Bulbasaur in "Hall of Fame"

Artwork Works in Progress
1

https://imgur.com/a/EZ8ooEk

Hi,

Before publishing this render I’d like to hear your guys honest opinion and criticism of it.
The following questions are my main concerns:

  • Do eyes look ‘dead’ i.e. not moist enough and too solid?
  • How to improve the lighting?
  • Is the environment to bland/depressing?
  • The denoiser node eats up the detail on the skin if I go any lower with the resolution of the picture or the sample size (currently 256). Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?
  • Even at 256 samples the tiles in the background are all smudged up. Is there a smarter fix to this than further increasing the sample size?

These are the things that currently trouble me, but feel free to leave any form of input that comes to your mind!

1 Like
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You could lower the roughness on the eyes so that instead of a sort of dull specular highlight, they kind of reflect the environment. you can see thats what this other 3d bulbasaur did.
image
edit real quick: Instead of just doing the roughness on the eyes material. I suggest turning up clearcoat, and removing the roughness on that. It should give a better result for eyes.

Lighting could probably be improved a lot by just switching it to an HDRI.

The environment doesn’t feel very fitting for bulbasaur in my opinion. He’s a grass type pokemon, I feel like he should be surrounded by dirt, grass, leaves, trees, etc. Even if you want to stick with the hall of fame thing, you could make his little platform bigger, and add some natural environment growing on the top of it.

If you havent, you should look into color management, and maybe switch to high contrast, and potentially play with the exposure some. It could help with the sort of depressing desaturated thing going on.

Keep in mind also, that good lighting doesnt just mean covering the character, here’s some examples of how different light can convey very different moods and feelings on the same model.

image

This makes sense for the Denoiser. The skin detail is very small and subtle and might be hard to distinguish for it between actual intentional detail, and noise at lower samples. It is normal to lose a bit of detail in the denoising process. Often however, things dont have to be perfect so we use it for greater speed. It’s particularly useful for animations in my opinion, when it would normally take hours or days to render something with a lot of samples.

Are the tiles in the background weird without the Denoiser as well? It looks like some AI confusion to me. Are you using depth of field?

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Hey,

Thanks a lot for your elaborate reply! I’ll try to address your points and questions one by one:

  • I am already using a clearcoat on the eyes, but I’ll try to increase the roughness beneath that and see if it helps.
  • The environment (that whole “Hall of Fame” thing) was a preemptive measure for future projects. When recreating other Pokemon, I planned to just reuse it over and over in order to minimize the amount of work on my end. It’s definitely a little lazy and looking at the in-game Hall of Fame it becomes obvious, that this is a very bland and boring environment to begin with.
    So I guess I’ll follow your advice and try to create a nice “forest clearing” or something like that, this time using an HDRI (this will take forever…).
  • Since I’m going to change my entire scene it doesn’t matter anymore but just to clarify, the weirdness on the tiles in the background is absolutely a denoiser thing. Without denoising they’re just noisy as hell.
  • Yes, I am using depth of field. Do you perceive it as disturbing?

TL;DR Seems like I’ve got a lot more work to put into this, before it’ll look decent. I’ll update this thread as I move along.

Best regards!

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The depth of field is fine, I just think maybe mixing it with the denoiser is whats causing the weird tile issue.

By the way, its a well done model, keep it up!