https://www.freeriderhd.com/t/1011637-dominion
Suggested by AfterImage, with a specific request for CC by Zurge, which I really respect. Please feel free to post the CC etc in the thread for me if im not on in a week
having played through, i think it's fair to say the detail isnt the problem too much (there's definitely something to be said about the rocks wanting better texture stylistically and the water detail being super rough, but in saying this im very impressed with how good the ground detail is, which i think is very hard to do well with a heavier style), it's the execution and cohesiveness of the overall composition, perspective and ride that is left wanting.
there's way too much white space for a forest-adjacent track. with the way the track's laid out, styling it all as a hill or mountain in a forest makes a lot of sense, with the bg starting at the top and the foreground unfolding as you work your way down. this should look like scenery line grass, rocks, boulders, mushrooms, weeds, insects, animals, bushes, flowers, trees, saplings, floating leaves and debris, a river etc etc etc. i think you started that in some places, but then ran out of time (this is a CE) or gave up.
im gonna be on my ishu **** here, but i also dont love seeing floating rocks in something like a forest track. i understand it's to give a bit of detail to that section of ride, but where your track is kind of inherently a grounded one, you need to maintain compositional/stylistic cohesiveness and stick to the realities of a forest. this doesnt mean you have to draw a whole cliff or massive tree to make the floating platforms work, but something as simple as logs nailed to a tree or scaffolded timber jumps would work perfectly fine, giving that section some detail while remaining grounded in the realities of a forest
ordinarily i wouldnt really harp on this - particularly because youve generally done a good job, youre an intermediate+ player still learning the ropes, and i admire the ambition to try perspective in this game (it's hard asf, there's a reason i didnt mess with it for years!) - but the perspective in places is super rough. the pool of water that leads to the waterfall is very wonky, but worse than this is that the stuff in the foreground isnt significantly larger than the stuff in the background. think of a photo of this scene youve drawn - the boat, trees etc should be much larger than what they are compared to the "back" of the scene. doing this well really elevates a track
the ride is generally fine, but i do have notes for you here. dont use boosts to make jumps "work". if pete is overshooting a jump, that means you need to add a gravity, change the angle of the jump, force the player to slow down prior to the jump; dont do the lazy band-aid solution of adding a boost at the end to force the player to (sloppily) stick the landing. particularly for heavier styles this is a really bad habit to get into, boosting the player into the ground has the potential for glitches and unfair deaths, with the player praying for the right RNG to stop them from dying so they can continue playing. also, with heavier styles, it's harder to judge how fast the player will be when approaching a jump, as it's very easy for the player to unintentionally build a heap of speed if you go over a patch of dense physics lines with the wrong button inputs, leading to the player overshooting the band-aid boost at the end of the jump. if your jump doesnt work, do the hard work of tweaking the jump etc - dont use boosts !! bladee approaches this problem very well but having sections of the ride be sparsely detailed to avoid glitches, take a look at his stuff and ishu's/xwinx's/maple's too for examples of this
this is a good track, and shows you have the foundations to go to the next level. however, it's these sorts of things i find which separates a feat-level player from a borderline player, and implementing these ways of thinking will help you level up your skill in this medium!
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