Newbie rendering with Blender needs tips
I'm working a developer working on an independent puzzle game in which the whole thing is an animated painting hanging on a wall. (I go into more detail about it here.)
I've decided to re-render the background graphic of a painting hanging on wall in order to support 16:9 and higher resolution monitors. Unfortunately I did the old background with 3D Studio Max years ago, no longer have access to Max, and have the original art as a .max file. So instead I'm now trying to reproduce the image from scratch with Blender, and it's going pretty well but I was wondering if some 3D rendering gurus could help me get it looking even better.
This is what the game used to look like. And this is how I have the background looking now, in higher res + 16:9.
To say I'm a newbie at Blender does a disservice to newbies -- I'm more of a Blender tourist. To do the new one I wrote a script to generate the geometry as VRML97 (because doing that was easier for me than figuring out Blender's editing interface), imported the VRML into Blender, bought a concrete texture off of TurboSquid and followed a tutorial on how to texture objects, set up the lights and camera, and then fooled around with materials/shader settings for the different parts of the picture frame until it started looking good. Mostly just turning subsurface scattering on everything softens the shadows and gives the image a kind of wispiness.
Everything more I try now looks about the same as far as realistic-ness/mood. Tried bump-mapping the wall but it just looked overwrought. I seem to be stuck in a local maxima. What else should I do? Are there any magical shader settings for the frame parts, etc.?
I've decided to re-render the background graphic of a painting hanging on wall in order to support 16:9 and higher resolution monitors. Unfortunately I did the old background with 3D Studio Max years ago, no longer have access to Max, and have the original art as a .max file. So instead I'm now trying to reproduce the image from scratch with Blender, and it's going pretty well but I was wondering if some 3D rendering gurus could help me get it looking even better.
This is what the game used to look like. And this is how I have the background looking now, in higher res + 16:9.
To say I'm a newbie at Blender does a disservice to newbies -- I'm more of a Blender tourist. To do the new one I wrote a script to generate the geometry as VRML97 (because doing that was easier for me than figuring out Blender's editing interface), imported the VRML into Blender, bought a concrete texture off of TurboSquid and followed a tutorial on how to texture objects, set up the lights and camera, and then fooled around with materials/shader settings for the different parts of the picture frame until it started looking good. Mostly just turning subsurface scattering on everything softens the shadows and gives the image a kind of wispiness.
Everything more I try now looks about the same as far as realistic-ness/mood. Tried bump-mapping the wall but it just looked overwrought. I seem to be stuck in a local maxima. What else should I do? Are there any magical shader settings for the frame parts, etc.?