WIP - Waiting on stairs

[xxdanbrowne]

So it obviously doesn't look photorealistic but I think the cloth textures are coming along. There's something wrong with the shadows on the jacket - I suspect I somehow reversed the normals when I stitched the jacket together in marvellous designer. The texturing of the skin is also off and there's no bump map on the skin. I just noticed I modeled the hands too big and a bit wierd too.
But other than that I think it's OK for a first pass LOL.

[xxdanbrowne]

Not a single crit? So it's either so bad it's not worth commenting on or so awesome?

;->

[badmilk69]

shoe.jpeg (23.36 KiB) Viewed 5495 times

[Daniel]

Stairs and wall need better texture work. Shoes need to be tighter fitting, but considering how she's cross-eyed, perhaps she's intended to seem like a clutz? She also needs a more natural pose. Not only is she barely grounded on the stairs at all, I've never seen anyone stand on a staircase like that.

[steveps3]

Looks like a nasty accident just waiting to happen.

[xxdanbrowne]

Thanks for the crits. Tough crowd: you guys ripped on my models and poses rather than the render!!!

So I will leave the robot babes out of my renders till I get the viz part of the arch viz looking more or less reasonable.

Thanks again guys!

[face_off]

So I will leave the robot babes out of my renders till I get the viz part of the arch viz looking more or less reasonable.

Human renders are very very tough to get right. There are so many elements (pose, hair, clothing, skin, eyes, teeth, etc) that have the potential to diminish the realism of the scene. IMO you are better off doing people-free architecture renders, or render with just a person (no other architecture) - mixing the two is incredibly hard to perfect.

[gordonrobb]

You hadn't really specified what you wanted crit on, so people just commented onnwhatbthe saw first in guess.

[xxdanbrowne]

@face_off: thanks. Yeah there really is so much to doing human renders it's not even funny. It took me a year to get the model more or less anatomically close (except I now notice the hands are too big LOL) and then several months to get the weight painting right so that it didn't bend wierd so I didn't really notice how bad the posing etc was. Also: the eyes for sure suck. I've been using Zbrush to spotlight paint the textures and I can never get the pupils to line up correctly never mind get a realistic render with the cornea, sclera, iris, pupil etc with full SSS and specular etc.

@gordonrobb: yeah you're right. I guess I just *assumed* people would focus on the materials etc. I'm pretty much an amateur and doing this just for the art of it - in no way am I anywhere near pro. I had initially thought when I started out with this that being able to model more or less close to what I wanted then slapping on textures in zbrush would make it close to what I'm looking for. In my mind's eye I'm comparing what I have to games and as bad as I am I'm already as good (IMHO) as the lower end games (though not yet at the cinematic level). I'm aware that I'm nowhere near the level of most of you guys who can do full realism so I'm trying to grope towards what's most important there. I'm also doing all of it myself - modeling, rigging, posing, texturing, bump mapping etc so it takes a *long* time to get all the elements of the scene right and I guess I was forgetting about that.

Coming here it looks to me like the key difference between realism and game level art is in the materials and lighting. Octane handles the lighting for you more or less (though you can take it the other 1% if you're an expert) but you need to get the materials down or it won't look right. From that perspective I wasn't really focusing on the rest of it like posing etc and am trying to figure out how to make the materials give me the look I want. On characters in the scene: I think the guys over in the poser section of this forum have it down almost perfect for photorealistic skin because the poser tool is focused exclusively on characters and so are it's users. I'm using the standalone so I may have inadvertently set myself a higher bar by doing that as I can't rely on existing content as easily. Any case I'm having lots of fun with this and I'm going to keep posting even if I suck because I just love the art.
Cheers.

[xxdanbrowne]

Here's a *slightly* better render of the girl on the stairs using Wilt's Octane superspec skin shader from the poser plugin forum which I put together in the standalone. Eyes are funky, ears are funky and eyelashes are funky. But I think the skin looks a lot better even considering I only baked it for 600 samples. PMC makes a big difference too looks like.