Hey guys, I’ve decided to spend my summer holiday by creating a small scene. I wanted to make something with stone, and ornaments, and decided to make a grave scene.
This is the first blockout
So far I’ve tried to keep the lines pointing towads the grave itself, but I could use some feedback on this before I continue, as this is the first piece where I’m taking this into consideration.
I’ll keep working on the blocking for a few more days I think, and keep you updated as I go.
Another update!
Someone pointed out to me that the stone lantern I had planned was very typical for Japan, and not China. Because of this I needed something else instead! Since my plan was to sculpt some tiger ornaments on the curved wall next to the grave, I decided to add a tiger statue instead of the lantern. This way the pieces gets a theme to tie it all together.
Still not sure what to put behind the handrails to block off the view. I might put another tree on the right side, but that only fixes one side.
Did some more tweaking and changed the handrails on the right side, added some steps and made a wall to block off the back of the shot. Think I’m ready to start breaking it up into individual pieces with higher detail to get more of a feel of it before I start sculpting!
I also did some very basic light setup to get a feel of depth as well.
are you kicking this in engine?
do you have a concept or a mood board that your going off of?
Hi cglewis!
I’m gonna render this in Maya vray!
I do have a moodboard, and I’ve used elements from most all of them in creating this piece.
I’m thinking of scrapping the handrails and wall in the back, and make some trees and bushes, to make it look like an overgrown cemetery rather than a temple.
awesome,
id say your block out is pretty good, not much for me to crit right now 
looking forward to see the meshes get some love :arteest:
Been a while since I’ve posted, but I have been working! Work has gone slowly because of summer holidays, but it’s getting there at least! I’m currently having some trouble with lighting I think maybe you guys can help with! I want to have some tree foliage shadows on the scene, and I made an alpha texture I put on a plane, and put the plane out of sight above the scene.
This is what it looks like in the viewport in Maya.
And this is what it looks like when I have rendered it.
Does anyone have any idea what could be wrong? I thought vray lights worked with alpha textures automatically, but I guess I’m completely wrong!
I did this lighting setup with vray in 3ds max many times, without problem. your problem is that in opacity map (not sure how that material slot is called in maya) because it is actually rendered without alpha texture even for camera, there is no way will pass that obviously…
I suggest you check material of that plane, make sure you use vray native material.
this is as far as I can help. those tiles in zbrush look really nice btw
Worked like a charm with vray material! I had used lambert, so it was an easy fix thankfully! And thank you about those tiles, pretty happy with them myself!
Got an updated shot with some sculpted meshes and the alpha leaves working!
I think the leaves look pretty decent for a first pass, but I still need to work loads on the lighting I think, but I also need to fix so much more with meshes and textures. Hard to figure out what to focus on next!
Lol you did all those lines to point into middle of scene and then just put shadow there do draw attention away… invert shadowed and highlighted areas also add there some more objects that have well known size so viewers can have sense of scale
Yeah I’m gonna add some more meshes, I just wanted to try my hand on getting the leaf shades to work so I could do something other than just modeling 
I’m a complete beginner when it comes to lighting, rendering and composition etc, as I’ve mostly done mod work for Elder Scrolls before, so all help with this is greatly apreciated!
I think your modeling/sculpting looks great. But i have to agree with Winside that those shadows are right at the focal point of your image. The shadows look good though so maybe just try and move them back to the foreground so that the headstone is lit up. I would keep the shadows on the far right as they will help to add focus ön the headstone, i think.
Im also knew to composition and that kind of thinking but you can get some pretty great advice in here so keep them updates coming
Looking forward to see this progress!
Thanks for the reply Elgstrom! I’ve tweaked a lot of the shadows, moving them back a bit so they dont block the grave as much!
My current problem is something with materials and shaders. Now I’m at the point where I want to materials to blend together using a shader that reads the complexity in the mesh, and applies the materials accordingly. They have this in 3DsMax, and it works like this;
But me being a Maya user, I can not for the life of me figure out how to get this done in Maya. Does anyone have any tips on how to achieve something similar? It would be really, really helpful!
You should be able to achieve exactly the same result using the “blend colours” node in the hypershade.
