I am new to Blender and still learning it. We are making our own MMORPG (my wife doing the software and I am doing art, sounds, and testing). I started off in Rhino 3.0 but found I could not do transparent background png files so I downloaded a trial version of 5.0 and it did work. My wife is happy with the non-realistic but vibrant rendering in Rhino 5.0 but I have been unable to exactly simulate this style in Blender. It is probably my newbness. I tried shaders, glossy, mixing them, tried various lights but the images still just don’t pop like they need to in this game as small icons 32x32 pixels and 128x128 pixels.
I will attach and example of a Rhino render and the similar item loaded as a mesh file into Blender and my attempt at making it look the same. Thanks for any help!
The shading looks very washed out and flat, which is often a symptom of blown out world lighting, or ao. In the world tab yurn down the strength of the lighting from 1 to .1 or 0. And disable ao (ambient occlusion lighting) that way your lamps will provide stronger lighting on one side.
If I disable the ambient lighting, the whole object is dark like faded bluejeans. You get some shadows yes from the overhead light but the colors are just not bright and cheery like in the Rhino Render. If I leave the ambient lighting and just turn up the overhead light to try and get a bright scene with still some shadows, I get white spots and such.
I will try and get a small blend file on here but I am having some trouble when saving a Rhino file as a 3DS type file with low mesh count so it is a small Blend file. The vertices coming to a point on each end of the sphere leave holes in the sphere when I do a add modifier subdivision subsurface so as to have the rough mesh render smooth sphere.
you can use internal render instead of cycles, you will get that old school CG look more straight out of the box.
With cycles it’s doable but maybe a bit more tricky, you’ll have to disable many option that help render things with more realism.
Hard shadows is one big difference between the two. If you are using a sun lamp then decrease its size until you can make out the lines of shadows (like the Rhino render)
Beyond that, disabling or reducing ambient occlusion, and reducing the strength of your world settings.
Yep… stronger and smaller light sources…, weaker and darker world settings…, and low or disabled Ambient Occlusion… those should all increase shadow contrast substantially.
