Assault trooper

[Argate]

Hi to all.
I would like to show you my last work. the idea was to do a not photorealism render, more painted oriented (don't like the cold feeling of some 3d work).
Base mesh was done in softimage but the rest was done in blender, as I wanted try the new bmesh (so about 90% of the model was done in blender).
Rendering in cycles and compositing and paint photoshop. C&C are really welcome
My goal is to paint, a day, like master Clint Langhley do.

[Candra H]

I'm no expert at anything you're doing so cant comment on anything technical or digital.

What I will say is, the trooper could use separating more from the background because at the moment there's not enough contrast and he's blending in too much. Maybe push the light and shadows on him further and soften the background to help with that.

[Obstfelder]

The model is really well detailed, but the camo-pattern is making it hard to read the shapes. I would have turned up the light intensity so that the value range between light and shadow is much greater than the value range in the texture. The background is also very busy with much stronger contrasts than the character itself. I would make those contrasts weaker and maybe add a contrasting color hue to emphasize the character.

EDIT: Added a quick PO to show you what I mean.

[Argate]

Thanks a lot for your comments and sorry for my late answer (I had internet issues).
I will try your suggestions, thanks

Obstfeler@ Don't understood what do you did on the image, can explain a bit (desaturated?)?

[Obstfelder]

My changes were a bit quick and dirty, but the main Idea was to bring the character out from the background by brightening the places where the light hits it.

I see now in retrospect that I brightened the entire thing too much though and I see what you mean that it looks a bit washed out. So yes I might have been confusing you. Sorry about that

What I wanted to suggest was to separate it from the background more by using more contrasts in the character than in the background. So the shadow areas on the character are darker than the shadow areas in the background and the bright highlights on the character are brighter than highlight areas in the background.

I did another quick adjustment to make it clearer what I mean. Hopefully it makes more sense now.

[Velocity Kendall]

id shoot him in the eyes and then the stomach
maybe give him some more armour? looks cool though, great modelling!

[lennon]

A few thoughts,

[aliM]

Oooh, lennon shorta fixed anything I saw to improve.

[Argate]

Hi Lennon,
I'm impressed
Please, can you elaborate a bit what do you did in it?

Thanks to for your comment my friend

Obstefelder, If I separate more the soldier from background I fear to lost the paint effect, no? Sorry, I'm not english so I have some problem to elaborate.

[Obstfelder]

I'm not really sure about that. Painting doesn't exclude depth in my opinion, but I guess details should be used sparingly.

Though Lennons background bluring is more effective it serves the same purpose as what I was thinking

[lennon]

Really glad to help, as said it's a great model. Here I attach a description on pretty much every step. The main thing was to blur the backgroud and paint some shadows and highlights in some layer in mode-overlay.
If you think it could be of any use, I could send you the psd file. Didn't uploaded becasue of CA file size restrictions.
In here I kind of forgot to put that I copy merged the complete drawing and did a filter>sharpen>unsharp mask, that sort of gives a more "painted" look.

[Argate]

Thanks very much Master!

And sorry for my delay in answering...