Empty snail shell


Give comments about anything that could improve this image, from easy and simple fixes to hard and difficult ones.

  • your shell looks nice

  • your gravel looks nice

  • I like the color scheme

  • I don’t know if it’s because of the shell but I feel like the camera is oriented backwards, which is not very pleasant.

  • The framing is too centered. If you’re going for something relaxing, you shouldn’t center too much.

  • for the shell’s material you should use a PBR material. Try Andrew Price’s PBR metal for example.

  • even though it’s not meant to look natural I would personally add subtle ridges along the shell.

  • the water is too flat, even for calm water. You should either use some displacement or a fluid simulation

  • the water material doesn’t look like water. You should use a Refraction BSDF mixed with a Glossy BSDF with zero roughness. Also given the camera angle, the gloss should be very subtle, so you should turn the fac towards the Refraction (a PBR water would take care of it but I don’t think you need one in this case)

  • To make the scene more interesting, I would introduce something like a hermit crab in it, whether it’s just a couple of legs coming out of the shell or showing the bare crab looking at the shell. Or even 2 hermit crabs looking at it, suggesting they will fight for it (as they often do). Anyway if you add something to the scene, you should probably unzoom to make the composition more airy. By the way look at these amazing free crab models !
    https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/scan-dark-finger-reef-obj-free/1035635
    https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/free-scan-carcinoplax-suruguensis-crab-3d-model/1035633
    https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/free-scan-ghost-crab-3d-model/1035716
    And basically everything this guy has uploaded https://www.turbosquid.com/Search/Artists/oliverlaric
    I didn’t find any decent free hermit crab but there are very good paid ones on turbosquid.

  • If ou don’t plan to add a crab, consider adding anything that would give some storytelling to your scene.


Much better :slight_smile:
Any messing with the water and it becomes too dark or too reflective, then I will need to change the light output and world image emission.

I wouldn’t say much better. In fact you introduced several problems :

  • You now have some serious scale issues with the crab and the fake caustics. A crab this size shouldn’t be so opaque and rough looking, and water caustics shouldn’t be so small.

  • The caustics and water look wrong in many ways :
    [LIST]

  • First, as mentioned, the scale is way too small

  • Then, unless it’s icy, water doesn’t blur what’s inside, it only refracts it.

  • Water caustics are light rays bouncing at the bottom before getting out of water and reaching our eyes. So they should lit the gravel, but because of the blurry water material, the gravel is not even visible. So why are the caustics still sharp ?

  • Turning down the opacity of the caustics image you pasted makes it look like faint light while you have more intense light on the shell.

  • Finally, when it’s like, 2 centimeters deep and calm water, you hardly even get any caustics, at least certainly not such drastic refraction and chromatic aberration (the rainbow colors).

[/LIST]

That can only come from a wrong node setup. Here’s a simple one for example :


  • The shell’s ridges look way too perfect to be natural. By the way I should have been more specific but I was not thinking about these kind of ridges but rather aging ridges. Aging ridges appear on every shell while the ridges you put don’t. You should at first put aging ridges and then if you want you can add the others on top of it (but I personally wouldn’t). Also note that aging ridges are smaller, more subtle but also more randomly spaced and chaotic :

  • For the crab, it’s a good model but as I said, its material is suited for a bigger crab. To make it look as small as it is, you would have to add intense subsurface scattering :


and although it’s not necessary, I think making it look wet and shiny would also help.

  • Now, since it’s not a hermit crab I don’t know why it’s partly under the shell. It could be hiding but the way its legs are spread don’t really suggest that. But mostly the way you put it there doesn’t add much of a story or message to the image. When I was thinking about revealing some hermit crab’s legs, I thought of something more discreet, which, by contrasting with the elegance of the shell could make the image say : “be careful with pretty things you want to pick, or you may get pinched”, or something else. Something that would give a title to this image. For the moment, the title I think of for your image is : “Beautiful sea shell and tiny crab minding its own business”. You could do much more with what you have. Like :
    [LIST]

  • Make the crab pull the shell with its claw and leave a track behind the shell on the gravel and the title can become : “too beautiful to not bring home”.

  • Or : put another crab facing the first one with wide-open claws and the title can be : “A coveted property”.

  • Put a bunch of crabs on the gravel leaving an empty space around the shell and make one crab stretch its arm towards the shell, almost touching it, and the title becomes : “a shell from another sea”.

  • You get the idea. It looks like I raised the bar from the previous post but it’s actually that I thought you would know where you could go with what I suggested.

  • Finally, you applied 3 of the 8 suggestions I made in my first post. I hope you will consider some others too, especially the more simple ones.
    [/LIST]

Continue working on this, it will get better.

I think the first thing you should do is adjust the angle. This angle is weird to my eyes. It is like upside-down.

If the snail’s the subject, fill the frame with the snail. Don’t make me “look around for it” in a clutter of things that are not the subject.

Thx for the water nodes, but they simply don’t work (I have filmic log encoding base addon so it might be it, because it changes how the lighting works in blender). I have no idea how to add subsurface scatter to a crab without the crab looking crappy. I can send you blend.file so that you could work on it and show me how you would improve it?

Glad you use Filmic. But for the water, that can’t be the cause of the problem. Filmic only changes how the pixels are transformed after the render is done, it doesn’t do anything during the rendering process.
Anyway, to make things more simple, I’d recommend you to use the new Principled BSDF. It’s the equivalent of the Disney BSDF, which means it’s a fully-fledged PBR shader you can use on almost everything (except it doesn’t have metallic fresnel tint so for metals you’d rather use the Blender Guru PBR metallic I mentionned before). You can have the Principled BSDF by downloading a daily build on blender.org (here, select one in the first list). If you use it you’ll have to put Filmic in its folder too.

For the SSS, same thing, try the Principled BSDF. Also if you don’t really know how SSS works there are a bunch of tutorials out there to explain you that. I don’t have any particular to recommend you as I personally learned SSS several years ago and any tutorial I watched at that time is now outdated. But I’m sure there are very good new ones.

If you’re really stuck you can share your blend but doing it yourself certainly helps you learn much better. Also I have little time so I can just eventually fix some material issues.