Workbench WIP - please critique

[shakes825]

Modeled and surfaced everything from scratch - all models are nurbs.

Please review and suggest improvements - thanks.

[gmask]

Looks pretty good.. The cork board on the wall maybe could use some more work.. the bump on it is repaeting a little too obviously and the color seems a bit too saturated... too red I think.

The drill and other tools on the table look a little floaty.. the shadow needs to be darker where the tool would be be touching the surface it lays on..

The green spill seems draws my attention and leaves me wondering what it is suppoed to be from.. maybe a jar with some green goo spilling out of it would be appropriate..

The drill bit looks too yellow and does not look like it is made of metal..

The screwdriver shafts also don;t really look like metal and their handles aren;t registering as plactic to me.. they need more gloass and a well defined reflective highlight on them..

The texturing ont he tool box is very nice .. I like the rust looks great...

The modelling on the drill is great and the sahder looks pretty good.

[shakes825]

Cool - thank you for the helpful comments!

The green spill is supposed to look like paint from some other project long ago - but I guess its too evident, I'll tone it down some to age it out a bit.

Will work on the other suggestions - thanks!

[gmask]

The green spill looks to me mroe like ink.. I have had a work bnecnh before an dif it were laytex paint or even oil it woul dsit on top of th esurface and have a thickness to it.. expecially around the edges.. and would be more or less opaque in areas.. wheras ink or dye will soak into the wood.. I would alos imagine there to be rings fromt he bottom the container the paint was in to be present.. any way that is my CSI analysis of the crime scene

[itroww]

I'd say, HDRI light it and get back to us with a new render,the HDRI lighting will make your scene look so much more real and will really anchor your objects in space and environment. Try it.

[shakes825]

Thanks for the idea, but for now I want to see how far I can tweak it with a standard render and dmap shadows - I've added invisible shadow mask objects and negative lights to get darker proximity shadows for the tools and toolbox on the bench top and tweaking lighting in general. I should have an updated render in a few days.

I've used HDRI a bit in lightwave with downloaded HDR images, but haven't in Maya yet - but what can I use to create HDR images? I'm assuming a standard 8 bit file wouldnt work very well....?