3D Fantasy castle..Recreation of idea by Nikolas Alanis..Reviews Please

[blckwtrpark]

Hello..

This is a little piece of work that is done recently by me and my friend. Modeling and texturing were done by my Friend in 3DS Max. Lighting, rendering and post-processing by me. Lighting and rendering is done with vRay in 3DS Max and post process in Photoshop.
The concept is not original, but recreated from Nikolas Alanis idea that we found on the web. It was our very first 3D project that we wanted to get reviews. Textures are of bad quality. So, please ignore them. We were not able to find proper textures. Rest if there is some problem please critic about it..We need to get better next time with original concept. We just want to get constructive critics so that we can be motivated for work..

[LaCan]

Nice. There is a number of possible improvements you should consider, on visual and technical side.

Visual

Let your design principles be pronounced. If you decide for wonkiness as your stylization approach, use it for everything in the scene. Otherwise it may look like a mistake. Crooked lamp posts do not belong in a world with perfect circular pipe sections. Be stylistically consistent.

Your light sources should emit light onto nearby objects. Put in some decaying point lights for lamps and windows.

Use environment fog to add atmosphere and depth to the scene.

Let different objects have different local colors. Differences between colors are noticeable even at night. They are subtler, of course. Currently, the image looks a bit too monochromatic.

Watch out for that pesky texture tiling. Human eye tends to catch the repetition immediately and it's not happy when it sees it.

Specular reflections are never as bright as it may seem at first. Especially at night.


Technical

Quality of the textures aside, it seems that you didn't arrange your UV maps properly. It should be a part of your normal modeling process. Render the scene with all objects having a checkerboard texture applied to see which of your UV maps are misbehaving.

Your shadows are jagged in places. It may indicate insufficient size of your shadow maps. Either fix shadow map parameters or use traced shadows.

If you're not going to go with any type of global illumination, at least use some kind of ambient occlusion shader across the whole scene. It's an inexpensive way to considerably up the "realism".

When rendering for further compositing, output your images with "straight alpha" (check your technical docs). Otherwise, objects that meet the background may have an ugly one-pixel "halo" along the edges. It's particularly visible on the main building. This can be fixed in post though.

[blckwtrpark]

Hey, thanks a lot @LaCan for such a wonderful review. I am really thankful for your awesome suggestions. I am self taught and still at beginning stages. Textures were put straight with simple UV mapping without unwrapping. We wanted to make it quick. However, for our next project we'll take texturing equally important. I have some questions about rendering.. If there is any good resource of learning proper rendering and composting you know, please share. Thanks a ton for your suggestions..