Here is an image I am reasonably happy to call “finished”. If I had followed a decent development process the pins would be rigged or have shape keys for the expressions so that I could animate them, but it kind of evolved from another image which was just of plain pins (no faces), and I have no experience yet with shape keys.
I spent ages trying to get the lighting and materials right, and am still unhappy about a couple of things (Blender’s motion blur/vector blur for one), but unless anyone has some real simple and useful advice, my motivation is exhausted.
Incidentally, the character similarity to Raymans Raving Rabbids is purely coincidental…I think its the teeth that do it. I just wanted something to show the cumulative effect of being slammed by the ball repeatedly, and missing teeth seemed to be appropriate.:evilgrin:
NIce image! The shaders are pretty good, and as for the blur, sometimes good 'ol motion blur can work quite well(you dont get those nasty lines that vector blur can produce).
Overall, nice stuff, the expressions are quite good, 3 stars!
Thanks, I was debating giving it one more render with motion blur as opposed to vector blur. The other problem with vector blur is that reflections don’t get blurred with the motion. Problem is I am rendering at 4000x3000 and it is already slow with the use of glossy reflections and Ambient Occlusion.
Correct me if I am wrong but using the good old motion blur would require multiple frames to be rendered? And the more frames the better the result?
Its not that I have lines…its more that I really struggle to get a believable natural blur. It could just be that I need to tweak the speed/motion/animation of the ball and the pin better, but its hard to really see the result of such tweaks at 800x600 and its painful waiting for a larger render (approx 1hr for this image on my bloated XP).
My specific issue with this image is that I had to reduce the BlurFac so that the struck pin didn’t look like a big white fuzz (you can’t really tell even now that one of his teeth is being knocked out), but that had the result effect of making the bowling ball look like it is hardly moving at all.
Its not really Blenders fault I guess. Man…what a whiner I sound like
The other thing I would dearly love to be able to achieve is the impression of speed blur like star trails (eg like cursor trails in Windows) where the moving object is most visible/sharp at the last frame of the motion, and progressively less visible/sharp for proceeding frames. Perhaps I could do some multiframe post production/node magic for that?
Didnt realize the image was so large Id try some photoshop if you can.