[davis]

The snail looks great, I like the material of the body.

Instead of appending or importing it, copy / paste also works from scene to scene. – CTRL-C / CTRL-V ftw.^^

[Reiner]

Thanks for the tip

I still hit the uncanny valley here. And wasn’t able to put the finger at it. But i guess it is good enough for what i want to do. Hyper realism isn’t my goal 

[Reiner]

Working with groups is nasty. The most important item is somewhere in the middle of the group menu. Well, alphabetically it fits there. But not for a good workflow.

Needs deeper investigation. We should group the menu items in most used and advanced menu items. That way we can have select group at the top of the list.

[Draise]

Assymmetry. Make the eyes peer around a bit, add some personality. Make a subtle facial expression. More often than not, it’s just pose and personality that hits the spot when it comes to makeing things “feel” less fake.

:dance:

[Reiner]

Assymetry will come with rigging. I plan to pose this darling 

[Reiner]

First blocking and testrendering. Finding the fitting hdri is black magic. I have picked one from Greg Zaal here. Monks forest.

The snail needs a pose. The snailhouse needs the good material back. The environment is still a bit too empty at the moment. Maybe a few little stones and leaves and sticks or so. I should redo the trees. They don’t really fit into this century and definitely not into a still. I made them many years ago. Low Poly. Stylized for a game. But nevertheless, it doesn’t look this bad. 

[Reiner]

Trying to create some moss. But hang at the material again. Has somebody an idea for a better solution that doesn’t paint the upper border of the moss black? ^^

Troublefile is attached.

[davis]

This is not related to the material, but to the maximum transparency passes of cycles, while rendering. – In the cycles render settings>lightpath crank up the max transparency to a higher value untill the black is gone.

[Reiner]

Wow, thanks a ton. I would’ve never thought of a cycles limit here 

[Draise]

I highly recommend you cutout the alpha with geometry and Ngons where you can, and keep your transperency depth limit low – this actual method with alpha planes is sometimes x4 times slower to render and if you have thousands of cards deep… that’s thousands of ray depths….. you get my drift, you’ll start seeing the errors quite easily at low angles anyway with an overall huge render cost. 

 

:dance:

[Reiner]

I see. Thanks for the hint. Then i’ll tweak the geometry here, and leave the transparency completely away for the moss.

Just curious, isn’t the holdout shader made for such cases?

And do you have a good recommendation for a leaf shader that could fit here? I’m not so happy with the current solution with transluency.

[Reiner]

Done as suggested. The moss particle is now a mesh without alpha channel transparency. Around 200 verts. And i found a useful plant shader setup now. It’s exactly this kind of common materials that is completely missing in the material library. Will make a task now to include it in the matlib.

Render times are with the current shader setup equal to the transparent solution. But looks much better now.

[Draise]

Wow, that sped things up. The last render was 7 min and this one is 3 min. And the shader looks fantastic. 

I read a study on the geometry for cards tip on twitter because the graph and analysis was.. very convincing. But I haven’t tried the holdout shader to be honest, might be worth trying out.

:dance:

[Reiner]

Tried it, cant’t get it to work

To be fair, the moss looks just so great with the current hdri …

And i start to cry here. Now that the material fits, now the particle system went fubar. When i modify it or when i move the object, then it breaks -.-

[Draise]

Ah.. I’ve done that. Apply scale to the particle and to the emitter – and parent the particles to the emitter root. 

:dance:

[Author]

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