old, one-footed fantasy creature

Edit: current progress:



I’ve been working on this creature for a while now, and I’d really like critiques. Eventually I hope to make a 480-frame, turntable animation with it, but the small details are still pretty poor quality, so I’ve a ways to go. I plan to add a catipiller and ladybug later on to indicate scale, (the scale will be pretty small. I plan to change the grass and moss size). Any critiques would be appreciated.

Very nice. The textures in particular look really good.

Thanks Grillage. I think that the skin displacement texture could use some work though. Here are some more views, at the quality that I plan to render the animation at. It takes 20 minutes per frame.







This is the default background that I’m using. I’ll composite in the green background for the actual animation.

Nice !
I’d say his eyelids ain’t right. No matter how old you are, you can’t have your eyelids like this.
The skin looks more like a painted translucent material than real skin, but maybe it was intended.
Yeah, I guess it’s supposed to look like a figurine since his toes are almost merged.
Maybe his eyes could be a little bit whiter though.

The rear and side views look really good but the eyes look unnatural, I think a fill light that rotates with the camera or with the head would help.

Thanks for the critiques.

  1. I agree, the eyelids are terrible. I’ll fix that.

  2. I’ll fix the eyeballs, as I can see a lot of problems with them.

  3. The skin does look bad. Maybe some more gloss will fix that.

  4. The toes are almost merged I see. I’ll fix that.

  5. It does look like it needs a fill light, but I’m hesitant to add one as this would increase the noise in the render, and the animation will take eight nights to render as is on my wimpy machine. I’ll try to do something about that though.

The camera and lights will actually remain stationary, and the character will move. This way it gets lighted well in all frames, and the background won’t look weird when it stays the same.

Can’t you render it on sheep-it instead ?

What’s sheep-it?

https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/

:wink:

I might render on sheep-it. I’ve fixed all of the stated problems, and improved the eyebrows, eyes, and body-hair. I’ll have it rendered and posted hopefully within 15 hours. Any critiques on how I could improve, or suggestions on what I could add or change to make it more interesting or unique would be appreciated.:slight_smile:

Here’s the render. I’ll fix the sss.


His bodyhair, eyebrows and eyeballs are indeed improved. But now his hat and cloth are weird on the edges. I think it was good before.
Though the eyelids are different, they’re still not right to me. Especially on the corner.
Look at this photo :


The corner is round while yours is a hard angle.

And now look at this old man’s eye :


He has wrinkles but the parts that touch each other when the eye is closed (I couldn’t find a name for it but you get it…) are not wrinkly.

Also your character is missing eyelashes.

It seems only few people know about Sheep-it. That depresses me. Every Blender user in the world should use it. It would be so much more powerful. Anyway it’s still a huge time saver, especially since they enabled tiling for single frames.

Thank you very much for all your critiques. It also reminds me how much I need to use reference. I actually have eyelashes on there, but they’re hard to see. I’ll try to make them at least as visible as in your second ref. Here’s my current list of things to do.

  1. fix moss edges

  2. too much sss in skin

  3. fix head-hair at base

  4. make a good skin-displacement map

  5. scatter dirt around

  6. fix toenail bases

  7. fix mushroom displacement texture

  8. fix dirt displacement texture

  9. fix mushroom spores

  10. fix eyebrows

  11. fix eyes

  12. add red to eyeball edges.

I’ll post an update as soon as possible.

Here it is. I managed to fix everything on my list except skin displacement map, scattering dirt around, and adding red to the eyeball edges. In my list of new problems caused by the changes made for this render, I only have to make the eyelashes less visible. I’ve also improved some things that weren’t on my list, such as the dirt. Any critiques would be appreciated!


I like the mushrooms now. Also the new ground. And the eyebrows.
The eyelashes should be grey since he’s old, and they should also be a bit longer.
The eye’s hard corner is still there as well as the wrinkles in the place I told before.
He still looks like a wax mannequin you would see in a museum. This is due to the shape of his ear and the skin. But maybe you can keep it this way and even place it in a scene where he would be exposed like in a museum or a workshop ?

Thanks again for the critique. Does this fix the eye?

I thought about making it a wax sculpture after post#5, but with my level of skill it would just look confusing to the viewer, and come across as a poor attempt at realism, making me look even worse than I am. I do like this amount of sss though. I’ve made the ears more realistic shaped now.

You should use clamping for the direct and indirect lighting to get rid of the fireflies, just enough to help though don’t go too strong on with it.
Other than that the only thing I can think of would be to improve the color grading and to reduce the size of the iris’s, that’s more my personal opinion though.

Thanks Shajuke. I might try that for noise reduction in the animation, but this is just a quick viewport render. For images like the ones in post #1, #12 and #15, I render between 1000 and 1500 samples, and don’t have to worry about noise. The irises are unrealistically large, but that was intentional. I’ll fiddle with the sizes of the iris and pupil to see what I like.

Cool, the eye looks quite good to me now.
I didn’t say it before, but the lighting would need some improvement. I don’t know how you plan on using this character, but for the renders you’ve done, it’s too bright on the forehead. Maybe even burnt.
If you don’t know what a burnt image means, check this wikipedia page.
It seems you’re using a point light since everything else is less bright.
Maybe a sun light would be more appropriate. But still, not too bright.
Don’t forget that a good lighting makes everything.
I’d recommend this 10min tutorial that helps tweaking lights fast and would probably work in your case :
[video]https://youtu.be/GXlSO_jvLHA[/video]