Guild of Writers

Just thought I'd post this pic for opinions. Modelled entirely in Blender all textures were rendered with the free Genetica Viewer (except the doors, the sky, the gold roof and the paving - Doors I made in Ulead PhotoImpact with help from a Genetica texture and the paving was made by Kato. The Sky I downloaded from the same site as the sky found in the First age tutorial.)

Anyways here it is (still WIP of course)

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Also I found a useful program for rendering things such as background hills and mountains (for billboards):Vue. I myself use Vue 6 Esprit. Here's a pic of what I rendered in the context of the age above (still WIP). Granted it was a little rushed - I may refine it later

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This age is part of the SftSoK project, which is still in need of devs </shamelessplug>

Please tell me what you think! Recommendations/ Constructive criticism are most welcome

Mystified Explorer wrote:Just thought I'd post this pic for opinions.

Ooh, an opera house.. :9

*donning the unfair_bastard-cap*
I realize it's WIP, but anyway, you did ask for critique:
Personally, I'd have worked towards a more subdued scheme (had I been doing any work at all, that is) - I find this much too busy; too many unharmonising textures with too much dense high-contrast detail and a cacaphony of colours.

You may want to scale those doors up a bit, and/or frame them somehow, to give their appearence the importance they deserve. (Hmm, looks like I'm trespassing on pappou's territory here [watching out for land mines..], he may have good advice )

Are you opting for quality over performance? -I ask, becuase I see no obvious hard edges on those neat orb lights - maybe a polygon or two could be saved here and there, if you are so inclined..?

Ok, so much for my 2 lesser currency units (excl. VAT)
I am sure the possible issues I raised were on your schedule already.

Very interesting.

Modeling looks pretty good for you building, street, rails, etc.

Some suggestions (which you can take with a grain of salt, since this is your baby, you do what you want to do), the texture for you street is quite bright, almost gives a Snow-Blind effect, I'd try making it a bit more subdued. Make your street interesting, but not stand out so much that it takes away from the building, rails, orbs, and surrounding scenerey

The texture under the roof of the porch is a bit bright condsidering it's facing downward, and now obvious lights shining on it. Try darkening it up a bit.

Your doors look great! A lot of detail there! But the facade of your building looks dull compared to them. Can you add more detail to it? (IE cracks, trimming, etc)

Looks like you're doing a great job!

I'm impressed with the amount of construction you've put into this already - there's alot of modelling been done and it's really taking shape, good work.

For what it might be worth, I do share the same thoughts as already mentioned, that in general the Age is too bright and a little garish in terms of colour. But then again, I know that sometimes the textures can look quite drab in your paint app and then as soon as you view them in Plasma it's like someone slid the brightness slider up! So I'm sure you have a fair amount of tweaking to do.

It takes alot of courage to post a WIP and put yourself in the firing line willingly, so full marks for that and do keep working on this Age because she's looking really pretty.

-: D'eux :-

I hope you take this as a positive remark:
One of my hobbies is photografy and there is a rule that you must have one point where your eyes are going to.
When you have more points your eye is going from one point to the other point and further on and that is very fatique and restless.
I think that it is in 3D enviroment the same.

You can do that at different ways oa.
Make the point of interest with more detail, brighter textured and complicater textures.
For example in your first pic when you want that people walk to the doors of your building than you must made that the eye of the gamer is going to that part. Make that part brighter and with more complicated textures.
The other parts of the building you do things with less detail and more desaturatered color.

A other thing is that you used must colors in your setting. I have no feeling of what the atmosfeer is what you have choose for your age. Choose a few colors with are part of the feeling you want to show and made in your age.
A good example is the pic of d'eux in his "d'ni remote viewer age" His dominant color is bluegrey and there in he have take a few other colors for making his viewer interesting.

By myself I find it also diffucult to choose at all the beautifull colors and fascinated textures

I am quite impressed with the geometry and the expansive feeling of the age, evident even with just 2 screenshots. Very excited to explore this in the future. Your island edges remind me of the ferry terminal in the cavern in a good way. I'm already curious about those structures in the distance.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about the high-poly geometry unless you actually have performance issues yourself. Someone seems to have made everyone paranoid about high detail geometry, while the only real occurance of it was the case of the subdivided bookshelves.

But, you asked for criticism, so here goes.

Lighting, I notice, is mostly vertex based and seems to show the telltale signs of being done by plasma, rather than blender. While this is good for getting matching avatar lighting, it isn't quite adequate for the body of the age. For the moment, though, it would be a good idea, if you haven't already, to kill the 0.5 ambient lighting that is the default in blender materials, so that everything isn't so bright gray where it ought to be unlit. In the final version, I would definitely go for some nice baked light to show a long shadow from the building, etc, but it probably isn't time for that, since the age geometry probably isn't finished. Although some people have commented on the color scheme in your textures, I think that the lighting is actually the root of the problem, I think that with some good orange mood lighting, and reduced ambient to match the sunset-like sky you have in place, the colors would even themselves out, as they aren't too far off of what one would expect to see on any given brightly lit surface in the real world.

I'm guessing here, are the gold bands around the middle of the orbs on the railings supposed to be the light emitting parts? (are they supposed to be light-emitting at all?) If so, I would suggest putting a few flattened flares around them to show the glow effect

The water looks bright green and goopy, as if it had been polluted. Of course, I wouldn't actually hold any water issues against you, since we haven't gotten nice reflective plasma water yet.

Thanks for all the comments and ideas!

The lighting is a bit of an issue I know. I actually forgot to kill the ambience setting on some materials Most lighting was done by vertex. The street does use a lightmap from the blue lights from the orbs but for some reason the sunlight refuses to bake onto the surface. I'm not quite sure why. I tried adding flattened lamp glares but they simply wouldn't work. Something to do with the sprite settings in the plugin - when I set the type property to sprite and the sprite_flags it became invisible in Uru. When it is visible it keeps rotating on the X and Y axes as well as the Z. I'm not exactly sure why it did that.

I'll do some playing around with the ambience and change a few textures as well. I have some ideas on how that might work Does anyone know how to make a good wear and tear/cracks texture layer?

Water is a placeholder I'm gonna eventually replace it and animate it

I'll post the modifications soon

Very well done, just one question.

When can we visit?

When SftSoK is released Hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.

Anyway I've made some changes. Here's a pic:

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I like that much better. Would it be possible to make the walls have shadows the way the floor does? Right now the floor seems very realistically shaded and the walls...don't.