hi everyone!
i’m sorry if this is in the wrong place, i’m really not sure where it should go ^^;
i’m using Blender to create an animation for my major yr 12 design project and over the last few days, i’ve run into a problem with my scene. it looks very fake, for lack of a better word. i’m not looking for photorealism or anything, it is supposed to look somewhat cartoony but right now the scene just doesn’t look right. i’m posting this here because it think the lighting is the problem, i’ve never been very good at it, but it could also be textures or a number of other things.
here’s some quick renders of the scene:
the big disk is the main light source of the scene. also, in the first screenshot you can see the grass, and i know it’s not all that good but if I bring the number of particles up at all, it runs in the 3D viewport very well (even if i’m using the render view mode) but when i tell it to render properly it crashes while it’s packing the BVH Nodes.
Show me 2 pics of the type of look you are going for. They could be anything. If you want the dragons to be toon style just pick a show or pic that demonstrates that style, the same goes for the environment. Go ahead and pick your final camera angles as well. Once you do this I can totally help you out. BTW I can promiss you that less can be more. I will show you two screens of a project I’m working on both have less than 15 textures and both have less than 5 materials.
Both of these are very early WIP. Both started out as napkin drawings. The second one is almost all compositor faked and even the first one takes too much advantage of perspective, but for a quick and dirty concept demo you do only what you can do. The trick is to comb over everythig in small passes.
It is not just lighting, it is the objects as well. The tree is fairly low poly, all the grass blades are the same length and those creatures are in statue mode.
Give the creatures different poses, get a better tree and investigate some better grass. Then worry about lighting.
As Atom says: creatures are from some type of fairy tail, so make a tree from the same opera - like 1000 yrs old with knots and what not. Make it visible in the scene - right now it’s like not here at all and distracts more than gives something. While grass is tough on resources you could look for some material variation to it and add one or several particle systems with small number of different type of herbs; not too detailed, make them surround the central spot where to to look to. Use hair for that and ‘plant’ them.
I wouldn’t say anything on anatomy except that front extremities imho should have different angles but i have no expertise here. However sticking in simplest armature and turning heads at least shouldn’t take much. Make them individuals.
Is this a scene or will it be movie? If this is a scene why you would need these flying rocks? Ain’t you concentrating on creatures?
it will be an animation, i’ll be able to give you some screenshots with the camera angles/dragons posed etc by the end of the week
i’m fairly happy with the dragons themselves, they have been fully rigged and i can pose them, but i had only just imported them into the scene when i took the screenshot (sorry, i know they weren’t the best shots ever :o)
as for a style…i suppose, off the top of my head the closest thing i can think of off the top of my head is Big Buck Bunny for the environment, just something fairly simple.
sorry, didn’t realise the pic uploaded. i put that there to show the characters are actualy rigged and to show the textures (although they’re kind of small)
Atom is right for a good reason. If I were you I would go with fewer particles and have them textured (you might want 4 or 5 grass images with their own particle groups) this gives you a more visually dense grass usually with fewer polys.
Eppo is right about the tree, but that has more to do with camera angle, lighting, and choice of texture (all three of which could be solved in 30 or so minutes apiece.
Now remember if you texture your scene fully (which I highly recomend) you will want to adjust each images black and white in levels to just before cliping (otherwise your materials will stick out from eachother). I recommend Blender Internal for the render you are looking for, as you can do most of this after the fact though the compositor with just a little bit more control.
Just a shape key to sow teeth a bit more and it’s quite clear what it says ;). That groove between right forearm and body still doesn’t make sense to me. I’d say there should be a muscle instead.
I wonder where do they sleep…
Will wait for more, looks promising!
If you’re going to use BI, then a quasi-cartoony look will at least benefit from AO, lighting from area lamps, and SSS.
You might try to then keep the realism toned down a little by using toon shading with soft falloff (or mixing it in via the node editor).
An alternative is to make use of the Toon BSDF nodes and limited GI settings in Cycles, Pixar for one thing used pathtracing for Monster’s University so it is indeed possible to have non-photoreal effect while keeping the shading plausible.
I’d thought about using BI, but i’ve never had a lot of luck with it. if i do use BI though, will that reduce the render time? the current render time is around 20 mins per frame, and theres about 4000 frames all up (or at least that’s my guess so far) which means i’d have to leave a huge amount of time for the rendering, which i can’t really do.
yeah, that groove’s been bugging me too, but no matter what i did in weightpaint, i couldn’t get it to deform properly, so i think i ended up using a shape key to fix it later on.
i’ve also changed the tree. it’s not perfect, but i think it’s better than the old one (i’m still working on those leaf textures though).
(sorry, the file won’t upload so i’ll just post it like this XD)
i’ve also changed the grass particles. i lowered the number of particles from about 5000 with 50 children to 1000 with only 10 children and added a texture so it looks like multiple blades of grass, although there seems to be a problem with the transparency, i’m not sure what’s causing it though. https://www.dropbox.com/s/jmi81qtxls4r95a/render5.png
Well, I just noticed the scene pictures that are you working on in the first post, half of the issue then is simply because of the lack of bright sunlight for what would appear to be a sunny day.
Add a sunlamp, set the power to 3, and set the size to 0.1 (this will produce a powerful light with sharp shadows). As I said before, the toon BSDF may be what you want if you want realistic lighting, yet want to keep the realism toned down in the material. The small light then would have the added benefit of making sure your specular highlights look good.
As for the arm groove, I had the same issue with a Dragon rig (different part), and fixed it using the smooth modifier mapped to a vertex group.
ok, i tried to get the actual animation file to upload but once again it wouldn’t work, so here’s a few screenshots:
so i did a test render of all the frames i’ve done so far (198). Thanks for the advice about the sunlamp thing Ace Dragon, it’s made it look heaps better.
i know this isn’t really related to lighting and rendering, but can anyone tell me why some of the grass has black squares behind it? I used a texture with a transparent background for the grass and it’s worked on some strands, but on others the background of the texture is black and it looks really weird…
On your grass problem, you have a lot of grass objects so it might just be a matter of raising the max transparency depth (Cycles will interpret the shader as black if it runs out).
