"The border" - school project

[Teomath]

Hello!
I've been lurking here for some time, but I haven't really produced anything that felt meaningful to post.
This is the result of a school project, where I 've drawn a concept in photoshop and turned it into a Maya scene.



>Original concept image.



> Rendered still: Maya + Mudbox + Vray + a bit of post processing in After Effects.


--> YOUTUBE MOVIE: a short animation that was the goal of this whole thing.


I'm pretty happy with the result, but I've had some problems with the lighting and texturing - most notably that the lighting from my original concept was too unrealistic to be applied to the 3d scene. I've tried to solve this by using a lot of point lights rather then Global Illumination. I also made the surface texture of the stones a lot more coarse in the 3d version, as I couldn't get the smooth surface from the concept to look good when rendered.

Any crtizism and/or suggestions for how I could have done things differently is appriciated, both for the concept and on the final render.