Freelance Mappzor
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💻 Oldtimer
The bluish Fog effect is the explosion. Dalte made a lighting effect for gig attacks that colour the sorounding area in the attacks colour. So it isnt really part of the map.Well... overall it looks 'OK'..
don't get me wrong, it's not terrible by any means, but it could be significantly better.
The level as a whole doesn't seem particularly cohesive in it's appearance... I think you need to pick an art style, and make sure all the elements conform to that. For example the characters we've been seeing lately seem to be developing a soft, rendered, sort of vibe from them. Then you have a level with very flatly painted textures, with pretty bland, subtle lighting. The water shader with it's normal map feels out of place with the textures on the landscape.... and considering the BG texture alludes to the ambience fading off to yellow, that would mean that both the light source in the environment and the fog should also be yellow, but they seem to be of a blue-ish colour, that again doesn't really harmonize the scene (not to mention that the blue from the light is obviously getting a bit more of a bias, and is getting more blown out by the bloom effect). Also the islands loo like they're floating on the water, as they have neither a shadow on the water, or any kind of reflection to help ground them.
This all really sounds a lot harsher than it is, and is all fairly fixable really quickly.
just sorting out the lighting and atmosphere to get the colour balance right will do a lot. You could apply some kind of alpha blend meshes around the islands to hint at either water making contact with the edges, or give it a fake shadow, and better lighting baked into the terrain itself will pull out the form of the landscape in a much more pleasing way.
I think the textures are actually quite nice, but like i said earlier everything is a bit too flat... bringing stuff in line with your characters would definately be the right way to go, and it would look different from the anime in an interesting way too!
Hope that helps!
As for the reflections/shadows. Sadly our water only reflects the skybox and not the mapped terrain. So it would need to be made manually by a workaround. That said im not to sure of how good that would look in combination with the water shader itself. Then again maybe Raven has some ideas. Would slight water transparency perhaps solve the floating island apearance?