Aiming For After Effects

I’ve been working with Blender for around 6 months (and I still suck… Go figure.) and I decided that if I can’t ever get a realistic or semi-realistic image out (my last attempt was the Antique Desk, and it did NOT turn out that great.) I was going to re-aim myself toward a more simplistic style.

My avatar (yeah, I know it’s sorta cheap to put a WIP as an avatar, but I’m at a loss…) picture is of my latest project. It’s just supposed to be a very simple city, and I wanted to make it as pleasing to look at as possible. ANY C&C are completely welcome.

Anyway, my aim was to go for an After-Effects Motion Graphics style piece. I’ll have an anim. up soon. For now, here’s the still image, please tell me what I should do to make it better!

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add roads, a dock, more waves… is this 3D?.. check out alot of tutorials.

See, that’s just the problem. I don’t really know where to get tutorials for this! And yes, it’s 3D. I just used a lot of shadeless materials to get it to have that stylistic look. Dock and waves coming.

EDIT: Here is the new version.

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It looks like a background from a nice olden-days cartoon :slight_smile:
I’d suggest putting the moon and stars way more into the background, unless you want a sort of psychedelic effect in the animation.
By the way, are you using the toon-edge setting in the render panel?

OK, the moon and stars are going back. I actually hadn’t thought of that until you said it!! As for the edges; yes, I sure did.

there are actually tutorials listed on this site… okay… how about a few things to get you started… I’ve looked at what it looks like you can do… so Ctrl-R is loop cut… alt-s is shrink/fatten in edit mode… v is used to split edges… Ctrl-I is invert selection I believe… press O and you enter proportional editing in which influence is adjusted via scrool… F is create edge/face or connect a loop. (blender only used triangle and quad faces.) B is box select, B-B is circle select, press esc or x to exit circle select… well check out the tutorials… oh yeah, shift-S is snap to: grid/cursor/etc…
just check out the tutorials.

Haha don’t worry, I’m not really that decrepit… I know the tools, but I just can’t get them to work for me. My work normally comes out decent, and can fool a non-artist at first glance, but it’s just not as great as i was hoping. Although I didn’t know the Loop Cut, thanks for that one!!!

I wanted it to look simple, just so that I knew that I couldn’t screw it up. I can do much better than this, realism-wise.

i dig the high contrast b/w shading, go on and make it epic ^^

oh well, sorry… I suppose the only thing I can say now is practice makes perfect! :wink:

This forum is full of knit-pickers and your Antique Desk is fine. I just went to check.