What do you think is needed to make a good GFX? And how do you accomplish it?
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Never make a GFX in studio.
All this stuff makes a good GFX
- Blender
- A Rig
- Good Lighting
- Good Pose
- No Noise
- USE CYCLES
- A good photo editing software
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Blender or any other 3D Software.
A Good Rig (inside your 3D software): Ultimate Rig is what i use most (demo version)
Good Lighting: Emission Planes work best for me (cycles only), but if they are giving off too much reflective ness and softness then i just use a sun light.
Good posing… try to replicate armature rotations as it would be in real life, be as lifelike as possible.
Denoise your renders always.
Use the best render engine you can, even if it slows down your pc a ton. it might just be worth it. I personally use Cycles with Blender.
you should edit your photos. I personally use photopea but photoshop is the supreme editing software.
dont make any random gfx like dont make: ‘noob on toilet’ give thought into your gfx, layer design, lighting, set, etc.
you also need a good set for your gfx. dont just use any studio free model or whatever (unless you cant build/model). i suggest modelling your own sets in whatever 3d software you use as they improve your skills with the program even more.
and the last important thing is definitely character design. you need to pick out the right clothing, accesories, and faces to be able to get that look you’re going for. sometimes body colors can appear as clothing if you’re going for a simplistic old style.
ALSO ONE MORE IMPORTANT THING IS TEXTURING
i usually use roblox blender materials but you should try other textures too
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Well @IceTheOneAndOnly basically said everything I wanted to, but I’ll add something.
I suggest using Cycles X instead of Cycles, as your renders will go (quite literally) 10x faster especially for high poly scenes. You can download it on the Blender website.
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Hm. Is Cycles X anything better then Cycles?
As I said it is proven to make your render time up to 10x faster, it’s basically Cycles on a sugarrush.
I think that the absolute most important thing that people don’t focus on enough is composition. This is important for all types of art, and if forgotten it doesn’t really matter how good your pose or lighting is because it will be unappealing.
A few other things that are important for good GFX are as follows:
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Using the right softwares and render engines
I would strongly recommend against using roblox’s built in renderer because it’s hard to get decent results without very extensive editing. People use Maya, C4D, Blender, and a myriad of other softwares with more advanced rendering engines. As far as render engines go, I don’t have experience with ones like Arnold or Redshift, but I think Cycles and Eevee are both good free options. I prefer cycles but you can achieve a good result with eevee if you touch it up in post and add shading. I created a comparison which you can view here. (This was a reply to a post, and the post was recently unlisted but I archived it in a google doc) As far as editing softwares go, Photoshop is the best option, but it’s not affordable for most artists, so I use Gimp which is free, and that’s what I’d recommend. -
Texturing your scene well. Whenever I see a scene that has the default texures you get from exporting a .obj from roblox, it always looks like wax or plastic. Websites like CC0 Textures (Recently renamed to ambientCG) has lots of high quality textures. I would also recommend PolyHaven, as they have textures, models, and HDRIs.
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Lighting your scene. A mistake lots of beginners make is thinking that you can just use an HDRI as your lighting/environment without tweaking and get good results. While an HDRI provides great color in your lighting, it’s not a complete package. You should still be using your own lights with the HDRI to better suit your scene and focal point.
These are the 3 biggest tasks that beginners should practice, but there are many more things you need to get good at in order to make a good piece of art. Editing, choosing assets, and scene creating are all necessary skills to develop.
I would be careful with Cycles X. It’s faster on large scenes, but it’s still in development. It doesn’t fully support things like volumetric, and because of how buggy it is, the current builds could corrupt your files. If you plan on using the Cycles X build of blender, make your scene in a more stable version and then import it only when you’re rendering. (For simple scenes don’t bother with Cycles-X, it’s actually proven to be slower on lower poly scenes than the latest version of Cycles.) I’m saying this because a recent project I worked on was corrupted due to the unstable state of the Cycles-X build, and I lost all my progress.
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i’ve heard of cycles x but thought it was unreleased. hm
its just not a stable release you can still use it though
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I disagree at the moment, Cycles X may be good but it’s currently apart of Blender’s experimental builds so it may have some issues that some people don’t due to a bunch of reasons.
If anyone is going to use Cycles X use a stable version of blender to do everything else then render in the experimental build, it might end up crashing on rendering and not everyone saves as often as they should.
Please do note that I haven’t used Cycles X yet so just take what I said with a grain of salt. (I’m going to test it shortly)
I probably should have added what you said. Personally I only my use it for rendering after making the scene in a usual blender file.
Listen to what this guy says!
Composition, Lighting Techniques, and Color theory pretty much, and blender guru has all of those covered actually
It really depends on what you’re doing anyways, I’ve just done a quick test comparing cycles and cycles X and only saw a tiny difference.
With cycles rendering a simple model at 128 samples with denoising only took 3.62 seconds, cycles X rendered the same model at 3.61 which is unnoticeable so not really needed on a single model which most of the time you will do unless you want t do scene GFX. I am using the GPU compute for both so that does factor in the render time anyways, I am using a RTX 3060 if anyone is wondering.
If you want to do larger scenes then I say yes but doing a large scene will require a decent CPU or GPU if you don’t want constant crashes, freezes or long render time but if you are only doing small avatar renders then go ahead most laptops will be able to do them.
Anywho, done with my tangent
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You don’t really need to use cycles, eevee is also pretty good if you know how to setup.
it’s just recommended to use cycles as eevee is real-time and not a ray tracing engine and normally used for animatons not so much still frame renders. Due to all the substitutions and hacky methods to get it close to cycles, you should really only use it if your computer can’t handle cycles.
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