What do you gain from making Still Renders?

This is probably a really odd question that might be simple to many people… However i feel quite blind to it.

I feel like i have trouble getting myself to make something in 3D space unless i have a urgently strong desire to do so, or it has something to do with what i’m passionate about.
But on Top of that i feel like i really need it to be used for something or seen by people.

So i’ve always stuck to modeling for Animation. And i would just put my animations on youtube and hope people will see and enjoy it.
The only time i ever make still renders is for the weekend contest once in a blue moon. Because i feel like even though it’s just a picture, it has a purpose. It’s being seen, thought about, and competing against others.

The only other reason i would want to make a still is if i could make something that would end up on the featured row… but i don’t know what the rules of doing that are, or if i have the talent to do it.

But i see people make stills all the time, whether it be for the featured row, or in the forum gallery. People will make incredibly detailed models and spend so much time on them to just have… a picture of it. It doesn’t do anything or exist for any reason besides that one picture.

I have ideas for Still images i’d want to make but… how can i feel like it’s not a waste of time? What does everyone else use their Stills for or what do they hope to accomplish by making them?

Sorry if i sound a bit selfish with this whole “What do i get out of it?” feel to all this. :confused:

Because I get a REALLY cool image out of it. When you don’t need to do animation or take the render time for tons of frames, it frees up a ton of time to allow you to just keep pushing quality further. For me, part of the fun is seeing how far I can push myself on detail, realism, technical quality, etc. Everyone is different, I don’t really have anything I feel needs to be animated. I get a snapshot in my head, and just set about turning it into a real .png file. If the snapshot was really cool, I might actually have the motivation to stick it out a few weeks to succeed!

Oh, and you can do multiple angles and get a few different pictures. It’s like different angles of a painting, which is cool. So that’s nice.

Sometimes I do sit back and wonder if toiling for weeks just to make a still image or two is actually worth it or not. Who knows. I try now to just focus on what I can learn about CG and myself in the process and not worry so much about when I’ll finish it. You’ll waste a life’s worth of projects waiting for them to be done, only to complain that you have nothing to work on. (or I would, anyway).

tl;dr: everybody’s different, some of us like still renders.

Some people just like still renders,like lots of people like paintings, which also are not animated. I make still render as artwork to illustrate scientific work in a glossy fashion.

misunderstood

This is all very interesting.
Perhaps it comes down to why it is that we enjoy working in 3D. I think my newer passion i’ve discovered is the art of story telling and perhaps that’s why i’ve always been leaning towards animation. But i really do have alot of trouble finishing that kind of stuff.

One of you said how it feels good to just see something get done and push how far your realism can go in an image.
I think i could like that feeling. Having just one specific image to work on and just sit there and edit and edit and edit thinking every step of the way about how much better it’s getting.
I may get to a point where i would never be able to deem it “done” but i think i would find that proof of the fruits of my labor feeling to happen more frequently.

Maybe i should set aside a day or two and give it a try.
Is the featured Row something very difficult to land a spot on by the way?

My two ideas of what i think i would want to do a still for is a Knight on a motorcycle, and the other being a recreation of a moment from a TV show i enjoy, in which to save his friend from being eaten by a giant, he quickly jumps in the giant’s mouth and basically pulls him out to trade places with him. Then, holding the mouth open he delivers his final words which is the image i want to recreate.

I kind of feel the same way. I am not happy with just one frame. I need footage. Often I am given a still frame and expected to animate it by breaking it apart into pieces. Often I wish the still artists understood some of that animation task and planned their art accordingly for my animation purposes. A lot of the times the PSD files I get are just full of janky tricks that still artists use everyday to get by. I think to myself “I could do a lot more with this still image if the actual designer had created and entire background plate and not just left the fixup for me…”

What do you gain from taking photos?
Why not a video camera?
What do you gain from taking photos of a landscape? Of a still life? Of a portrait? Of masterpieces in museums?
Why to work as an illustrator?
Do we need books? We have videos now.

BTW, why to render animations?
3dprint is here, robotics are here.
Why 3dprints? Traditional clay mediums are far better (and much cheaper)
Why digital 2d painting?
A simple scanner and paper, colors and brushes are much better.

See my point?
My question: Why to use any digital medium after all?
:slight_smile:

This is why Michael Bay gets to keep making movies…everyone these days needs stuff blowing up in their faces to keep their interest. :slight_smile: If you are making things to “get something out of it”, you shouldn’t be doing this. To be put in the top row is an honor, as people have recognized the effort, skill, and overall excellence that someone has achieved in their work…same as a “Daily Deviation” at deviantART. BUT, you don’t make something just so it might become a DD or put in the featured row. That’s not what being an artist is all about, artists express themselves, be it in an animation, stills, or anything else they decide to do.
For me personally, I just love making art. If I get featured, then great, but it’s not my motivation at all.
As for what I “get out of it”, I get comments, critiques, helpful hints, I get better, and most importantly, it’s fun. Met a lot of great people along the way as well :slight_smile:

I gain a finished work that would have required hundreds (thousands if I keep the quality level) of machines to make an HD animation in any reasonable amount of time. Farm rental is out since my internet is terrible.

I think you should ask yourself who you are making art for. Are you making art for yourself, or so that everyone can see you? Is it really only worth the time and effort if it is a featured image? Is it better to post on youtube because you can see the view count?

It’s nice to make things that are appreciated by others, but if that is your only motivation, your art will be lacking in personal expression.

I could find many reasons, why high quality stills are important.
Render quality stills from many view angles.
Do this before baking these details on a low poly asset, ready for animation.
If something goes wrong (there always something going wrong… lol) then it will be too late (after baking)

animation needs a lot of prep work to do well.

When I started working in Blender, I, for the first time, had the ability to bring ideas I had in my mind to life. The rewarding feeling when making images only grew when I got more experienced and I could do more complex things.

Of course, sometimes it can be a long process too, with Cycles at least you have to take more things into account like what’s behind the camera because that could affect how light bounces around the scene, even though the outcome is a realism that wasn’t readily possible before.

Razc; I hazard to ask, exactly what TV show did that image come from?

And i would just put my animations on youtube and hope people will see and enjoy it.

You could put your still images into a slideshow video and post that on Youtube. Do a slow pan and zoom (Ken Burns-style) to keep things from being too static.

Steve S

I really like what you said Sterling Roth. I think that my aim is for that appreciation by others. I really love the critique, feed back, and talking to people about what i’ve created. But… Often times it’s hard to really get much of that. Maybe Stills would be great for getting more of that because there are alot more people interested in seeing what i make here on the forums, rather than those on youtube.
Maybe i could get enjoyment out of making a still if i made a timelapse video of it at the same time? hmm…

And Ace Dragon :stuck_out_tongue: I kind of goofed a little bit in making that post. I often get to talking to much and went into too much detail of the moment and gave the image and decided it may turn people away with how much i was talking about it. So i retried… but forgot that backspacing over the image doesn’t get it off the post when you post it.
So really the only thing i’d have to add is that that image was a Real life recreation of it.
It is from a Series called Attack on Titan. It was #1 in the Anime community for 2013, it’s now on netflix, but the english version of it is only just now being released one week at a time. Alot of people have bad ideas of what anime is and it gets a bad rap sometimes, but as far as Attack on Titan goes, it was an incredible story. More like a 5 hour action movie in my opinion. It could play with my emotions like a ball. One moment it had me feeling depressed and saddened, but in the next moment i wanted to jump out of my chair cheering for humanity.
I can pop ya a link here ;3


And the subtitles in that aren’t too important, cause they go by kinda fast in the 2nd half. But it just goes to show how much action is in it. And it has a but of a mystery to it aswell.

First of all, you should just make what you enjoy. No need to force yourself to make still shots because others are doing it.

I mainly start with stills because I can get a satisfying image result in less time than it takes to do an animation. For almost every image I work on, I always think of all sorts of different ways to expand the scene elements into animations, physics experiments and games. Those become exponentially more complicated for planning and time consuming to execute at high quality (not to mention render times). So, I mostly do short image projects then move on to the next and less frequently expand the ideas to animation.

It also helps to have an appreciation for photography. I’ve always taken stills and snapshots. When I moved into shooting more video, I found that over time I watched the videos a lot less than I end up looking at the photos. Images have a timeless quality of the moment captured and frozen in time. You can look at a photo or still render for as long or as short as you like to appreciate the details and make your own associations. Videos and animation really don’t share the share the same quality. They have their own strengths and merits, but they give a different experience.

As a viewer watching an animation, there are also so many other elements that can add or detract from the experience: the music, sound effects, camera movement, editing, writing, acting (if there’s dialog), etc. The visuals are just one part of that. With a still image, the visual is everything and the only thing.

For you, if you really feel the need to do more still images, I would suggest thinking of your still scenes as a movie poster, book cover, album cover or an advertising image. The one single image should tell a story or transport the viewer into the scene and communicate a quick impression of the subjects, environment and mood.

My advice to you, either in still or animations, is to make something that you are proud of. That’s an internal feeling, comments and critique are external stimuli. There is nothing better than posting something that you are really proud of and getting good feedback, but it starts with the pride, then is amplified by the feedback. Be critical of your own work. Start from within, What do you want to say? It’s nice to be appreciated by others, but you need to start appreciating yourself and the time and effort you put into your projects.

Not trying to get too deep on you, but the sooner you can get in touch with your internal motivations, the sooner you will be able to accomplish exactly what you want.

As I see it, there are 3 reasons you might do a still render.

  1. Not enough computational resources to render an animation, even though you want to animate.

  2. Lack of imagination - other people post pictures of cars, robots, etc. so you do as well

  3. You want to create an artwork, illustration or design, and a still image is the best way to do this.

Naturally you don’t want to waste your time doing something that isn’t impressive. Making an impressive animation is harder than doing an impressive still, IMO. Most animation done by amateurs really sucks.

Why did Leonardo da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa instead of making a flip book of her sticking out her tongue? For the artistic expression, or, still renders are useful in creating realistic or near realistic images that an architech might use to show a potenial client what a proposed building might look like. Or I might want to make a new background image for my channel on YouTube… there’s lots of reasons one might make a still vs an animation. In advertising for example, print media & the web both use still images… maybe I want a car on top of a mountain without the expense of buying a car and renting a helicopter to take it up to the top when I could instead render it for some car ad… again, endless possibilities for still renders.

Animation is a series of stills.