Magneto

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Latest WIP.

I need help with the composition. How can I make magneto bigger and show off the environment to it’s fullest? Shrink the environment?

Are the colors to grey? NO post proessing done, the blue light strips up front will be blurred and made transparent for camera glare.

Thanks.

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Any feedback would be great. I realize the character is pretty small, but I’m really looking for help with the composition/color/light. Thanks!

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A bit further along after rigging and some more background edits. Some post processing as well. The composition still bothers me. I spent a long time texturing the the character - Chris Bachalo’s version of Magneto in white and it’s pretty much not really visible. So, I think I’ll zoom in quite a bit and try to get the best parts of background.

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[Argent108]

I think the problem that you are running into is a lack of value contrast. I took the liberty of downloading your image and de-saturating it to show you what I mean.

Notice how the subject is almost the same value as the background. In fact, apart from the lights and some objects in the extreme foreground, the entire composition is a uniform shade of gray. It’s hard to tell what I’m supposed to be looking at. When I work on a new project, I like to mentally divide my composition into a foreground, a midground, and a background, and then assign a value range to each one. Usually, the subject will have the lightest values, which helps the viewer focus on it. I’ll show you how that applies here.

As you can see, Magneto is now undeniably the focus of attention, but the background still forms an important part of the composition.

Notice, also, that I’ve created three zones of contrast. The subject has the starkest contrast in values (some very light, some quite dark) the background is mainly composed of midrange shades of gray, and the foreground is composed almost exclusively of dark values. This reinforces Magneto as the subject of the composition.

I believe you can accomplish this by adjusting your lighting. It looks like at present your scene is lit mainly by the concentric rings and the screens. If you were to place a spot light above Magneto’s face, give it a contrasting color and shine it down, I think you’d accomplish the effect you’re looking for. You could also use a darker material on the platform he is floating over. Or you could put the platform on a different render layer with some dimmer lighting if realism isn’t strictly what you are looking for. If you have any fill-lights under the platform, I recommend turning them down, or getting rid of them all together.

I noticed that you put some orange in the background to contrast the teal screens in the foreground. Nice touch!

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Thanks, Argent108! I really appreciate the helpful feedback. I’ll make those changes tomorrow and give it another render. Thanks!

In these shots I played with the camera and the colors. I think I’m getting a bit tired of blue images. So, I warmed it a but. There is some intersecting geometry that I have to fix as well and I kind of want to put something on the screens, but I’m running out of steam for this project. Anyway, I’m liking this comp and I’ll take the feedback given and apply it going forward. The versions below are posted in the order which I like best, top to bottom.

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I think this is a bit better but I’ll have to push the lighting much farther for brightening up Magneto and separating fore/mid/background.

Also need a foreground render layer as the glare from magneto is flattening out the the image.