Freestyle render and overall feedback

Artwork Focused Critiques
1

Hey gang!
Anyone remember Gizmoduck!?

I would appreciate some feedback on this as I do not know how to improve it.
Should I switch them up and have the cartoon duck point at the “realistic” one?
How can I make it look more realistic? Having a metal material and to color it white makes it look grey, almost black. So, any tips on white metallic?

Gizmo3.jpg1080×960 217 KB

It is the first time I’ve ever tried cartoon stuff. I used the freestyle render and I would love some tips on how to improve the black lines so they’re more connected and apply to more areas.

Cheers! / J

2

Hi - I like the first render.

The second one doesn’t quite suit for some reason. Maybe it is, in my opinion, more suited to 2d cartoons, or a comic stripe with more straight edges.

The character in the first photo would do well in a pixar animation, at least a form of it. It seems you have it in context more.

Either way, your dynamic poses do plenty of justice. Top marks for this.

3

an advice
for the second image also apply cell shader to the back or alike, it clashes with the style of the character

4

Your only issue as far as the metal is concerned is the fact that you’re treating it like a dielectric material. Most materials are dielectric. They have their fullest possible color saturation at their darkest areas, and run to the least saturated at the brightest lit areas. It’s the opposite for anything metallic. They go from the least colorful in their darkest areas to the most colorful. As this is difficult to depict with simply white or black, you should consider adding a slight tint to suggest a metallic material.

Onto freestyle! While I’m not an expert on this subject, it looks to me like you could solve your issue by either ticking the ‘smooth’ box in the freestyle settings (found in the scene layers tab) or possibly using the advanced setting and tweaking the sphere values. Alternately, you can get some fine lines by using the inverted difference between the softened and sharpened normals in the compositor, and tweaking the result with a color ramp (if your lines look too scratchy, proceeding it with a soften filter smooths it up nicely). Then you can simply multiply it onto your model.