This is hopefully just for some inspiration:
One of the principles ppl who do 3D forget is the illusion of detail. It is easy to obsess over detail when in principle we can often just fake it. Stuart Davies gives a good oil-painting overview of this principle:
Thank you!
Exactly!
… if only (my personal) goal wasn’t to learn texturing in substance… And I really am fixated on making the barrier myself 
Yes, that’s good point. I’ll re-prioritize the work on that (esp. that’s consistent with my goal - I can texture it in substance as well… and not hard to do in terms of modelling).
That’s a good idea. I had thought about it at the beginning, but forgot about it…
You are 2nd person to point it out 
. But I might narrowly being saved by wikipedia:
But overall I think you are right… I should probably add reactor building and put it on fire… Probably will not have enough time for this by the Collab deadline, but 
Thanks! I feel a bit like you (and now Jaco :D) are my art directors for this render . Thanks for all the feedback!
It’s good that the collab has a deadline
Thanks! I’ll watch it!
Status update: RL got in the way so I lost one evening worth of work. Still some hours left to work.
Priorities:
Realistically speaking I might just do first 4 points. I might need to postpone doing the barriers to after the collab 
. Let’s see how much I can do
I wait a few hours to setup the vote!
Street lamp textured with substance (first try at it) back in blender. Not perfect, but in a context of a final scene, the imperfections hopefully will not be seen
Where there’s a fire, there need to be some damage, doesn’t it? 
(got a bit distracted from my plan )
Ok, doing final render ongoing. Large sample size so it will take a bit.
Unfortunately I didn’t mange to replace the models I used during the blockout. So Credit’s for the models I’ve used:
The cars are by MAC2001 (CC-BY) from blenderswap: https://blendswap.com/blend/20961 and https://blendswap.com/blend/22404.
Traffic cones and barricade also from blenderswap: https://blendswap.com/blend/21865 (by jeandiz, CC-0) and https://blendswap.com/blend/25811 (by colkaih, CC-0).
I took a few rocks from CC-BY https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/lowpoly-rocks-2-7f8361d14ff24e27bc460f7f7ba318b6
And I used a ground texture from texturehaven.com.
Love the car blur … maybe brighter braking lights …
Edit, if you learn working with the compositor. The car could be in a different layer, with a special bur
Great point about the lights! Not enough time to learn more about compositor, but I’ll play around a bit with breaking lights!
Phew… That took a while to render… I got to stop being so drawn to volumetrics 
Special thanks to @FedPete and @Jaco_Pretorius for being my art directors in this work!
Short “post mortem” (random order):
), but plans rarely survive the first battle 
(and that was just 1 week long project!)What (art related things) have I learnt:
(and probably more things that will come to my mind later )
Sounds a good list. I am bad at sharing works in progress, lol. Most get so far and then, left for some other project, like these ‘collab’ entries, or some other thing creates a roadblock. Then I spend ages trying to find out how to do something, or find reference for it. Plus many improvements take ages and are tiny overall.
During this one month of low poly I discovered that sharing the work is improving it. The bigest part of it is getting feedback. But for me also putting it out there and describing stuff helps my brain to wrap around the things I try to make and untangle some chaotic thoughts in my mind… Plus I hope that someone will stumble upon those words and pictures and hopefully also gets something out of it or learn from my process and mistakes
Good project. I like this dissecting of a project and its progress.
“Kill your darlings” I always say. It’s difficult to let lose of one thought.
But as time passes other ‘darlings’ will emerge in a project.
Personally, I think your project was more about composition. Placing elements, adding details, more like a painter on a white canvas. Still in that process you lost some things, like the rule of third. If zoomed out a bit, the main ingredients are then in the middle of the scene. And not at the border (police cars, breaking lights), fire. The fire could be more intensive. Creating a strongs triangle between the other (high)lights.
Great work and project. You have grown!!
Thank you 
And once again thank you for taking your time and providing feedback!
You are absolutely correct - I actually didn’t do what I originally planned:
…so the final composition isn’t rally good. My intention was to focus viewer on the barricade, but now I think there is no clear focus point at all! And the closest thing to the focus point is the burning coolant tower, which was supposed to be in the background .
Still as you said - I’ve learnt a lot. Given the formula
x = learning / time
x is very high
I couldn’t let go… .
First I redid the sign, to be more horrifying (I actually wanted to try to improve my workflow - and I did. I used vertex coloring for setting up ID maps, and I have now 1 texture set instead of 3 for the sign, which worked but was a waste and pain to set up). This is the new sign rendered with iray:
And I worked a bit on composition. This is the result:
What do you think about it now?
