Rainy Medieval Town

[zoekmath]

Newest version ^







Hey, I wanted to try a different weather and I wanted to use some water, so I did this.
Please, give me feedback as I feel like if this wasn't as good as my previous one.

[MysteryMeat]

The rain looks like an overlay since it doesn't interact with the background at all. I did a rainy piece a while back I can use to illustrate what i mean:

Note how i made little splashes where drops hit the ground and how i made it stick to and drip off objects in the picture, water's sort of "sticky" and tends to ride under things a bit. In your piece this would come across as rivulets of water zigzagging down the shingles and dripping off the bottom of that balcony on the left. You should also saturate the dirt and add some darker muddy puddles to simulate mud.

[zoekmath]

I made some changes on the roof and on the dirt. Thanks for your comment.
In my opinion, I don't think water could be so visible, as it's invisible. But it makes contrast on wet surfaces.

[MysteryMeat]

Aye, that's certainly true, but you don't always have to strive for realism with those kinds of things.
Case in point, in older movies they used (and may still use!) milk for more "visible" rain on camera, to achieve the heavy rain effect. For example, that t-rex scene from jurassic park used that technique to create visibly oppressive, stormy weather.

If you want to avoid that sort of thing though, it may be better to remove the lines of water you have overlayed on the picture in favor of some water droplets on the "lens" of the camera. As they are now it feels more like you're going for the idea of rain rather than a straight representation of it, and I was suggesting based on that.

And while water may not have so much visibility while FALLING (unless it gets absolutely torrential, as seen here http://images2.sina.com/english/china/p/2008/0825/U99P200T1D181645F12DT20080825181053.jpg, where it becomes a sort of thin haze), most of the time you can definitely see it when it splashes against the ground and in pools of water! Also, there's still a lot of spots where the rain would be hitting that aren't just the pointy bits of the houses.
 It'd be splashing down on all parts of the roofs, like that little overhang on the right or bouncing off the knight's armor!

As a side note, I'd also recommend some clouds for the sky to make it more clear it's weather and add some visual interest to the sky, you can probably achieve that with a mono-or-near-monotone slightly-darker shade(s) of grey to keep it from overpowering the foreground focus.

[0xDB]

The world seems to suddenly end at the gate. Fog wall? Boss imminent?

If not, the path and the ground should continue through and behind the gate as the horizon appears to be way up above and outside of the image area (determined by the fact that we can see the top sides of the roofs everywhere and by noting that all ground planes of all buildings and even the ground plane of that balcony are seen from the top as well), so we should not actually be able to see a sky or a horizon line within the image itself but just the ground plane all the way.

If the horizon is supposed to be where the path ends or anywhere above that but still within the images vertical boundaries, then you would need to fix the perspective for pretty much all of those buildings.

Also check the directions and lengths of the cast shadows. They seem inconsistent if you compare the lengths between the shadow of the knight and the shadows of the buildings and keeping in mind that the buildings rise higher and thus need to cast longer shadows. I believe this is primarily a perspective issue as well since the perspective appears to be inconsistent too, on some parts (all the architecture) it is orthographic while the ground plane with the diminishing width of the path suggests a fake perspective projection. That does not work, choose one perspective and stick to it throughout the whole image.

[zoekmath]

Thank you both for the suggestions.



I made the rain more notable and did minor changes.

[0xDB]

The path still just ends in the void. Maybe you misunderstood what I wrote before, so let me repeat it in a different way: By the perspective you have chosen for the buildings and the ground, there can not be a horizon inside your image unless you change the perspective of all the buildings to match it. To keep the buildings perspective you need to show the ground level and the path throughout the whole image, there must be no sky and no horizon in there. You simply moved it up a bit but it's still wrong.

[zoekmath]

But I want the fog to be seen, have I done right now?

[0xDB]

If you want fog, it should still adhere to a SINGLE chosen perspective and perhaps seep into the town. If you want fog, let there be a few fog clouds hanging over the ground plane everywhere and not just outside the town because that just looks like it's supposed to imply a sky and a horizon (which again, along with the diminishing path is wrong for the dominating parallel projection that the architecture implies). That being said though, I don't think fog and rain can be observed simultaneously in nature very often (if at all but I could be wrong on this).

Hopefully this will make all previous words more clear:

[zoekmath]

Thank you so much. I'll keep that in mind in future drawings.