AuthorTopic: [WIP] Dark Days  (Read 2958 times)

Offline Coops

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[WIP] Dark Days

on: December 23, 2013, 11:50:00 am


Demon's Souls inspired landscape.

Somewhat proud of the clouds, but I know they can be improved much more. Maybe even add in god rays at some point.

Challenging myself since I've never done anything large as this whilst also experimenting with different hue's with the shading.

EDIT: Got the mountains going a bit.

« Last Edit: December 26, 2013, 05:36:19 pm by Coops »

Offline Coops

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Re: [WIP] Dark Days

Reply #1 on: December 26, 2013, 05:35:59 pm


Please excuse the double post, I'm just lonely and looking for CC

Offline HezaKey

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Re: [WIP] Dark Days

Reply #2 on: December 27, 2013, 12:55:01 am

This is looking really nice really.  You kind of worked yourself in a corner by making both the landscape and the clouds yellow.  So I bumped the saturation up on the clouds and added a very slight shift towards orange.  Also your horizon is lacking value to separate it from the clouds.  They blend into each other, which we don't really want, so more dramatic shadows for them. 

Did some slight fixes to the shadows on the buildings and experimented with some rim lighting, which I think looks fairly nice.  Rays of sunlight will always fall in parallel lines, while artificial light rays will converge, meaning that most shadows in a natural setting will align with each other, while artificial lights will have shadows that tend to spread away and share converging lines.

I tweeked some colors, mostly dulling the blues down (yellow light on blue will make it grey out/ complementary colors).  I also took some tiles out of your castles roof to add more age.  Maybe just a slight hint of creeping vines might be nice too, depending on how long abandoned the place is.

I didn't do too much with your trees, since it doesn't really seem like you're finished with them yet.

I really like what you've done so far.  I really want to see something in the landscape that will give us a sense of scale of the monolith out there.  Maybe some old faded roads or ruins of a half buried city.  Just something that will tell the viewer how gigantic that thing really is. 

Offline Coops

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Re: [WIP] Dark Days

Reply #3 on: December 27, 2013, 08:07:30 am


Took a lot of the advice and came up with this. I really like the idea of the small town showing off the size of the monolith, gives a nice depth to the picture.

Still gotta work a lot on shadows however and to find out what to put in the bottom left corner.



Shadows fixed and shading is more readable.

Now I've hit a crossroad here. I can play around with the blue hue's like milokey did and work around getting that correct color with the highlights on the roof,

or I can take the cheap route and change it to a red roof. Nicely enough the red shows off the vines much better now and it sits nicely with the desert/forest theme.

Surprisingly both iterations look just as good (I may even prefer the red roof now).



« Last Edit: December 27, 2013, 07:19:42 pm by PixelPiledriver »

Offline HarveyDentMustDie

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Re: [WIP] Dark Days

Reply #4 on: December 27, 2013, 10:30:17 pm
I will try to say this nicely, those colors are VERY unappealing. I have trouble just looking at them. Everything feels to muddy.

"Houses" beneath monolith (if I can call it that) doesn't read like village, and IMO main reason for that is some problem with perspective. House in foreground is very good, but it seems like it's in the same plane with village and monolith. It's very strange. Maybe some contrast change or perspective check will fix that.

I can't pinpoint the main light source, so the monolith shadow is also strange, it's not in the same direction as shadows of small houses or foreground house. If light comes from above it should be shorter (like when the sun is right above the object in the noon). If there are multiple light sources shadow will be more complex, and not so clear.

Again, I love the 'main' house and the idea, but I think that you can achieve same effect with different colors.  :)