My Second 3d Background

[joelphilippage]

I may be making my next Lif game in 3d. This is the first background the character would be in.

[Da_Elf]

ok. dont take offence but I'm going to give alot of criticising from the point of view of someone who does this for a living. however i realise your going for a little more cartoony look than the photorealistic look i go for.

your wallpaper texture should tie in with the slope of the walls. see the blue stripe in the corner on the wall with the door thats thicker at the top than the bottom. For instance if you used 3dsmax i would have used a box for the room then converted to editable poly, inverted the normals then warped the walls to give you the slopeing wall. since the boz already had its own mapping coordinates whatever map you use will warp as well.

Lighting should tell a story and set a mood. This lighting has no shadows which tends to make object seem to "float" above the ground. Your corner is pretty dark. and the lighting is pretty much unballanced throughout the room. Im not saying this is a bad thing to have unballanced lighting since maybe someone might want to hide a secret door in a dark shadowy corner or maybe you might want to use a pool of light to focus the players attention to a side table with a phone on it in a hallway or something.

functional rooms is also a point to keep in mind. this room does not "tell" me what it is. i see a chair to sit on and a wastepaper basket. but is it a persons office? I'm not too sure. and there is somethng reeeally funky going on with the arms of that chair (kinda like an anistobic shader gone really wrong) not to mention there are no back feet to it either. Yes thats a technique used by some people where they dont model things that wont be seen, unfortunately in this case i would be able to see the back feet on the chair so they are needed. i however tent to model everything due to my rendering style and usually polygon limits dont mean much to me hehehe.

texturing vs modeling. A big question is how much do you model and how much do you texture. in games to keep the polygon count down alot of the character is created with textures inplace of what would be modeled. like wrinkles in clothing ot even most details on a face. Its all an illusion. For your door however that texture doesnt sell the illusion. the door would have been better off modeled to have the beveled look to it

palette of colors. with that blue and green well the door seems out of place in that room as well as the floor color. The painting kinda mimics the colors so if your theme is the blue and green then yu should start using complementary colors in the room. the splash of red isnt bad, splashes of color like lighting can draw the viewers attention to something.

on another note I'm not entirely sure whats going on with the skirting in the corner. seems the corner of the room and the corner of the skirting dont line up. its very strange. the 3d program should not do that. but without proper shadows i cant see properly to tell whats going on there

closing note. if you have any questions for me about what i have said please feel free to ask. If i had the time id love to do a game with 3d backgrounds but my style of photorealistic backgrounds doesnt lend itself well to the theme of adventure games. keep practicing what your learning. day by day you get better. i teach a course in animation. my beginners class is 100 hours and we have reached about the 55 hour mark now in out lessons and I'm now going through materials and mapping with them.

[joelphilippage]

I have tried to fix the problems you have listed. I still don't know why the right wall has that dark shadow in the corner and why the door had all those shadows every once in a while.

Sorry the quality of the image is a bit low.

[Da_Elf]

what software are you using? if its max can you zip up the fle and email it to me at da_elf2000@hotmail.com

[joelphilippage]

Im using blender.

[Da_Elf]

ah. ouch. cant help you there then.

[Buckethead]

Maybe you can export the file?

[joelphilippage]

Would a .3ds file work? Ive exported it here.
http://lifsadventures.googlepages.com/room1.3ds

[zabnat]

Corner is darkness is probably a problem with normals. This could happen if your wall is a box and you mess with smoothing groups (or something similiar)... So check the normals. There also seems to be some problem with normals on the chair.

I think you should also add some ambient light so that shadows are not so dark. Alternative you could add a few dimmer lights to simulate ambient light.

[joelphilippage]

Thanks. I had clicked set smooth on the wall and the couch which had messed it up so I just had to click set solid and using ambient lighting worked as well.

[Ali]

Thanks. I had clicked set smooth on the wall and the couch which had messed it up so I just had to click set solid and using ambient lighting worked as well.

I think you should adjust the threshold in the auto smooth box.  Making it higher will smooth out the angular looking bit of the cushions. You could also add a sub-surf modifier in the modifier stack. That will make the mesh more detailed when you render, without actually making the mesh more complex.

[Da_Elf]

i agree with what ali says. tried opening the scene in max but it didnt want to import it properly so i couldnt check out anything

[Candall]

joel, while in edit mode in blender, have the "edit" context active and look for a button that says, "draw normals" and make sure it's activated.  This should cause blue lines to appear on the faces of the object that you're editing.  You need to make sure that those blue lines are all radiating in the same direction off of your walls, and that they are radiating inward toward the scene.

[EllePollack]

The wall really shouldn't need smoothing on it to begin with...it's *flat*, it's supposed to be angular.  And if it were realtime 3d instead of a still render, you'd be wasting the extra polygons.