Just a quick character I bashed together. It’s very much what I was aiming for so I thought I would share it with you all. It’s no masterpiece but it’s my second finished thingy so y’know. It’s nice to finish things. A good confidence boost.
Haha - I like the way he looks:D
Good job.
Are you going to make some kind of a background for him or something. Oh and how come the arms aren’t in skin colour?
They are supposed to be bone… but try as I might I couldn’t get them to texture right… so they ended up as white bits.
I was going to add a background but I’m completely stumped as to what to include.
Hah - amusing quick render!
I know you’ve put this under “Finished Projects”, though I’d like to see how it renders with a little change; world colour set to light grey, and Ambient Occlusion enabled at samples of around 8-10 or so.
The difference should be something like…
Like this?
Yeah! Much better! You’ve immediately increased the realism and the whole image is a whole lot easier to see. Much more convincing now. Nice one! 
AO seems to help your image a lot because the lighting in your first image looks like a hack job. There’s nothing wrong with it being a hack job, though – your picture isn’t of anything remotely realistic and doesn’t look carefully done.
It’s a quick 3D sketch of a blob thing that’s a cross between cute and creepy. The tension between the undesirability of the caricatured blob and the word “Hugs?” gets a good chuckle out of whoever looks at it. The quality of the image isn’t important; it’s good enough to get the point across, which is something that can’t be said for many pieces that are more carefully made.
Once you add the AO, though, it takes your picture up a level, and the viewer expects more from it. The eyes are far from perfect in the first image, but they stand out well enough against the dark background. In the second image, though, they’re too dark, and I hold that against it. There’s a weird highlight on the blob’s left eye that doesn’t go with the diffuse clay-ish material that the rest of it is made of, and the scene is generally over-lit. There’s not enough contrast to show the blob’s shape properly.
The only thing that’s improved is that the inside of the mouth is darker.
Without the word “Hugs?” the picture is much less effective.
Thats the problem with higher rendering quality – by improving the quality, you’ve drawn attention to the flaws in your image, flaws that didn’t matter at all in the lower quality version.
Imagine I handed you a notebook filled with handwritten information and hand-drawn sketches. You’d probably find it informative and well done if I did a nice job writing it. Now, imagine I handed you the same material, typeset as a book, but with crappy figures drawn in pencil. You’d judge it as unfinished and lower quality.
Don’t get caught in the trap that increasing realism always improves your renders. There’s more to a good piece of work than render settings.
I’ll agree with that. The lighting in the AO version is nicer though you are correct. The problem is with the colours. The eyes are too dark. I like the first image though because it gets my point across. It wasn’t meant to be a work of art. More a subtle look into my fears of rejection etc. Well at least thats where I think the concept came from.
lol, the title of the image suits it very well! >.<
I think that in the second picture it looks much happier for some reason. I think it’s because it’s missing the shadow on its face. Maybe if you kept the ambients the same but changed the sky colour? Try that, I’m not too sure how it’ll come out though :spin: still a noob really.
or even better tweak the SSSetings a tad bit and see if that has an effect, though id understand if you would rather leave it as-is, as this is after all the finished works section… :eyebrowlift:
I’m gonna leave it as is. The first image is the final published version. The second was merely an experiment. Not because I am closed to suggestions. But because I want to move on. Attempt something a little more ambitious this time.
well, i kinda thought so…