I am happy to see someone trying to texture my model. You said you thought my model could be used for a splashscreen or some promotional screens. Which would be fine with me, and I would like to try with this post to encourage or motivate you to try a little harder 'communicating' the idea you had in mind when creating that image you posted above.
There is this guy, named pd, who is apparently the graphics lead of this project, and when we want to create artwork that makes it into the final game, we have to make an impression on him that we, as amateur artists, can make artwork of professional quality. So, lets first concentrate on some basic things, things that I think are not only important from an artistic standpoint, but are also repeatedly mentioned by the guy we want to make an impression on:
- a good presentation of a 3D model is very important when you want other people to recognize the 'look' you are going for
- lightning is the key to achieve the above
This might be a bit condensed, but I think it will do for a start. In fact, I think getting lightning right is probably the most important thing when doing 3D art. Think about how a image is perceived by our eyes, via lightning rays. So, I would go so far and say that lightning is probably the only thing there is to get right, and everything else you might think of (modelling, texturing, ...), is just a subset of lightning a scene (when you model something, you may think of it as shaping something to reflect the light casted on it in a very specific way, you might think of texturing a model as specifing parameters controlling the direction in which a models surface should reflect the light, etc). Thats at least how I see it.
The point I am trying to make here is that I think that before we go and try to texture the model, especially if we don't have alot of experience as artists, we should first concentrate on getting comfortable with the basics of lightning, because it is so important. Lets try to get a good look out of the model just with changing the parameters of the renderer, placing and tweaking lights and fiddling with the basic material settings blender has to offer (reflectivity, specularity, hardness, color, ...). And I think that once we get a hang of that, everything else will eventually just fall in place and we can create really professional looking artwork (This assumption is probably naive, but I'll adjust it as I go along).
So, I tried to stick with what I said above (actually, the other way around, I first tried to make the model look good, then extrapolated the above text out of the experience) and worked on making an image that looks like what I had in mind when I modeled that autofactory, here is what came out of that:
autofactory_render2
autofactory_render3 - I tried adding a 'key light', although I don't really know what that is... you decide if it looks better or worse then the other render
autofactory2.blend - and the updated .blend as well, for reference
Now, there is still a lot that could be done better, but compare these renders to the
first one I posted. It does look a lot better, doesn't it?
And, if you look at the new renders, you might notice that I did not really change that much. It is still the same model, with the same details, without texture and the same linear gradient as sky. All I did really change was the colors, the lightning and the perspective (and the renderer, but I would say that counts as changing the lightning too).
A very rewarding(as in: easy and fun) thing for you (or anyone who is interested) to do could be to take my .blend and try to do the same thing I did. Make a good looking image with just changing colors, lightning and perspective. Try to capture whatever you thought of when you made that image you posted with just changing those very basic things. I'm sure there can only come good things out of that.
You tried rendering the model from the side and a little from above. To give you some tip to get you started: try lowering the camera a bit, so the sky is visible above and behind the model. The reason I would do that is because there is only a plane as floor below the factory, from the perspective you have chosen the background of the model is just uniformly gray, and that makes the whole scene look 'flat'. Also, I notice you have chosen a very dark color for the main part of the model, that makes the already subtle and sparse details of the model go away, maybe what you wanted with that was to make it look like it was in the dark/night (absence of light) instead of the texture itself being dark? That would certainly something you could experiment with, make the same scene I rendered look like it was in the very late evening or night (for a night render I would try to experiment with spot lights lightning to factory from below, like you often see with landmarks done in the real world, or you could try to attach little lights at the top of the building, making a night render look good is probably pretty hard... because there is no 'easy' lightning setup for that), instead of early evening/dawn like it is right now. Or maybe shift the whole setting to an ice planet with a crisp clear blue sky in the morning? The possibilities are endless.
Anyways these are just some ideas and thoughts, and now I am gonna end this already very long post. I hope that I am not telling anything that is too wrong, since all I have written is just more or less my personal opinion, I have never visited an art school or something like that. Feel free to criticize or correct me.
PS: everything linked in this post released under the terms of
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
