If you’re planning in doing a turntable then i find Caetano’s idea very interesting, it will add “life” to the scene.
Clothing is still WIP? Otherwise i think you can improve the fur and add more details.
Thank you very much Caetano, I think that would work very well. I would also have to make more kinds of mushrooms.
@ Mik1190: Thanks a lot for the critique. The clothing is still WIP, but I think I’ll fix that later, mostly because I am hesitant to increase the particle count.
Here’s last night’s render. Here is what I know I need to fix:
- Too much focal blur
- The horns still need a lot of work
- The knuckles aren’t in the right places
- I need to fix the dirt texture
- The expression needs some work
- The eyelid don’t look right
- The fur cloak doesn’t look right
- I need to fix the mushroom bases.
Any other suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Cool, I confirm my idea !
Your list is good.
To me the focal blur is not that problematic but if you don’t like it…
There could even be a little hole where the mushroom was.
The thing with the fur cloak is that it doesn’t seem to be attached to him, so he couldn’t jump around with his foot without losing it.
Also we can see the skin/leather in many areas which makes it look old, like it lost some fur, but maybe you can go with that.
I personnally liked the brown color, but fur is good.
For the horns, black is a good idea to try, they just still look too thick to me.
Thank you again. I think the hole would only make sense if I put a small patch of mushrooms around it, but it is a good idea. For the cloak, I was think more of the skin texture under the fur. The old, worn look fits with the style, I think.
Sure it makes sense.
Something I just realized. His fingers shouldn’t be straight like this. Take any object about the same size and look at your fingers. They’re cuvred, making them straight requires more effort.
And for the moment it’s hard to tell that he’s checking if the mushroom is edible from his face. Maybe making him frowning his eyes or touching the top with his other hand would make it more clear.
You’re right, the fingers should be curved. I’ll try to make it more clear that he’s checking if it’s edible. Do you think changing the variety of the mushroom helps? I think it adds a lot more color and interest to the image too, although the material could use some work. The face also looks pretty bad from this angle. I’ll switch the angle back, and do some more sculpting on the face. The horn material looks pretty bad too, and the cloak still needs to be fastened on.
Actually, now that I look at it further, I think I really like this angle. I’ll just point the head farther down.
Nice ! Great idea for the mushroom ! Though this species is definitely not edible. But it’s a fantasy creature so… And maybe since it’s fantasy, you could even make it another color :
This angle doesn’t look bad for me either.
Now his pinky finger is longer than his ring finger.
Anyway I look forward to see the improvements.
And about sheep it, did it turn well ?
I realize this species is extremely poisonous, but he hasn’t decided whether or not to eat it yet, so it doesn’t have to be edible. It always humors me that the kind of mushroom portrayed most it illustrations, especially for small children, is one of the most poisonous, but it is colorful. As for making it more fantastic, I think these colors work very well with the image, but another shape, like that in your second picture might look quite nice. I’ve now fixed the curve and length of his fingers. As for Sheep-it, I think I’ve overcome all the problems, but I haven’t actually tried it because I don’t feel like I need it. The scene renders at pretty good quality in six and a half hours, so I just render over night. I should start saving up points for when I render the animation though.
Sure. I had a 500mb smoke sim on my computer which took about 48 hours to render locally.
The same thing took down to 20 minutes on sheep it depending on how many credits I had and how many computers were connected (plus uploading the 500 mb file which took also about 20min). So 6 hours could be reduced to 5 minutes. How big is your file ?
And don’t worry if you don’t have credits yet, it will still go faster. Since sheep it is not that popular, sometimes there are just a few projects online and the queue is short so your credits almost don’t matter (at these moments)
What you can easily do (and what I do) is render for others and earn credits when you’re doing something that doesn’t require all your CPU and GPU (watching a movie or videos, browsing the web, doing not heavy graphic stuff).
Sheep it doesn’t take 100% of your CPU like Cycles does.
For the old creature, sure he has not put the mushroom in the basket yet, but if he’s carefully checking it, it means he’s bit of a dummy on mushrooms. But it’s fantasy world and as you say you can change the shape so it’s okay.
You’re probably right about Sheep-it. My file is 209 MB. As for the mushroom, I will change the shape. Here’s another render. There are still a lot of small details to fix.
I’ve put a few more hours of work into this render. Here are the changes I made, at least the ones I remember:
- I re-sculpted the face a lot.
- I added green to the mushrooms.
- I took off the hat. I plan on replacing it with a much shorter one.
- I repainted the skin displacement textures, adding more detail.
- I fiddle with the whiskers, and head-hair, and body-hair.
- I added back some focal blur.
- I fiddled with the compositing a bit.
I can see the difference of displacement details especially above his left eye, that’s cool.
I’m not sure about the green stuff though. Especially this material. Maybe it could be translucent or a less saturated or yellower green.
Another thing : it seems you have black edges in your focal blur. If you disable the alpha channel (without the gradient background) you should clearly see it. This normally happens when exporting the file in a wrong way or importing it in the wrong way in an image editor like Photoshop.
Basically it’s when your alpha is premultiplied (or when it’s not, I don’t remember).
Which format do you use ?
Normally if you export in PNG (8bit or 16bit) and import it right away in the image editor you shouldn’t have black edges.
However, if you export for example in openEXR and import it in the image editor while checking the wrong boxes when asked how to deal with the color profiles and alpha, you will get black edges.
Is this better? I had originally used an alpha-over node in the composite, and I’m not quite sure why it didn’t work.
yes that’s better, you can see it on the fur of his cloth
Are you still on the project ? I think it deserves to be finished.
Yes, it’s almost finished. I haven’t been doing much on the computer in the last month, but I am going to finish this project. Can you think of any things I need to do before I call it finished? Thank you very much for reminding me to finish this!
Here’s a full list of what I would improve including things we previously said (but still not done):
- Less burnt image
- More dense subsurface scattering (less translucent) to look more like real skin
- Nicer edges on his cloth (and with more polygons)
- Attached cloth
- Corner of his left eye less red/more pink
- More continuous edge on his upper left eyelid
- Texture on the horns
- Hollow in the cut of the horns
- Thinner horns
- More streaks on the horns
- Nicely curved spine/neck
- Thinner ears (thick ears look like wax)
- More natural looking green stuff on the mushroon (more dirty, less saturated, yellower or maybe translucent)
- Some soil and roots on the visible mushroom bases
- Texture that doesn’t look deformed on the big pointy mushroom
- Change the color of either the white dots or the red surface (or both). I like the green dots + red surface on the previous image I showed you
- A more expressive face (maybe a smile since he found a mushroom, but then the eyebrows should behave differently)
- Better shaped skin around the fingernails and toenails (this has actually been bothering me from the begining)
- A better background or a 3D environment (with some volumetric light or somethin’ cool ya know)
- A hat with holes for the horns
- An AWESOME hat with holes for the horns ! (I typed “fantasy hat” on Google images)
If I was rich I would buy every hat on HandiCraft Kate.
To me if you do all of this properly, your image should be on the top row. Because if there’s room for a stormtrooper with big eyes, why wouldn’t there be room for an awesome and original creature like that ?