My entry (plus padding) to Bad Normal’s Default Cube Render Challenge, done in Blender 3.3.0 alpha/beta with some frames touched up in GIMP 2.10. I’ve done very little animation (and I’m currently working on an underpowered laptop, Cycles at 8 samples plus compositing effects getting about 20 frames rendered per hour), this is easily the longest piece I’ve attempted. Learned what I did with Suzanne’s geometry node hair mostly from Johnny Matthews’s New Blender Hair Tools vids, and the sugar-coated thing I did to the Default Cube came from Blender Guru’s latest geometry node tutorials – my gratuitous abuse of their teachings aren’t their fault, especially not what happened with Suzanne’s body fur.
The dishware’s all from Martin Newell’s teapot / teacup’n’saucer, and I made Suzanne’s body / hand from a MakeHuman model.
The blend file’s a smidge less than 10mg, so I’ve made it available for download at Dropbox for anyone interested. Please note that this isn’t a presentation file, just the last one before I split for rendering. Although this isn’t Focused Critiques, I’ve no objections to questions or concrit.
Really original idea !
didn’t even think about the option to make the cube „move“ by moving the environment.
One question i have is (and don’t take this as criticism, it’s only curiosity):
Did you intentionally make the scene very plastic/unnatural looking? This may very well be an artistic choice.
If you would like some constructive criticism: i would have refinde the lighting some more. At the moment everything has roughly the same brightness, which makes it a bit flat looking.
if you want some low performance real looking light, have a look at using Gobos with spotlights.
Yeah, going for a CG-toonish look, even the gingham texture was as simple a procedural as I could make. Although I used CG Guru’s recent tutorials for the candy-cube, I couldn’t use the materials he included because they were too realistic for the style.
The lighting’s a dark blue-gray World and a single big Area light warmed with a touch of that orange hue – I planned for flatter using Eevee, but most of my experience is with Cycles and I couldn’t get the shadows to work right in Eevee.
I’m pretty happy with how most of it came out, the two bits I found frustrating were Suzanne’s body fur (a monkey’s fur is supposed to be kinda sparse, but not patchy like that) and the room animation (I started with a simple three-point path intended to smooth out the middle in the Graph Editor, but everything I tried made it worse). It’s not like I’m in it to win it, although I’m hoping to get into the compilation vid.
Didn’t get into the top hundred, I have a sad. Didn’t expect to win of course, magnificent entries. But the lack of reciept confirmation in the entry process makes it impossible to tell if mine was acceptable / considered or if something went wrong and it never even got looked at – there were several stylized entries in the top 100, enough to make it clear the judges weren’t relentlessly pro-realism (even a couple Suzannes!), something like mine had a shot. Now I’ll never know.
Oh, well. I like it, I enjoyed making it, and I learned a lot.
Sorting by “Rank”, there are 70 people in the same rank as me and we run from 189 to 258, so I can’t tell if I’m in the top 200 or top 300. But with 509 entries considered I’m upper-middle of the pack, so pretty decent.
Thanks! I wish I’d been able to do a better job of it. The movement of the room+ that brings Suzanne’s mouth to the candy has some retrograding vs the camera movement (required unchanged for the challenge, you’ll recall) that I tried to fix or at least mitigate, but couldn’t. But I’m glad you like it!
Didn’t expect to win of course, magnificent entries. But the lack of reciept confirmation in the entry process makes it impossible to tell if mine was acceptable / considered or if something went wrong and it never even got looked at – there were several stylized entries in the top 100, enough to make it clear the judges weren’t relentlessly pro-realism (even a couple Suzannes!), something like mine had a shot. Now I’ll never know.