My first 3D production - what have I learned from it!

Good day!

 I want to talk about my first work ever in CG. I usually take some time after having completed my projects to take a look at what i did and realise my mistakes so i can improve my work in future productions and this is what this post is about. Now, the scene: it was an image for my first mandatory task at school. We had to pick a random image, from an interior or exterior scenario, and reproduce it in 3DS Max from the same point of view. I chose this one:

 At the time I was still (and for that matter I still am) very unexperienced working with Max, so I wasn't aware of the complexity of this image and what i would have to do to reproduce it correctly. From textures and modeling of the objects present to the illumination of the scene, everything was a bit hard to reproduce for me at the time. My final work was this:

 A nice image, for the regular viewer, but very distant from reality. There are too many modelling mistakes, with objects having either way to many unnecessary polys, or missing some extra ones for better realism, bad texture decisions, with high resolution bitmats in objects that are not that noticeable, and this delays your workflow because it increases rendering times unnecessarilly (This scene had almost 700.000 polys!).

 Another important aspect, that in this picture is no where near accurate or for that matter real, is the illumination. Lately, by reading some books about rendering and illumination, I became aware that I was very obcessed with texturing everything really detailed and this wasn't something so vital or that adds that extra piece of realism that CG scenes need to be convincing. What it really lacked was the correct illumination and fine tunning of shadows and light traveling distances. 

 I tried to edit my scene and create a better illumination system, but i have to admit, there is no hope for this project. I will, some time soon, remake this scene, put in practice what I have been learning lately and correct all of the noobish mistakes I made, because I consider that if you can discover what you did wrong, and learn how to make it right, you have just taken a very big step towards improving your own work and, by consequence, become a better professional.

 That's all for today, thanks for reading!