said, you need to dirty them up. id start by just giving that asphalt a grunge texture in the diffuse slot, it should dirty it up more than enough once you get that working, then try that same method, but with a different grunge map for walls, sidewalks etc etc.

[dfinlay]

also, it seems that some of your textures are low res and seem to be pixelizing. i know its kinda late for this, but you might want to res up your texture size, especially on that large building in the background. its begging for a high res imagemap

[Hugh]

Here's an update!!

I still need to do some of the things that were suggested above...thanks for your critiques

I made it into the Detroit News paper!!

http://www.detnews.com/2004/events/0...f12-112284.htm

[TheAllusionist]

Hugh,
Looking better, I think you toned down the lighting a little, it appeared a little over saturated before. In addition (could be because of all the green objects), your image seems to have a slight greenish tinge (I am not viewing it through a color calibrated monitor right now so I could be wrong), so I would change the light color spectrum to something slightly warmer in the orange instead of yellow range.

Sidewalks and curbs, I think they could be warmed up a little as well, perhaps it is all the green objects in the scene.

Looks good and like I said before, I think it is a cool technique and think it worked out pretty well for you.

[phile]

I think you need to do some work on the lighting. The shadows are very sharp and dark - on a day this bright, there would be enough indirect light to brighten the shadows considerably. In the street-level shot, you might consider moving the "sun" round so it comes more from the right. This would make the posts in the foreground cast shadows to the left and help "attach" them to the ground. Personally, I'd also move the camera up a little. It seems very close to the ground at the moment. I usually put it 1.8m from ground level (ie about 6ft or eye-level).

After that, adding some dirt via masks or procedurals would help add that "randomness" to the textures that you get in Real Life (TM).

Keep at it though! There's a lot of potential in this pic.

Phil