Reply To: Ryanocerous’ Polybook (Feedback and advice welcomed)

Periodically, I try to take a break from online courses and do a solo project that implements much of the lessons I’ve learned so far. Here’s a render of one I did last month that I called Sea Obelisk. I was inspired after seeing a hand drawn piece with a similar looking obelisk in it, and deciding to incorporate it into a scene of my own making.

I still see a lot of areas I’d like to improve on, but overall I’m happy with my progress. The rocks were fun to make, and gave me some good sculpting practice. The ropes and broken sail you see hanging from the shipwreck in the background I did with physics, and there was something particularly entertaining about pressing spacebar and watching all those fall into place. Fiddling with dressing the figure in that robe with the cloth modifier was significantly more time-consuming, but still fun. It’s like Gi-Joes all over again.

If you have any advice on things that I could have done differently, or if you know of a way to do what I did more efficiently/easier/etc, feel free to speak up.

Just some of the things I wish I’d done differently:
* Made the shoreline water a little more translucent maybe catch more of the brown of the sand.
* The figure’s skin looks a little doll-like to me. I know that skin is incredibly hard to get looking
* Getting the water right at the shoreline to look right was quite difficult. I tried simulation at first. It was my first time doing that, and it seemed like way too unwiedly a method for what I ultimately wanted. Plus waiting for the simulations to bake was slooooow going. I ended up giving up on simulation as a solution. Ultimately, I loaded some royalty free images of waves into a photoeditor, cut out the parts I didn’t need, and loaded them as planes into Blender. I gave them a little bit of dimensionality, and this is the result.
*Finding a way to make the sand around the base of the obelisk flow more organically into the surface sand.
* Making the ocean close to the horizon a little flatter. I can convince myself that it’s maybe the crest of a growing wave, but it still looks a little “off” to me.