It's that time again: Time to get your Blender projects ripped to shreds by the best critics in town!
I mean....If you would like a critique from *humble* Blender heads, Kent Trammell and Jonathan Lampel , to help push your stuff to the next level, please submit one of your projects to this thread. It can be a model, environment, texture work, a shader, animation - anything created with Blender.
The stream will start at 2pm eastern US time on Tuesday, February 26th. It's ideal if submitters can participate in the stream. However if you want to get a critique but won't be able to participate in the stream live, that's OK. We'll still review your project and you can watch the recording later.
NOTE: All active Citizen members have access to watch this live critique stream and submit art to be critiqued.
@theluthier Thank you so much! Feeling good to hear that from a pro digital artist and i need it that feedback:)
@theluthier np at all .
My mistake to begin with . Lost date out of my sight .
As for the link to the blend file here it is :)
char try 1
Thank you so much for still wanting to take a look at it . I really appreciate it sensei :D
@theluthier
I wanted to attend this stream but regretfully a small family emergency cut that short (all resolved now). I'd love to watch it regardless however I can't seem to find it under past events.
Is it still coming? I would be very much interested to see it.
General PSA for everyone: to see past events go to events and click on the "past events" button in the top left. There is quite a big archive of past streams to watch. I recently watched "Let's talk about Failure" and "Artist Study: BEEPLE" both of which I greatly enjoyed.
Go check out the archive if you haven't already! :)
yyukinoh1989 That link says the file has been deleted (?)
3dioot Sorry to hear about the family emergency. I archived the stream a couple hours ago - must have been shortly after you asked. Turned out to be a long one so maybe consider the 1.5 playback speed feature 😅
Glad you enjoyed those past streams! We've tried to expose that large cache of content with a new home for all streams. I think they've unintentionally been a hidden gem up till this point.
Hi Kent, I figured out why your DOF was behaving so strange. It has to do with the fact that Suzanne's head is about 6 feet tall, when you add a Monkey to your scene. So your Camera is actually very far away and the distance between the monkey heads is relatively small.
Thanks again to you and Jonathan for the great critique! It was really helpful.
@theluthier ow now that's strange gonna upload it again this evening in a good 9 hours from now. Not sure what went wrong
spikeyxxx Suzanne's default size is ~6ft tall...that changes my entire perception of her. Suzanne, I don't even know you anymore..
Very helpful to know, thank you!
@theluthier Yes, because it's a head, we tend to forget how huge it is! She must be cleverer than Einstein;)
@theluthier Thanks for the critique! I missed the stream thanks to my weird sleep schedule :D
I forgot to mention some thing in my post as I was in a hurry at the time.
My main goal is to learn how to make game ready characters. Since I had very little experience with sculpting, anatomy or rigging, modeling a simple professional soldier instead of a knight in plate armor made much more sense. I also modeled his weapons the day before the stream. They are fairly simple which fits the character's idea. You can find them here. https://cgcookie.com/t/1650-polybook-drgnclw?page=8#answer-17505 (The langets on the poleaxe are out of place because of a simple mistake which I realized and fixed after posting them)
I was going to use matcap renders but decided against it the at the last moment and went for LookDev mode in 2.8 (I think it's just eevee with a selection of HDRIs) with the basic materials because I thought not being able to tell the difference between the pieces would be worse than subpar materials. I already made the proper materials but I'll texture the character after I'm done with rigging.
As for the rendering, it's probably my weakest skill. After everything is done, I'll look into improving. I'm thinking about using eevee for rendering.
@theluthier I was thinking on how I was going to render all those frames of a two minute video for the portfolio, in 1920x1080 it's going to be vast amounts of hours and I mean impossibly too much time. I only have a laptop.
In your course of rendering the Halloween short, you set up the scene so that Wayne can render some frames, and other computers can help in as well, but most people I know don't even have a decent computer, so that's not an option. I have never used a render farm service, I don't know how expensive it will be either.
I was thinking of using Element 3D in After Effects, I use it quite often and it's very powerful. I have to bake lots of textures and optimize scenes but it's worth it, I can probably cut a 5 hours render time down to 5 minutes with it. But what I was really thinking is using EEVEE, it's kind of the same thing as Element 3D is. Do you think EEVEE is up to the task? should I start learning EEVEE so that I'm able to make that video? There is no way I am going to be able to render the whole thing in my laptop with normal rendering in Cycles.
Could @jlampel maybe touch the subject on next week stream?
dostovel 2.8 has this experimental thing where you can use both your CPU and GPU to render, and in most cases, it's faster than either alone. Here's an article.
You could render with Eevee for time's sake, but be aware Eevee is suppose to act like a game engine, so you may get less accuracy. There are also a lot of switches to flip on that are on by default in Cycles to get something comparable.
It sounds like you need to set some money aside for a better PC. Set some aside, no matter how little. If you get a bonus, file that away towards better tools. This is your livelihood. Invest in it.
The best thing to do is plunge right in, Omar. Start fiddling and see if it'll work for you or not. You never know until you try.
silentheart00 Thankfully investing is not a problem, the problem is time, I have a very small window of opportunity with my Canadian Express Entry profile and I need to try and gather the points I'm lacking and I need to do that ASAP or I'll loose the chance.
Most of my scenes take 3 or 4 hours to render because of all the details, if I want at least 10 seconds, that's 40 days of rendering, and that's just 1 scene and I have at least 15 scenes. My laptop is not bad, I have an Alienware with a 1070, say I get a double the power desktop, that's 20 days of rendering still for just one scene.
My best chance is something like EEVEE or After Effect Element 3D, and optimize the heck out of most of my scenes to try and make a cool video. I love the idea of playing around with short quick shots and different camera angles and cinematography and make it paced to the rhythm of a cool song.
dostovel I hate to say it because I love eevee, but I really think that it will hurt your beautiful renders.. you'll never get the good realistic quality you've got going with all your renders. And since that's your strength... it would be a shame to not showcase that.
I haven't really looked into it myself because I haven't needed it, but I believe your best bet would be using a render farm. I think there are some free ones? I also think you can get a discount to some via your CG Cookie account? Anyway since you say investing is an option, you might want to invest in this route.
Just my 2 cents 😊
ssmurfmier1985 Dangs, I haven't used EEVEE yet, but you guys use it all the time, so I'm guessing EEVEE is not the way to go. Maybe render farms then or Element 3D. Man I thought EEVEE was there already, I mean you see some incredible stuff on YouTube that makes you think ray tracing is already out of the picture, a thing of the past, dead on the water, ancient technology, dial up to my 200 megabits connection.
dostovel well eevee is mega mega awesome, truly, but it does come at the cost of realism. For me that's not a problem, but for you realism is the best quality and selling point of your work imo 😊
Anyway, you could always ask @jlampel opinion on it, he seems to know a lot more about eevee than any of us! Because you're right about it being fast and there's indeed more and more awesome stuff to see on the internet every day...
dostovel I'm afraid Miranda is right that Eevee may detract from the high-quality of your Cycles renders. Maybe one day, but your renders (like the banged up toyota) are super sharp and detailed. Eevee doesn't do great with super details because it's essentially a game engine. The name of the Eevee game is optimization, just like a game engine.
3-4 hours per frame is really long. You're going to have to lower the samples and deal with some noise I'm afraid. I mean noise to a degree is beneficial for realism because even modern film cameras that shoot blockbuster movies have plenty of noise going on.
Also what you should do to expedite your render process is ask for help from this community! When your file is 100% ready to render, share you file with anyone who can offer their machine for rendering - crowd-sourced render farm. For example (if you have enough dropbox or google drive space) you can share out the directory and everyone can contribute to the render as they're able and the image files will sync to that directory.
Realistically though, if you're rendering EXR's for the sake of post-rendering compositing, sequences can be 10-20 GB each. If you and your contributors don't have that much available cloud storage, you could simply share the .blend file and you delegate specific frames to each contributor. When they're done, each contributor uploads a zip somewhere of their image lot.
I would guess you could find several - even several dozen I'd bet - willing to help render your sequences! If you go that route, I'd recommend starting a thread in the forum titled "Request for Rendering help" or something like that.
yyukinoh1989 I got the new file! And I have it opened ready to give advice but I don't see the reference you're using as it's not packed with the .blend file - I see the ref objects there but they're bright pink. Could you either pack your file, save it, then upload again or just post the ref images you're using? Without that my notes would be purely subjective to what I imagine you're going for.