I've hit a compositional snag.  Here's my current picture I'm doing because I'm procrastinating on my big Christmas image because I'm intimidated with the modelling work that I'm going to have to figure out how to do.  It's another in the Buster series (Conniekat is giving a huge assist in his texture dept.)

So here's the good news, I learned a new trick to make deciduous distance forests.  As you can see in the hills in the background, they're covered with small wooded areas.  To keep it from only being coniferous, I did a usual "Add Noise" forest, but then said to myself I was sick of pine trees, can I make them look rounded.  So I slapped to clicks of "smoothing" on the terrain editor on it, and son of a diddly if it didn't look like bulgy deciduous trees!  SO that's the upside.

What isn't complete yet is the cloud work.  Oh yes... there will be big 3d clouds.  I'm having fun with those... especially after what I did for the "Wake the Dead" composition, we're just getting the hang of this.  I also have to get the right set of trees and vegetation into the foreground, and I would love to figure out a way to do a road trailing off into the background... 

but...

... it's not feeling right compositionally.  I need to add color, so I think I'll ahve to find some banners or flags or something to add to this.  Also, I'm torn on just the layout of the composition.  I want enough castle for it to make an impact on the image, but not so much that it waters the whole thing down.  But at the same time, my background landscape isn't meshing quite as nicely as I'd like.  So... opinions people, I'd love a new set of eyes on this to give me an idea of what I could be missing,  if you would please.  ;c)

mdb

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=326879&member

Cool,...........looks good so far. Maybe shrink the size or amount of the structure he's on,..........so to accentuate the vastness of the panorama. I also think the textures need work,.........something not quite right about them. So that's what I would change,..........less of the castle and more of the landscape,.............let the cat and the vastness of the landscape be the foucus rather than the castle.  I did an image awhile ago with almost the same title, but with the same focal point,.........a cat. See the attached link.

Thanks for the comparison image Sack.  (you're one brave rat modling cats like that.)  Anyway, I'm not happy with the textures either.  I tried to get a good photographic one for stones, but I have tiling problems that I don't quite know how to handle.  I may go back to a proceedural texture, but I haven't been able to get it to look good up close.  I haven't made an attempt to blend the two types of textures, but I smell disaster right now, so I dunno.  But yes, I need to do something there.  Any good DTE tricks for making castle walls?

mdb

How about using the DTE for the stone texure and using a photo  for just the bump map ? Might work,.........certainly worth a try.

Just my 2-Pennyworth (re. composition)..

The cat is sitting on the wall and, errmmm, looking at something? Looking at nothing? Looking out of the picture? etc...

Although the camera angle is dynamic (well done there!), the rest seems to me to be static.

Suggestion (feel free to disregard):

1. Move the cam further to the right so that less of the castle, more of the background is in view.
2. Add a second point of interest on or near the ground. Anything would do - a cottage with smoke coming from it's chimney, a dragon, a minor war, a "strange reflecting sphere", a huge dog?? whatever..
3. Change the pose of the cat so it's looking at the 2nd Point of Interest.. Give the viewer something to catch on to..

As for a road, there are several tutorials around on how to do that.
I can't remember details at present, but mostly (IIRC)
Create a height image of the terrain (for reference).
Using a 2D app, create your road as a white wiggly line on black (using the height image to decide where to go). (or it may be black road on white - white raises the road, black lowers it).
This "road map" can then be used in both the terrain editor (using the "pictures" tab and adjusting the blend) to control the way the 3D of the road looks (although I doubt it's needed for a shot from this distance) and in the materials editor to control the textures...
May be sensible to blur the edges of the road (in the 2D app), although again, probably not necessary at the given distance.

That's it in a nutshell. Alas, I've lost mynut-crackers, so no "kernals of truth"...
Cheers,
Diolma

Well nice idea and the castle is looking good. Try a few different textures for the castle I think we are seeing too much of the same texture. A way to think of it is the outerwalls woudl be built differnt to withstand attack so you can make the outer walls out of one textre the inner buildings out of another. (maybe make the roofs a brighter color would break things up too. ) Maybe a few windows on the interior buildings will spice it up a bit.

Here's what I'm thinking....
The black mass of the tower in the background is overwhelming the image, and Buster, whom should be the focal point of the image is little too small. I would turn the camera to the right so that the background castle towers are to the left of the Buster, and are little less intense in their blackness. 
Perhaps if you take the ambient shadows, and set them to about 70%ish... seems like your shadows are pretty dark right now, making that tower all black. IRL, shadows are almost never that dark.  Add little more light on Buster too.

You may want the towers to be little more crisply defined and tad more saturated and in focus then the forest behind it, but not too much lighter or darker, so that it doesn't detract from focusing from seeing Buster and the expression on his face.

With turning the camera clockwise some way you can see little more if the green scenery too, and let the viewer imagine what Buster is seeing, or has in mind with 'that far away look'.

Right now one of your 'supporting actors' (the castle) is competing for viewers attention with Buster, whom I'm thinking is the main character in the picture.

How about turning Busters head to the right, and setting the camera to look a bit over his right ear, and down the left whiskers? With his head turned, the viewer will see his whole body and his expression, and a lot of the scenery, and some of the castle to give it all scale and the feeling of the perch???

Anyway, those are my first impressions.... :) Take what strikes a chord, and junk the rest :)

I haven't made any progress with the texture this weekend yet. :(  I'm stuck on finding good reference photos.... Seems I'm going to try turn this into a photo-texture. If I don't make it into a photo texture, it may go faster... Looking at your image, here, you're not going with photo realism, so a photo realistic texture may not fit the scenery, huh? Thoughts?

oooh, and if you’re going to showcase the clouds, you may want to use the rule of thirds...
two thirds sky on top, one third landscape below. One third castle to the left, two thirds clouds to the right. Buster's little butt sitting at the intersection of the bottom and left third, so the balance of him is visible against the sky.  This should work as far as colors too.. him being flame point (orange based) and sky being blue based) you're going to get a very striking complimentary color combination for your focal point. 
I would make the ground some sort of a coloring analogous to blue, but little toned down, perhaps green/blue, cool haze coloring. For the castle, go with something analogous to buster, perhaps some sort of a non-descript warm taupe as the main color. Something analogous to orange/beige, but not overwhelming it.

I dunno if this will work, but it's an idea you may want to try ;) 

I dunno, here is a really really rough sketch of what I was thinking about.  See how there's also a diagonal going across the image, and even though high on the perch, buster is securely grounded in the corner, so he will look like he has a secure and a dominant position, which is needed for a commanding presence of a 'lord'  ;) If he looked like he may fall down any second, it would make him look voulnerable.

hmm... I agree with Connie that the lighting could use a little work, but i'd personally prefer using fill lights over ambience settings in the texture any day. Abient values tend to take away from definition of shapes and depth (which is already happening particularly at the side of the wall in the foreground which might be part of the reason why the stone texture isn't working too convincing yet).

Ooops, I need to clarify this, Rayraz is right about ambience in textures. I meant the shadow darkness setting in sunlight...Eh, I'm opening up bryce to get the exact name/con...  Also, that setting does have it;s drawbacks, since there are areas that it may end up wasing out too much. You'll have to do a few tweaks and see.

Also, a big YES on use of spotlights (spotlights, radial lights etc where needed.)...  I tend to call them spotlights, but it's really the little round radial lights with a square fallof that I use most of the time when I need selecive illumination of a detail that would otherwise wind up in too deep of a shadow.

Otay, I'm off to work on Buster's texture :)

Thanks for all the great advice guys!  I've already started to incorporate some of this as I go here.  I'm hoping I can get enough of a depth cue with the cloudwork, rather than putting an item back in there.  I'm hoping for the feeling of wilderness, but you never know how it will go.

mdb

Ahhh... whew, you're back  :)   YAY I was worried there that we got too critical and ran you off... thinking, OMG, I never did say what a cool idea the rendering is and all the good stuff  :( I think I'm going to sprain a braincell with all this critique stuff ;)

here, I did another experiment with the buster texture... this is a hand painted z-brush experiment. I was tortuting myself drawing things hair by hair. Although, this is a quick study, not a final look.

Awwwww!  What a great job on the face!  Very reminicent of my Boo-Boo.   (yes I called him buster boo boo... ya gotta problem widat!?)  ;c)

Naw, you didn't scare me off.  Basically my work week goes from Thurs, Fri, Sat 2pm till whenever I can leave, Sun 10am... oh yeah it hurts and Mon at noon.  So, I just wasn't able to comment much till I started working on the picture again and process some of the ideas you guys gave me.  As for the critiques, it's been very helpful as usual, so I wouldn't worry about that.

Just remember the rings around the calfs above the paws like the face and on the tail.  I really look forward to seeing the final texture, and of course being told how the heck to apply it to the cat model from Poser. in Bryce.  As you can tell by previous works of mine, that texturing poser figures is NOT a strong suit of mine.  I'm only now just getting a handle on some of the DTE functionality... yaaayyyy.  Just getting it to translated to the image is turning out to be the cast iron bee-hatch.

Thanks a bunch all!

mdb

You know, this weekend someone else here on rendo asked me to help them translate couple characters out of Poser into Bryce...   I did one via obj export...  then I remembered I had DAZ studio just sitting around, so I tried via DAZ studio. It went really slick!

I dunno if there's enough interest for this, but if I write a step-by step for you, perhaps I could tun it into a little tutorial? What do you guys/gals think?

I don't have DAZ Studio, so I dunno.  I'd have to see it to say if it could help me. :c)  (I have 4 other cats from my herd I'd do LOL.  Cheddar, Max, Nemotode, Puddin)

Ohhhh herds of cat pictures... too fun. :c)

mdb

Hi mboncher,
This is just my 2 cents please feel free to disregard if you like. In my opinion the problem with the composition is the perspective is all over the place. I would go back to the default camera view straighten the castle up and line all the horizontal building edges up with your wireframe grid. Lower the depth of field a bit. It's stretching the terrain texture in the foreground. If you want to show distance I would lower the horizon line a bit and increase the atmosphere some more rather than rely on depth of field to give you that distant feeling. Try fiddling with the grass texture on the nearest terrain to the viewer. Maybe instead of parametric try object space. Leave the distant terrains parametric. This will also give you more of a distant feel.

The biggest problem I think is you haven't well defined a main focus. Connie is absolutely correct when she suggested to bring the cat closer, and enlarge it so that it becomes the focus and the main subject. The terrain should be the secondary focus. turn that castle out more rather than in towards the center of the composition. That will do a great deal to fix your perspective problems. Maybe even bring the whole castle closer and just show a part of the castle that the cat is sitting on. Once all that is done, then bank the camera if you want. The problem is it needs to all be lined up right perspectively before you can bank the camera. Or it all just looks skewed.

Try different textures on various areas of the castle. The lower wall would be slightly different than the walls of the roofed building on the top. That's certainly up to your creativity.

These are just my observations anyway.
Good luck.

Hi Hythshade;

Yep, I've done a few of those things already in my reworking so GMTA it seems. ;c)  I've made buster more of a focus instead of letting him be lost in the scene like I was originally intending.  I've only a few things left to do before I think it's done.  The cloudwork has been the hardest since I had to resort to volume textures to get the effect I wanted.  Nice tip on the textures though.  I may have to try that in the future.  As is I did a lot of customizing thanks to Diolma's suggestions and think I came up with some good stuff.  I'm doing a third full rendering to see if it works, then I have one accent left to add, and that's it, unless someone knows where I can get a good texture for japanese / chinese military banners.  I want to hang three of them off the tower to do something with the empty space there.

mdb

Hi Mboncher I have another little progress sketch of your Buster Boo!  I think I'm starting to get the hang of the z-brush hair brush, and my kitties are volunteering being poked and proded as I investigate which way their hair grows and how the stripes work on every detail of their little faces... What you're seeing here is somewhat low quality, because it's just a zoomed out screen capture from z-brush. Still a long way to go!

Wow Connie, this is looking exceptionally good.  It always freaks me out ot see no pupils, LOL.  But this is getting very accurate. outstanding stuff so far. :c)

MDB

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1328043

No longer a WIP.  Check out the final image here.

Volumetric Lighting and clouds, the wonderful texture by Conniekat8, some fill lighting and of course, compositional corrections. Thanks to you all who gave ideas to make this picture what it is now.