environmental design reel project please comment...

[orion5175]

I am new to this particular forum but I am usually on Wold's work in progress section but I figured that I am going to need a lot of help with these projects and as much feedback,suggestions, comments as possible, So please feel free to add your two cents. A little info about the scene it was modeled and rendered in Maya using mental ray settings, textured in CS4

I am not looking forward to batch rendering it in it's entire 197 frames (8 seconds) which I have averaged to take about a week of rendering, but if I get it close to perfect then it will all be worth it (hence the large amount of feedback from other artist,designers,) I'll be honest composition and lighting are not my strongest attributes and I have tried to solve all this with photoshop sketch's before starting

looking south

looking East

[AlexM]

Will the scene be static with just a camera moving around it? If so you can cut your rendering time down significantly by doing a pre-baked lighting pass on every nth frame first then rendering using the baked lighting. I'm fairly certain mental ray has this capability, I've only done it with VRay myself though.

As for the scene, not bad, the thing that stands out most for me is that sharp rectangular entrance to the temple. I think you need to put some sort of frame or trim there.