Hey everyone, I want to share a simple scene I’ve spent the last couple of weeks cranking on in my spare time. I’m happy with the current result, although I feel the lighting may be a little flat.
Please let me know what your initial thoughts are. What stands out as weak or problematic? What works well? Thank you.
I think the elements that you’ve modeled are quite nice, but the composition of the scene gives it a sense of clutter, not of peaceful meditation really.
The foreground trees shouldn’t be blurry. It makes the scene seem tiny, as though you’re photographing miniatures. They wouldn’t be that out of focus with a real camera, for example.
The tree just to the right of the temple appears to be behind the temple, but its trunk appears to be in front of the temple. Almost at the other end of the bridge. Same with the orange, smaller tree just to the left of the temple.
The rocky shores could use some displacement detail, or perhaps a more interesting and dirty shader. Those rocks are nice, but I think you need a lot more of them to sell the illusion.
The background looks rather empty. There’s landscape there, but not many trees? What does it look like on its own? I’d detail it out more, with more trees and some kind of horizon. As it is now, your existing trees hide the horizon almost entirely.
Just some ideas! Keep at it, it’s coming along nicely.
Thanks for the critique, these are definitely useful thoughts that I will aim to implement for the next iteration. I agree with your assessment regarding the perspective of trees situated by the temple, the lack of detail in the background elements and tips to improve the shore’s realism.
One quick thought regarding the depth of field in the foreground elements… I set up the camera to be a 50mm with an aperture of f1.8, so the foreground elements would realistically be that out of focus. I wanted to give the render a slight dream like feel, similar to how I would consider capturing it in real life with that lens set-up. However, I understand if you feel that it distracts from the final result and I will consider removing it for the next iteration.
Thanks again for the helpful perspective!