Advice for a beginner

[-Ben-Battler-]

Well, that looks better. If you still want to improve then I suggest you watch a recent Tutorial from Rawa.

At the moment the whole image still looks abandonded because that's exactly what it is. There isn't enough going on. It would need more vegetation, shrubs, the trees you have hidden, people, furniture on the inside (or outside), more interesting grass, still more dirt.

What you can think about is, when added the trees, to set the sun behind those, add fog that you get some nice god rays. Rawa shows it here

The steps in the grass are a negative eye-catcher, you should flatten out the distribution object of the grass.

[JGallagher]

Thanks again for the tips Ben, it's looking a lot better now. I'm thinking the brick material still need a bit of work, they aren't as displaced as they look when you're up close. I'll keep playing with it. II couldn't get the 'god rays' to work either, I'll have to watch the volume material video over again.

[danielmn]

just catching up on your thread.

In response to earlier comment of "feels abandoned"
Might I suggest starting a new scene based on a real location.  Seems like you learned a lot from this and using your imagination. 

But you will learn a lot when creating something from real life and understanding why aspects of building and enviroments do what they do.  From the way they are designed (Guidelines that go into the thought of a building a building)  or the way textures get worn and used, either though man made use or enviromental concerns.

Not sure where the inspiration for this building came from but there are definitely parts that dont make sense as to their function in reality.

This is only my advice, as it helped me lot and I still pull reference, and ask my self in reality why would this wall be here or this opening. Why a  10 ft vs 12 ft corridor.

I guess if I was to change one thing is , the brick that takes up 90% of the building , either vary it up with different  brick textures or uses other materials on different walls.

[JGallagher]

Thank Daniel, this is actually a real building somewhere in the states! I'm not loving the architecture either though haha. We were given a building in school and had to model it in Revit, and do a full set of Architectural and Structural drawings for it. They asked us to do a rendering for the cover page, and while everyone else was rendering in Revit I thought I'd take advantage of my Corona education license, and a good learning opportunity.

I was going to ask about variance in the brick. I just pulled an image of gametextures for it, it there a way to tile multiple variations of the same texture?

[romullus]

Your brick texture has very regular pattern, you can take advantage of that and try to overly matched 3ds max's procedural tiles map on top to give it some variance.