blender sculpting, painting and rendering
Ah i see xmas has come early in the forums has it.
lol
still it reminds me of those tacky models you get from pound shops, not taking anything away from you modelling dude, its very good
It looks very much like an actual santa candle you see around christmass. You could even put a wick on his head and light him up. Proper modelling/sculpting job!
here is a turnaround animation of this model
http://andklv.narod.ru/ak-flvplayer.html?http://andklv2.narod.ru/2009/santa.mp4&400&600
this is great.
looks more real than real.
is that blender internal render?
yes. this is blender internal renderer with linear workflow (hope you know what I mean) and a bit of compositing, done all within blender.
Nice image, looks very realistic!
Can you share some info about the lighting and compositing?
ok.
1 - linear workflow
we need to put our textures and colors to gamma 1. there are no way to do this in blender except emulating it with RGB curves. so our goal is to darken the textures and colors. why? because we will postprocess our final image to make midtones of lighting more bright. So we will brighten our lightning, leaving textures in proper state. Once more, our textures are already gamma coded to gamma 2.2, we need to convert them to gamma 1. render image. convert final image back to gamma 2.2. If we skip converting our textures to gamma 1 we will get notorious washed out textures in the final image. So again the purpose of gamma correction is to brightem the LIGHTING part of an image (note AO in the image - it is bright). By the way you can tweak lighting with different fakes - use inverse falloff of lights instead of inverse square, use brighter shaders put more light sources into a scene and so on.
2 - compositing
i separated the specular pass in this image. then mixed it with main pass (tweaking the strength of specular highlights), then blurred a copy of specular pass and add it to the composition too (this is glow). RGB curves used for tweaking brighness-contrast, sharpen filter, lens color distortion… nothing special… as usual
though… linear forkflow is not the only way to make a rendering of this kind. you can render all passes and composite them in any way. you can tweak lighting pass (convert it from gamma 1 to gamma 2.2) before compositing it with shadows, diffuse filter, reflections and so on.
Thanks for the explanation 
I already knew some things about linear workflow (spent a few months with it actually ^_^), but it’s great to read it. Good idea to separate specular in a different pass. I always have trouble with specularity, the control it gives to have it that way must be really helpful.
nice I like it a lot, it looks real
excellent image.was glossy reflections used.pl. can you give some info on light setup and getting such speculars
2sick
i found the way how to gamma correct textures in linux the problems are: 1) as far as I know BLENDER does not have means for gamma correcting textures or colors, a gamma node for texture nodes would solve the problem. 2) GIMP does not work with 16bit or 32bit images. so converting images to gamma = 1 with 8bit we will lost almost everything. 3) but BLENDER has a node for gamma conversion in compositing nodes - use it and save the result to .HDR or .EXR, then use that file for your texture.
2rusted
thank you.
No reflections or refractions were used - they are too slow. these are usual specular highlights, rendered separately and composited with nodes - this approach allows tune the image more precisely. the light setup is very simple - there are three lights nothing really special.
Good idea to correct images with the gamma node, will set up a file to do that from now on, although, with Blender 2.5 colour correction will be done automatically so we won’t have to worry about it anymore. Thanks for the tip anyway.
Very nice sculpture.