Edit: Thanks for all for the postive feedback and stars! Much appreciated.
I started this scene thinking I’d enter it in the realism contest, but I ran out of steam and entered another completely different scene of a woman laughing. There’s only so long you can stare at worms. But looking back at my render folder I liked how a couple of them came out, and they are completely finished, textured, lit and composited so I’ll call it a finished piece. I had two different mini-scenes with lighting, and here’s my favorite from each one.
damn, that worm material is awesome but the can looks like plastic, not tin which deducts awesome points
But with the rest of the image holding up, the bottles especially (damn they look pretty real to me) I have to give it a nice, even 4/5
This image is, uhhh, “appetizing, I guess.” (If you are a drunken fish.) However, it is also quite believable.
The only thing that I would do with the first image is to increase the exposure on a fill-light to the right of the camera. Don’t let the right side of the can, nor the out-of-focus second beer bottle, go that dark. Detail is being lost. (I would also suggest using a complementary color of light on that fill.)
Beyond that, these little creatures are … ahhhh … “realistic.” Yeah, uh huh. That’s it. Realistic. Very…
Blender Tip of the Day: Don’t take so many swigs from can #1, that you attempt to take a swig from can #2 …
@Netcommericial, modeling and texturing ~8 hours. Lighting ~3 hours. Compositing ~3 hours. The models themselves are pretty simple, although the worms are extremely high poly. They’re modeled as nearly perfect cylinders and bent with a bezier curve with 4 handles. Then just tweaks and tests, letting renders cook out. I had lot of issues with fireflies as you can still see in the renders due to the glass. There’s SSS and volume absorption so it was CPU on a quad core i5, which is still slow.
The tin material was/is awful, it looked best with straight glossy, but I created this cluster of node insanity based off the displacement/scratch map and I wish I hadn’t.
I reached a point where everything was getting worse and worse, and I got sick of it and convinced myself it didn’t look right. But looking at it with fresh eyes a couple weeks later I saw the good in it.
Now the worms are fantastic, however, they don’t make much sense in the scene to me. Maybe if you’d continued and made it seem like someone / some people were hooking bait, etc., before going fishing it’d work.
But it almost looks as if the unseen people are about to have a dinner of worms - instead of beans.
… congrats on the top row