I'm sure there's better out there, but I know I will never be as good a modeller as you are
The bird needs real feathers... can probably only achieve that with some kind of plugin or something though. It's pretty good-looking otherwise (except that the white texture for its body looks more like rock than feathers), its appearance is pretty organic (except for the identical wings--might wanna change that), and nothing really wrong sticks out. (lol, d'you like my interleaved ups and downs?)
As for the tree... well, it sucks. Nothing you can do but climb it and jump off. jk
IMO,you have a lotta' talent...the tree is a lil' hard to see in that context but I'm sure within the right environment it looks fine. The bird is just a fine piece of artwork....I think the body feathers look as near to the real thing as you can get (considering,it is a computer image).
the shapes look fine. but how they render, makes them look lacking. do you see it?
maybe they are missing lightmaps or it's something wrong with the texturing, or maybe you need to play around with some techniques for making things render more organicly.
First of all. How come you guys think the tree sucks? I thought it looked good. I spent so much time working on it so I can't look at it objectively anymore. You know what I mean Btw the tree is 6million polys. I still have to have to paint a texture for the trunk.
As for the bird model. I think the shape and modeling is fine but the texturing does need a lot of work. I agree about the feathers looking like rock. I can't seem to paint my own textures very well. And for feathers you would need some plugin for that to make it look realistic.
For the lighting and rendering setup I didn't worry about that for these renders. I just did something basic. For the final renders I will spend much more time on that.
Your tree looks nothing like the real thing, that's why I think it sucks It's really hard to do, I don't discredit your effort. It just..sucks. That's all. lol It needs a LOT more leaves, and a LOT more branches, as well as some fairly advanced shading on the leaves. The biggest issue is that the shapes aren't organic, the branches look like extruded and bent cylinders or something. This kind of thing is generally best left to a plugin, since there's a lot of repetitive detail involved.
Yea. I think I tried to model something too complicated. I really don't like using plugins for modeling so I decided to do everything by hand. There is no copying and pasting done at all for this mode. I agree it could use way more branches and leaves. The actual leaves themselves are identical to reference pictures I have. The branches are basically cylinders but I squished them and changed them so they aren't so round. The reason I think they look like cylinders is cuzz of the horrible texturing and uvw map alignments on there.
Geeze I got so board of that tree. So repetitive and hard to get it too look right. Like trees have a mathematical formula for how they grow, branch off, and the position of the branches. Guess I bit off more then I can chew on this one.