Savage Opress Bust

HellishBaroness

I've been using 3d software for a long time but have always had trouble learning and finishing projects. After a few years I'm barely at this level. I'd like to finish this and end up with a nice render.

I understand anatomy is basic, details are lacking and polypaint is minimal. What more can I improve and how so?

I'm very rusty and not very experienced so I'd appreciate all criticisms and advice on workflow.

Brian "Panda" Choi

How are you planning on rendering this?

You could make blendshape facial expressions for this character.

HellishBaroness

I had NO IDEA what I was doing. Eventually I got here. Ended up rendering in Blender Cycles.

Was slow, but I learned a lot and had fun.

Edit: I forgot to mention: Rip and tear. The end result is better than anything else I have made before, but it's still not outstanding. I'd appreciate any feedback on this.

fjun

Hello!
Good job.
Struggling with finishing work is very common. something I've also struggled with in the past. You made a commitment and executed on it despite having troubles and not knowing what you were doing. You should be proud! Use this momentum to slingshot another project. Don't stop!

On to the render,

I like the contrast between the silhouette and the background. The focal point (face) doesn't blend in with the background and pops out, kudos.

My biggest issue is the flat and boring lighting. You should think of the mood and personality of the character. Is he supposed to be Cute? Menacing? Mysterious? Holy? Ask all those questions to yourself and use the answers to dictate your art direction. I'd go for stronger lighting here, would look really neat!

Materials! Everything is more or less the same, flat matte material. Very boring. Explore some Cycles nodes and come up with interesting materials.

If you're interested, I can show you some stuff and give you some pointers, PM me the blend file(make sure to either pack textures or zip them into a folder and send em.

but again, good job. Keep going and grinding'! Looking forward to more stuff from you.

fjun

accidental reply, ignore this

fjun

Referring to your OP again, let bygones be bygones. Everyone goes through this, it's okay to suck. Work hard and go get 'em! Discipline and consistency is key.

Looked through your file, it's good, let's go in

First off, I put in an environment HDR to blow everything out. You had rays disabled, make sure to enable them!

Next up, basic PBR materials. I use the RGB node as an input for roughness/metalness. If you move the B/W slider it basically outputs a value between 0 and 1. I like the graphical element of it. You can also use a "Value" node for this.

Now we'll use your polypaint to generate a mask for our gold facepaint. The setup is simple, convert it to Black and White, use a ColorRamp to tweak so we get a sharp Black and white mask.

The masking seems a bit iffy with Polypaint/Vert colors, just use the setup below with two diffuse shaders and then tweak the colorramp until you're happy.

Now, a fun thing you could do is use texture generators with masks and mixers and use them to drive values like Roughness, Metalness etc to get interesting results. This is a super common workflow for material authoring. I use Substance Designer for it though, since it's way more powerful. But this is a good primer and fun to mess around in.

Make sure you're using Filmic mode, also turn on AO pass and composite it in scene nodes, this only works in actual renders though, won't change the preview render at all.Study real life, movies, anime, whatever you can get your hands on and observe how lighting affects your mood, emotions and how you feel about the character, it's an amazing sandbox and an extremely powerful tool to have. And it's fun! I did some quick exploratory thumbs to show you.

Sorry for the rushed graphics, was strapped on time. Hope these help you.
I'll send you the .blend. Feel free to ask _ANY_ questions, no matter how basic. If I can help, I'll try my best. o/