Octopus

Hello! I have been working on this project and I’m trying to clean it up so I can call it done. I would appreciate any critiques that you would have to offer. My goal is to do a digital print. Thank you.


Underwater effect looks good. I think the biggest thing that’s detracting from the reality of it is the octopus’s shader.

The coral needs slight mounds of sand around them, as the ocean slowly shifts sand which gets caught around there. The coral should also have more slight differences, rather than being equally sized, perfect tubes.

Thank you for your critiques @wirehead and @unyxium.
I’m still working on the octopus shader, but is there something specific you’re thinking of? Here is what I have changed it to.


I will also get on those other suggestions mentioned. Thank you.

So, here’s a reference photo that I like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lunkwill42/3658339290/ (found it on Google Image search)

I think you don’t have enough sub-surface scattering.

I think the skin color too uniform. In that picture, the color of the skin at the bottom of the creases is a different color from on top. And some of the other photos had the octopus with a bit of a tiger spot pattern going. And the color changes as you go to the extremities.

And I think the bumps on the bump map are too big.

Oooh, I see. Ok. Thank you. I’ll get to work on it.

I added some more coral. I’ll probably add some more. I tried to put some more sand mounds around the coral, and I worked on the octopus shader.


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I changed a few things for the sand.


Getting closer every time!

The sand needs more variation. Remember, it’s bits of various things in a pile, so you’ve got quartz (the clear stuff) and calcium carbonite (bits of shell). Here’s a micrograph of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand#/media/File:PismoBeachSand.JPG

Something’s still not quite right about the octopus. I think maybe more subsurface scattering, or potentially tweaking the model so that it’s got more thin transparent web-y bits. And you might want to add the suckers on the arms.

Ok. I did use a texture for the sand, but I’ll try something different.

Tried a different sand texture. I am also playing with the octopus pose and a few other things like the rocks.


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Those black tubular corals are quite distracting imo. You should swap them for another type of coral if thats how they’re supposed to look, or just improve them if not.

For the octopus, you probably won’t get around looking at some more reference images. And you won’t be able to get a really convincing result with just procedurals.

For starters, the easiest thing to change: The eyes, octopuses have eyes almost like a goat’s eyes. Very important to the look, as they immediately change the character.

But the main problems is that texture and color are not the same all over a real octopus’s body. There are places with fine grainy texture, sometimes with bigger bulges inbetween, areas with larger blobs and even patches that are very smooth. Then the color. Virtually all marine animals have a top-bottom, dark-light coloration gradient. Then there are minute patterns on top of that, which break it up and make it interesting. Some color variation, wrinkles, and it all correlates more or less to the texture. I would take some images like the one below, project them onto your model and build a color map from then. You can then generate some displacement from the color data and you may finally retouch and enhance the resulting shape in sculpt mode.

The antler corals look much more convincing than the tubular corals. The key appears to be irregularity. The tubes look like manmade cylinders. Make the shapes more smooth and more noisy, as you did on the other types of coral.

You might be able to enhance the composition futher by adding just a bit of rock in the immediate foreground, already out of focus.

Tentacles too flat. ADD SSS to skin.

Thanks guys. I’m going to tackle your critiques bit by bit.


I changed the scene a bit by adding rocks up close and completely removing the tube corals.
I also added more of an a different eyeball to the octopus. I’m still playing around with the texture of the octopus.

Is it possible to texture realistically body and tendrils of octopus in Blender ?

You’re doing pretty great so far, but I have a few suggestions. Add an additional bump map with more spread out bumps of a larger size. While the texture isn’t uniform, it’s still fairly even in size at the moment, and there’s usually a bit more variation. As well, I would either darken or completely remove those spiky balls down in the corner. They’re stealing the octopus’ spotlight.

Here is a new texture combination I was able to figure out for the octopus. Let me know If that’s closer to what you were thinking.


For the most part, yes, but the little bumps are too sharp. You can soften them by blurring the bump map a little (or mixing it with an inverse and using the slider to lower the strength).