Would like feedback! :)
Phantom Studios
Posts: 203
Hello
I have been a 3D artist for a short period of time. I still consider myself somewhat of a newbie. I'd love some feed back on my recent work! I would appreciate that! Thanks
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Looking at your work I think the two things you need to focus on initially are lighting and surface settings. Fallen angel is the one that seems most successful to me overall. The moody directional lighting working in your favor in that one. Which program do you work in? I could give you a bit more direction if you work in studio.
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Thanks for responding! I'm still learning and totally down for learning from others to improve my modeling skill.
I work in both Poser Pro 2014 and DAZ 3D 4.6.
I'm beginning to use DAZ much more than Poser only because the content seems much more compatible and easier to adjust.
Right now I am just learning the basics. I haven't begun animating! lol
Advice is always welcome! Thank you! :)
I'm little to no help in poser so consider anything I say aimed at studio. The lighting there vexes me.
If you have not read this :7.6 - The 3 Point Rig found here http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/chapters/lights/start that is a good start for basic light set ups. You almost always need mulitple lights of some sort in the scene because of how lighting works in Studio. Where a light is not shining you have a lack of light that is not really the same as a shadow. Even in a very dark scene you can benefit from lights that even out the lighting a bit.
You also may want look around and see what you find about the uberenviroment light. It is a bit more complex to work with than the regular lights but it can vastly improve some types of renders. For example you could have used an environment light to mimic moon light in your fallen angel render or to fill out some of the places light is not shining in your Thor render.
With surfaces it looks like the specularity is not working well for you in some of your renders. Your getting shiny spots that don't look realistic on some of the surfaces. I suspect that simply lowering the glossiness on them would have solved that issue. It is something you should play around a bit with so that you see what happens.
I could be wrong about this but the metals in the Thor render look wrong to me. I think that they use a reflection map but for some reason that isn't doing as well as it should. Your options would be to play with some of the surface settings to get more realistic highlights and so forth and hope that will make the metals look more metallic or you can switch to a ratraced reflection. If you do that though you need to have things in the scene to be reflected and make sure that there is light on those surfaces (or they have a super high ambient) so that they can be reflected.
I think that if you experiment with those two factors, the lighting and the surfaces, that you will be much more satisfied with your renders. I do want to say that your renders are actually quite good for someone who considers themselves new. I know that many of the renders I did in the first year or two were pretty darn dire overall.
Everything said so far also applies to Poser.. exchange "Uber Environment" light for "IBL with AO" for Poser, and "lowering glossiness" with "raising highlight size"
Thank you for your suggestions. I will take them into serious consideration. I haven't messed with the lighting too much. I am still playing around with the lighting and adjustments. I don't own many shaders yet so I'm trying to use what DAZ offers within studio and its been a learning process. Thank you for the compliments.
I had a feeling it all boils down to lighting and shaders. I'm working on it though! Thanks everyone!
We're not talking about applying new shader presets, we're talking about adjusting the surface settings on the ones the product comes will. A lot of older products, and even new things for V4/M4, if not purchased here, don't come with DS materials and the Poser ones look pretty dreadful without adjustment.
Ditto what Fisty said. I'm far from an expert, but here's a few simple things that might help you along.
If an item comes with Daz Studio material presets, by all means use them if you're in DS. They often make a much better starting point than default surface settings. Here are my super simple settings for things that do not have DS material settings: Specular Glossiness 70%, Specular Color 64 64 64, Specular Strength 30%. This is for things that are not supposed to be real glossy. You can think of the Specular color as additional tuning for the Specular Strength. By changing the Specular color, you can give something a metallic glint, for example. For bump, the default settings are usually way too low. I like to start with 50%. The spot render is your friend here. The Fallen Angel is the best looking of your renders, but it looks like too much Specular on the skin.
On lights, don't overlook the large number of free light sets available at places like ShareCG.com. Note that Poser light sets sometimes work in DS, sometimes not. In any case, when you have 3 or 4 lights in a scene, it's handy to create a null then parent all the lights to that null. That allows you to select the null and rotate all the lights to a direction that looks right, rather than rotating each one in turn. You can still select one and move it relative to the others.