Wow this model is simply beautiful, it’s easy to see how much effort you’ve poured into it. I do have one critique though, the armour itself seems a little too washed out. Whilst the lighting is very pretty in the clays, I don’t think it’s properly showing off the texture work you did. A lot of the armour seems to melt away into a grey, glossy film, which is sad as you lose all the scratch maps and texture detail as a result. Obviously I’m not sure how much of this is corrected though in post-pro. Certainly I quickly whipped it into PXLR just to see what upping the saturation would do, seemed to help a bit.
This is gorgeous! Way to go! Pretty much flawless. I agree that you seem to have figured out the balance of scratches and grit really nicely.
As a side note: I see that you used Vray, How did you get the hair from Blender into Vray? Does the Blender to Vray connection provide good translation of Blender hair to Vray? I mean, it looks great so obviously it does but how easy or difficult was that? Now I’m starting to think I should look into this for my own work.
there is a working vray fur implementation in the blender/vray build. I used that for all the fur, but with the exception of his beard+hairdo. They were rendered separately in cycles.
My initial plan was to do all the hair in cycles and then simply composite it together with the base vray-render. But i noticed that the renders from vray did not align perfectly with the ones from cycles. I think there might be some sort of distortion that happens to the vray camera that makes it different from BI/cycles (i don’t know).
But anyway, because of that i decided to render as much fur in vray as possible so that I would not have to many problems with misalignment while doing the composite.
The vray fur works fine on a basic level, but it’s not perfect. It doesn’t have very many controls and it renders quite slow, compared to BI/ Cycles (actually the renders took twice as long to do because I had to render with vray fur)
But with that said, it did the job. And I’m just happy that the feature existed. It’s a fairly new feature.
Okay, I got it. So it’s really just the Vray fur object and not a translation of blender hair. That’s fine. It’s funny that it takes longer to render than Cycles. So many people complain about Cycles being slow but I’ve used Vray and Mental ray lots and I can tell you, it’s definitely not as fast but it’s not that far behind. And, if you just use equivalent shading techniques in Vary like Brute force, you’ll get similar results.
ok, sorry i probably didnt explain that clearly. The vray hair is based on blender hair. I think you can find some videos on youtube by the dev (bdancer) showing it in action
