Army dude

Artwork Focused Critiques
1

Hi i posted this pick in works in progress as well as in here.
i’ve been working on this army dude for about four days now
and i am going to try and rigg and animate him.
Any suggestions or comments.
Thanks ( BLENDER RULES )
Jester
http://www.freewebs.com/blenderroach/Armydude4.png
http://www.freewebs.com/blenderroach/armydude5.png

2

looks cool, Im digging the style

3

It looks nice. But you should fix his shader.

4

Neat style. The chevrons should be pointed up for a SGT (3 up).

cheers,

Bob

5

It looks like a nice model, but if you’d like to spice up your render a little bit, I have some helpful hints. Of course, this will make the render time slightly longer.

Materials: You have a pretty high specularity for his skin. A person’s skin does have specularity, but only if it’s oily or wet. That means that a person’s face has a little bit of spec around the forehead, nose, region, maybe also the lips, but not the arms. If you want a cartoony look, I would just set the specularity for all the skin material to zero.

Lighting: Your image has no shadows. If you are doing this to save on render time, then ignore my following comments.
I’ve found that the best lights for nice looking shadows in blender are either the area lights set to a high number of samples and ray tracing enabled, or shadow buffer lamps. There are tutorials on how to use these, but the important thing to remember is that shadows add a lot to someone’s render. Enable those raytracers!

Also, try a number of different lights. I use one light from an angle, like the sun shining on someone’s face, as the primary light to most of my scenes. This light casts shadows, causes specularity, and is much more intense then the other lights in the scene. Then I add a small light where the camera is, so no part of the models body is entirely obscured by shadow. Finally (this is what most really nice looking renders have, although no one talks about it for some strange reason), try adding a light behind the model, that will illuminate the edges of the figure. You might need one or two. I know these comments are a little sparse for the topic i’m trying to describe, but hopefully, they will provide some aid to your rendering.

6

thanks for all the comments, still learning blender from the internet . alota trial and error.
i will use all of your suggestions and see what happens, im curently trying to rigg a small
character, if anyone has some up to date indepth tutorials leave me the links.
Thanks

Jester :smiley:

7

Remove specularity, use bumpmaps, and use textures.

8

Here’s some of my tips to make it looks like a human-skinned doll.

  1. Use Oren-Nayar as skin shader.
  2. Give him a human color
  3. Set Spec to 0.01
  4. Use a procedural cloud texture as bump map. Nor=1.00
  5. Maybe change the Map Input ScaleX.Y.Z to 5.00 or if needed 10.00

Human Skin isn’t that difficult.
To fake SSS you can use a Ramp Shader: Shader, not Normal Result or Energy.

This will hopefully give a good result. Do you still work on him?
It’ll make him have a nice skin.
Can you host the .blend? I’d like to change some settings and then add a render here.