Critique please

[Anonymous]

See attached image.

Thanks!

[Dwight]

Slightly over-exposed.

Foreground asphalt could be darker to anchor image.

Crop off foreground - why look at empty road?

Saturation - color intensity.

Fringing on trees distracting. What are you using?

two minutes in photoshop not great but illustrates a possible direction...

[Dwight]

image.

[Anonymous]

The "asphalt" is actually concrete, and that stone actually is a chalk white texas limestone, but I agree it is slightly overexposed. I always have problems with concrete it seems.

Cropping was done on the layout, but this is the original uncropped version.

Those fringy tress are the architerra billboards. I need to find some better ones than those. The foreground trees are the archibam 3d trees which I think look pretty good for what they are. Suggestions for better ones that aren't onyx?

[Dwight]

You don't like Onyx?
Too many depared parrots? (Polly-gones - groaner)

PC users have several other 3D tree applications. I dislike picture trees because they only work for one sun angle. Oddly, that sun angle is the one they use in their promotion material.

[Anonymous]

I actually prefer Eric's original, just clearer and more cheerful. Could maybe do with a bit more depth in the windows (darker, more reflective, but that would obscure your interior too). Yeah, the fringes on the trees make them look flat and unrealistic.

[Dwight]

I can excuse you for that taste flaw since the grass in Newzieland is actually that green.

Destauration in Photoshop is a poor way to make a point about oversaturated skies and foliage in general, and this comes from oversaturated colors in almost all Archicad material textures.

[Anonymous]

Dwight wrote:
I can excuse you for that taste flaw since the grass in Newzieland is actually that green.

Been a lot of rain since you were here last, even greener now.

For trees I recently experimented and got the following (see image) using Tree 3D 01 (from AC9 Library, converts to Tree Deciduous 11 10 in AC10), They took a little while to render with shadows on, but I was quite happy with the results. Trunks and branches look a bit funky up close but they're o.k. for backgrounds.

Tree settings:
no. of leaves - 300, random leaf polygon nodes ON, leaf diameter - 1200, spreading - 500, angle of leaves 40degrees, tree diameter 6000, height 10000
leaf material - Evergreen which I modified with:
Texture space - Eroded (scale 0.1, coverage 0.5, Fuzz 0)

[Dwight]

Wonderful look.

The eroded transparency shader gives the impression of many more leaves without the broken-shards-of-glass look.

Good score, too:

Fuzz 0
Bad guys 1