3D-Blender Blender Art - Show Us Your Blender Skill

[0ier 3D]

Just a little question to the artists : Do you all import your model from daz to blender ?
Blender seems so difficult to learn...

I do at least, but that's also because I'm not really an artist and I'm pretty bad at 3d modeling/haven't had much practice. I still have some blend files saved with my horrifying earlier creations. I usually use blender to try and create small, specific, niche things that I can't find in the daz store.



For example, these star pasties/stickers were made in completely in blender. Took a few minutes to model it after mashing together parts of different tutorials. Took another few minutes to figure out how to shrinkwrap it to the nipple area. Mostly did it because I couldn't find any sticker assets in daz or pasties in a star shape. I think it is worth it to learn blender just to be more flexible and have more options. There's a great (I think) youtube channel with basic modeling info that helped me out a few months ago:

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[Lucius Vorenus]

Just a little question to the artists : Do you all import your model from daz to blender ?
Blender seems so difficult to learn...

A good start:

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[M0rD0l]

Just a little question to the artists : Do you all import your model from daz to blender ?
Blender seems so difficult to learn...

It's no more difficult than other 3D editors. The main thing is not to be afraid of it.

 

[TranscendentThots]

Just a little question to the artists : Do you all import your model from daz to blender ?
Blender seems so difficult to learn...

Honestly? Once you get over the hump of the learning curve, you'll find that a lot of things like hair collisions and clothes that look good with big breasts are easier to do from scratch in Blender. Especially once you start learning Geometry Nodes!

 

[jackmancactus]

 

[BobbySnaxey]

Lara is training

 

[DitaVonTease]

Lara is training
View attachment 2605353

Mmmmmmm....IN training, I think....

 

[DD3DD]

Lara is training
View attachment 2605353

"Awww... Lara Babe, Chat defs lied to you about using a cold can to soothe your arse'ole after a vigorous anal sesh."

Spoiler: Naive Lara

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Spoiler: Naughty Lara

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[TranscendentThots]

I'm trying to nail down a non-photoreal style. It's not quite there yet, but I can't think what it needs to push it further. Maybe makeup countour/highlights? Better eyebrows?

--->

Edit: Yes, that's better. Not perfect, but better. I've achieved a "We Have Widowmaker At Home" level, I guess.

 

[TranscendentThots]

Just a simple portrait I rendered lately ...

View attachment 2602730

I don't understand what's going on at the tips of her hair. The alpha channel looks great all the way down her face and neck, then it suddenly chokes at the last second and turns into these strips of plastic.

I'd have to see your Shader Nodes to know for sure, but you want to manually set the alpha using a Mix Shader node right at the end before Output. Just plug transparent into the top and your previous shader into the bottom, and modulate between them using your hair's Alpha textures.

More information if you need it:

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(This technique should work regardless of what alpha technique your current node setup is using, though of course it will probably render a little faster if you take care to blend the diffuse colors *before* feeding it into your existing setup. Replacing the alpha data just before Output is something of a brute force solution.)

Good luck!

 

[TranscendentThots]

Thanks for your reply! Unfortunately I don't use cards hairs with images textures, but particles hairs :

View attachment 2608461

It's not the shader that is faulty, but the interpolated children particles :

View attachment 2608456

I agree with you, it should be more "pointy" at the end, it doesn't look very good!

Ooof.

I don't know a lot about particle hair. Can you adjust the particle size/radius or the hair thickness? If so, see if maybe you can make each individual particle smaller towards the end of the strand. Maybe even do something in Geometry Nodes that you could then feed into it, if it only accepts a float value for thickness. You'd be amazed how many unsolvable problems have "we can do that in Geometry Nodes" as the solution.

 

[TranscendentThots]

Disclaimer : I'm not an expert, just a random internet user!

For me it's the hair (it's too shiny and too much "straight", you should add some messy hairs here and there), the skin is a bit too pinkish too. Maybe something like this for the hair ? :
View attachment 2608422

Also, most of the time in 3D a good lighting does the trick! You may have the best model, best textures and so on, if the lighting isn't good, the whole picture won't be good too.

On your first picture, the smooth smile, the character looking at the camera, the light in the eye, are nice little details!

Thanks for the feedback. I've tried to improve it. Please let me know if this is a step in the right direction:



But I wonder if I'm missing the point with my current hair textures. Do you know of a way to make curved lnes procedurally using noise textures? All I've been able to make so far is random straight lines. I know how to make my own hair cards but I was hoping to do it procedurally, so I can just switch the RNG seed and it'll be new cards for a new character.

The one thing I'm kinda proud of is the fake shines. It's basically the one thing you can't do with particle hair.

Note that I did not change the skin texture between the first and second images. The only thing that has changed is the lighting. It's a very pale skin texture so the lighting has a very pronounced effect on it. (The reason the lighting keeps changing is because I'm using Blender's asset system. I was lazy and took the screenshot from the (editable) library file, rather than reloading the scene from the first image.

I'm actually a rank amateur when it comes to lighting, so I'll happily take any tips you can give me. (Do note my constraints: I'm using eevee, I'm trying not to spend any more money than I already have, and I'm on a potato.) I understand the principles of key, fill and rim lighting, I just didn't bother using it in these shots and just used the HDR and (in the room) an Area Light for the window.

Is this a mistake? Should I compose every render's lighting like I'm shooting a TV commercial? Let me know!

 

[DitaVonTease]

Thanks for the feedback. I've tried to improve it. Please let me know if this is a step in the right direction:

View attachment 2608893

But I wonder if I'm missing the point with my current hair textures. Do you know of a way to make curved lnes procedurally using noise textures? All I've been able to make so far is random straight lines. I know how to make my own hair cards but I was hoping to do it procedurally, so I can just switch the RNG seed and it'll be new cards for a new character.

The one thing I'm kinda proud of is the fake shines. It's basically the one thing you can't do with particle hair.

Note that I did not change the skin texture between the first and second images. The only thing that has changed is the lighting. It's a very pale skin texture so the lighting has a very pronounced effect on it. (The reason the lighting keeps changing is because I'm using Blender's asset system. I was lazy and took the screenshot from the (editable) library file, rather than reloading the scene from the first image.

I'm actually a rank amateur when it comes to lighting, so I'll happily take any tips you can give me. (Do note my constraints: I'm using eevee, I'm trying not to spend any more money than I already have, and I'm on a potato.) I understand the principles of key, fill and rim lighting, I just didn't bother using it in these shots and just used the HDR and (in the room) an Area Light for the window.

Is this a mistake? Should I compose every render's lighting like I'm shooting a TV commercial? Let me know!

Yes, you should treat every render as needing new lighting, unless it's just a test render, which you should use a fixed 'lighting rig', to keep things the same, except the item your testing. A 3 light rig, is one 'rimlight', one 'key light' & one 'fill light'. They don't have to be big lights, you'd do just as well with 1/4 sized lights, closer to the figure/figures your lighting, you can also make the lights themselves invisible within the render, which makes things look soo much better. This all Daz Studio shows what I mean, the Girls a lit by a 3 light rig, the rest of the scene relies on the lighting provided in the props.

 

[TranscendentThots]

Yes, you should treat every render as needing new lighting, unless it's just a test render, which you should use a fixed 'lighting rig', to keep things the same, except the item your testing. A 3 light rig, is one 'rimlight', one 'key light' & one 'fill light'. They don't have to be big lights, you'd do just as well with 1/4 sized lights, closer to the figure/figures your lighting, you can also make the lights themselves invisible within the render, which makes things look soo much better. This all Daz Studio shows what I mean, the Girls a lit by a 3 light rig, the rest of the scene relies on the lighting provided in the props.
View attachment 2608972

Wow. This is amazing advice which has already saved Future Me headaches.

I grabbed a 3 point lighting rig HDR from Poly Haven, and will be using it when I author ALL future content from now on.



The skin colors looked a bit off, at first, (not shown) so I adjusted my shader to work better with it... and immediately noticed massive improvements when I flip through other random HDRs using the Material Preview settings in the Viewport Shader menu in the 3D Viewport Editor. HDRs that used to look "too green" or "too pink" now suddenly just magically work. No matter what skybox I throw at it, suddenly I can do no wrong!



Lighting is complicated and messy and subtle, and I now realize that the seemingly clunky (especially IRL) 3-point lighting rig has persisted mostly unchanged for all these decades for a reason!

So how does this work with animation and camera movements? Do you just compose on keyframes, then let the key rim and fill lights slerp around the scene, occasionally adding new keyframes to adjust them whenever one of the characters accidentally steps outside their area of influence?

Should I parent them to the characters? To the camera? Is there some crazy way of automating it with math or scripts or geometry nodes that looks "good enough" 90% of the time?

Or should I just get used to the fact that this is just my life now, and I just need to git gud at putting three lights around my dudes every single frame from now on forever?

 

[DitaVonTease]

The theory is that if you 'parent' them to a figure, unless an animation has lots of turn arounds, they should stay with the figure. I'm not into animation, so that might be a 'suck it & see' thing...

 

[TranscendentThots]

The theory is that if you 'parent' them to a figure, unless an animation has lots of turn arounds, they should stay with the figure. I'm not into animation, so that might be a 'suck it & see' thing...

See, that advice makes total sense in a vaccum? But what happens when you've got two characters pacing around a living room at night, looking out windows and expanding and closing the distance between them, symbolizing the emotional distance between them that they're opening and closing with their words? When two characters get close enough to fuck, or in the really sick works, hold hands, are there now six spotlights on them?

How much bleedover onto furniture is acceptable? If it's 100%, because it's meant to be grounded in the environment, then why don't I just blend the 3-point-light HDR with my regular HDR? If it's 0%, because the whole point is to make the characters stand out, why not integrate it into the skin material? These are all options we have as 3D artists that movie directors don't get in real life.

I'm sure there's perfectly sensible reasons to do or not do it this way, I just don't know what those reasons are yet. (Indeed, I think modern video games faked rim lighting using surface normals in the Playstation 2 - Xbox 360 eras. It's fallen out of favor as 3D lighting engines have become more powerful, but I used it in this very project because I want my rim effects to look fake, as if a 2D artist faked the lighting using airbrushing techniques in a paint program.)


(Open season on shader feedback, BTW, everybody.)

 

[DitaVonTease]

'IF' the two figures are close together, like in my render a couple of posts back, then only one set of lights will do, if they aren't moving around the room much, then just use a wider spread angle on each light, sometimes moving in & out of light, can look better than a flat bright room. It all depends on what you want from your render or animation. Most renders will, by the nature of the beast, be a sort of 'one off', but you can develop your own lighting style, mainly by practice, and what you like/need from your image/s. Just make sure the main focus of your renders, still or moving, is getting enough light to 'pop' as to what you should be looking at, & not what you shouldn't be looking at...

 

[TranscendentThots]

Here are some tips and tricks I suggest. Note: I'm an amateur too and I exclusively use Cycles, so you may or may not find these useful

- The "Cinematic Lighting" course by Gleb Alexandrov (60$) :

You must be registered to see the links

IMO, it's a must-have, many many tips and tricks for both Eevee & Cycles. If the course is too pricey for you, Gleb shared some parts in his Youtube channel :

You must be registered to see the links

- Many real life photography tips can be used in 3D too, here are some nice little tuts :

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- Otherwise you can apply some simple tricks :

• using camera depth of field (DOF)
• compositing nodes : glare, lens distortion, color balance, etc
• make the subject look at the camera, and make the eye reflect light (you did it on your first picture! )

Actually, the highlights in the eyes are fake. I used a voronoi texture with Reflection UVs. I had to rotate the angle of reflection by about 22.5 degrees (IIRC) to make the left eye match the right eye. As with the rim effects, the goal was to fake what a 2D artist would do when they fake lights in a character's eyes.

 

[TranscendentThots]

'IF' the two figures are close together, like in my render a couple of posts back, then only one set of lights will do, if they aren't moving around the room much, then just use a wider spread angle on each light, sometimes moving in & out of light, can look better than a flat bright room. It all depends on what you want from your render or animation. Most renders will, by the nature of the beast, be a sort of 'one off', but you can develop your own lighting style, mainly by practice, and what you like/need from your image/s. Just make sure the main focus of your renders, still or moving, is getting enough light to 'pop' as to what you should be looking at, & not what you shouldn't be looking at...

Mad respect to you. I know this is a time-honored tradition that you've taken the time to master. But I'm already brainstorming ways to automate it using Geometry Nodes.

For example, you could grab both characters and do a Convex Hull around them. Then raycast from the Camera to it, to get the characters' center-of-mass. Then it could stick an Empty with a spotlight parented to to the point of impact, sort of "working backwards" from the space between the characters towards the light sources.

If I'm really feeling spicy, maybe I could do a second raycast from the character towards the light entity, and if it hits a wall, move the light down to the point of impact. That way the lights would "stick" to walls instead of going inside of them.

I probably won't bother with things like movement prediction or interpolation because I'm bound to want to tweak stuff manually, so this is really probably best used not as a fully automated solution, but rather as a system for quickly blocking out the first pass of those keyframes.

We'll see how far I get. Maybe somebody's already done it, or maybe three-point lighting is so quick that automating it would be a waste of time.

 

[TranscendentThots]

Lighting test with the HDRs visible in the background, just for fun.

It really makes visible what is real lighting and what is fake lighting.