The Dark Tower......a work in progress

[ELEK]

These images are from an online storybook I am in the midst of creating. It will go online sometime after Christmas. Feedback is appreciated.

The images and story are based loosely upon the poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, by robert browning, and the books by Steven King. The poem can be seen in the images for now, but the text is placeholder stuff. There are several shots here...

http://www.planetquake.com/tertiary/pics/d_tower_page1.jpg
http://www.planetquake.com/tertiary/pics/d_tower_page2.jpg
http://www.planetquake.com/tertiary/pics/d_tower_page3.jpg
http://www.planetquake.com/tertiary/pics/pixie_concept.jpg
http://www.planetquake.com/tertiary/pics/pixie_wood1.jpg
http://www.planetquake.com/tertiary/pics/pixies.jpg
http://www.planetquake.com/tertiary/pics/tower.jpg
http://www.planetquake.com/tertiary/pics/TOWER_~2.jpg

The story progresses from the woods you see in the top images, to a wasteland dominated by this tower.....

Feedback is much appreciated

[amphex]

That concept drawing is awesome, and I love all the 3D work. Very interesting, very well done =)

[GriNGo]

wow, cool stuff you got there man :) congratulations on it.. well about the dark tower, when I read the thread name i really though it was going to be Barad-Dûr of Mordor, from the Lord of the Rings.. but anyway, it looks cool.. Perhaps a bit taller?

[AfroLaxMan]

I would suggest 2 things:

I see some banding and stretching on the forground rocks, and the bump mapping becomes to obvious. Don't rely too heavily on just the bump map for your rocks, and think about placing the mapping more on the faces rather than the whole object. Instead of trying to wrap paper around the 3d object, "unfold" the rocks to flat shapes, then paint them. It is a tough process, time consuming, but really well worth it. You can do a couple rocks for the foreground, then do simpler version for the middle and background.

The second thing I saw is in the tower. The angle of the tower you renedered shows the geometry a little too much.
What I try to do is either build the geometery to follow the mapping (maps of bricks match the faces), or just a small, larger-tessellated object at the edges of the objects (stack a cylinder with a low height value, but a high value for the number of sides).
You have done a lot of work on this and it is evident, it looks great.