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

[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 :

• You must be registered to see the links
• You must be registered to see the links
• You must be registered to see the links
• You must be registered to see the links

- 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.

 

[TranscendentThots]

She's starting to look like an actual character!



I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of Geometry Nodes hair cards. Now it's a game of chicken where I try to decide how dense I want to make the flyaways.

I'm considering changing from fibermesh eyebrows to more cartoony stylized mesh eyebrows. What do you guys think?

 

[TranscendentThots]

Hmmm.

Not sure if it's production-ready yet, but it's close enough that my time is yielding diminishing returns.

Time to switch gears and do a clothing pass.

 

[TranscendentThots]

Supersuit test. I don't even know if I neccessarily want to make a superhero thing, at this point, it's just bodysuits are the simplest form of clothing to make from scratch. (Just don't try to distribute them!)


I wanna say the most glaring weakness of the piece is probably body language? But in my heart of hearts, I know that's not the whole story. There's something else wrong with this image. Something lurking under the surface. Possibly stylistic, rather than technical. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I can feel it. Or sense its absence. Or something.

 

[Ghoseh]

eevee and what version of blender are you on?

 

[TranscendentThots]

eevee and what version of blender are you on?

3.5.0. I'm not using the special Geometry Nodes particle hair system that shipped with that version, though. I'm using my own custom Geometry Nodes setup for hair cards. (I'd rather fake my own hair and know I have options than take the default hair how it comes.)

 

[Ghoseh]

3.5.0. I'm not using the special Geometry Nodes particle hair system that shipped with that version, though. I'm using my own custom Geometry Nodes setup for hair cards. (I'd rather fake my own hair and know I have options than take the default hair how it comes.)

my only critique would be the hair just seems too shiny even for eevee standards. but maybe its just the HDRI your using

 

[TranscendentThots]

my only critique would be the hair just seems too shiny even for eevee standards. but maybe its just the HDRI your using

Hair shine is completely unaffected by the HDRI and other "real" lighting, (although I added a Value slider to tweak it for especially dark scenes where it can fight for attention with the eyes if left unchecked.) It's custom, in the shader. "Too much shine" is definitely part of what I'm going for with this project. That said, I've been working on softening and better blending the shine:


Is this better? And what else would you improve?

 

[TranscendentThots]

And now here it is with some color correction. Because nothing adds sex appeal like Bisexual Lighting. fun fact: I could have separated the red and the blue a little more sharply and gotten a surprisingly sweet sunset. Too bad I woke up this morning and chose smut.


Oh, whoops! I totally forgot to re-enable the suit after those closeups! Now the thread has nudity in it!

 

[TranscendentThots]

Okay last hair shine closeup for a while. It really helps to do the colored shine, then add the white shine over the top of it. That's one of those design rules I keep forgetting and then rediscovering.

I also made some other small tweaks which collectively make the overall shape a bit more coherent, especially near the bottom.

 

[HornySensei]

Okay last hair shine closeup for a while. It really helps to do the colored shine, then add the white shine over the top of it. That's one of those design rules I keep forgetting and then rediscovering.
View attachment 2614410
I also made some other small tweaks which collectively make the overall shape a bit more coherent, especially near the bottom.

looking good but the only thing that is bothering me a little bit is the scalp texture beneath the hair on the forehead, it doesn't quite blend with the hair cards in my opinion

 

[HornySensei]

Supersuit test. I don't even know if I neccessarily want to make a superhero thing, at this point, it's just bodysuits are the simplest form of clothing to make from scratch. (Just don't try to distribute them!)

View attachment 2614220
I wanna say the most glaring weakness of the piece is probably body language? But in my heart of hearts, I know that's not the whole story. There's something else wrong with this image. Something lurking under the surface. Possibly stylistic, rather than technical. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I can feel it. Or sense its absence. Or something.

And also what technique did you use to do the body suit?

 

[TranscendentThots]

And also what technique did you use to do the body suit?

Well, this isn't a tutorial, I was making it up as I went, but IIRC the basic workflow looked something like this:

• Duplicate the (already rigged) character mesh
• Delete unnecessary geometry (Head, feet) from suit mesh
• Reshape suit mesh to imply folds (less cleavage, less asscrack, no navel, no genitiles, reduce or eliminate nipple profile, depending on how ecchi of a final result you're going for.)
• Add a new Geometry Nodes modifier to the suit mesh and displace the geometry by a very small value multiplied by the geometry Normal. (Basically, a homebrew Displacement modifier. We're doing it in GeoNodes so we can add changes before and after it later. Think of the main horizontal line in Geometry Nodes as your own personal custom Modifier Stack.)
• Subsurf. (Again, directly in geoNodes so we can add nodes before and after it later.)
• Some sort of procedural Texture node to make the ribbing and panels. (I was using Brick, but Voronoi is also a great choice here.) Use the Position input to get your normals. (This was counterintuitive for me, at first, since I was more accustomed to working with Shader Nodes, but apparently in Geometry nodes you can just grab the raw Position input and any posing or animation you do later Just Works. It's not using the "real" world position of the mesh. It's using the domain of its default pose or something. This is why there's no way to get Generated coordinates in GeoNodes. You can Math them from the Position coordinates, which isn't possible in Materials since they are always evaluated "after" posing.)
• Use the Capture Attributes node to get the ribbing and panel textures, blur them in GeoNodes before passing them into the geometry Nodes Group Output, and name them in the Modifier Properties panel. Now you can use a low-res version of these textures in your Materials. (Rebuilding these procedural patterns directly in the Material Nodes would be preferable, especially for closeups or if you plan on using them for Displacement. But since there's no way to copy and paste nodes from Geometry to Materials, it's best to save this for last. It's a time-sink, and all that work will be thrown out if you change your mind later.)
• In Materials, use a Layer Weight node feeding into a bunch of math nodes to fake some stylized reflections. Ribbing attribute can be reused as an alpha to make the ribbing non-metalic. Basic Materials polish pass.

You should be able to google most of these steps. Let me know if you get stuck or if I skipped anything.

 

[TranscendentThots]

looking good but the only thing that is bothering me a little bit is the scalp texture beneath the hair on the forehead, it doesn't quite blend with the hair cards in my opinion

When you spend 5 seconds Overlaying your skullcap with pure white at 50% opacity to add an abstract corallary to all the hair shines, followed by 20 minutes of making comps for peer review. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



I hope this is closer to matching? There's really no way to make a sphere light the same way as a bunch of fake tubes on sheets, but I did my best.

 

[jackmancactus]

 

[jackmancactus]

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

I got that the other day. Haven't finished it yet but so far it's really good. It was on sale for 45 (I think) when I got it, so I imagine it will go down again at some point.