Reply To: Jammin’s Blender Progress

[Jonathan Lampel]

Hey, nice work @jammingammon ! Sorry it took so long for me to get to this. Here are a few notes on each:

#1 – The light size and intensity looks really close, but it could definitely use some color. Almost no light is pure white. Even if it looks white like the bar light in the reference, it’s only because it’s so intense that it’s desaturated. As it bounces around and fades out the saturation comes through. The reference also doesn’t really have much of a rim light. 

#2 – This one is pretty spot on! The light could be a little more saturated and the light could be hitting the upper part of the cheekbone more on the shadowed side like in the reference, but it’s pretty close in overall style. 

#3 – Another one that could really use more saturation. I wouldn’t crank it all the way up to 1, but probably pretty close. It’s interesting how your render has the ‘evil’ look where the light hits the bottom of the brows, but that’s not present in the reference. The light is hitting there slightly, but in a really soft way. You can tell there’s a bit of light coming from the front because of the way his nose is shaded. The reference looks calm and serious while the render is more intense and creepy. 

#4 – This looks super close – just a little more direct light hitting his cheekbone on the shaded side and a bit of backlighting would make this spot on. You can tell that the main light is colored a bit warm because you can compare it to the cooler light hitting the back of his head. 

#5 – Similar note to before – the little triangle patch on his cheek on the shaded side does a lot of work when it comes to defining the shape of the face while keeping the shadows relatively sharp. Also note the shadow that cuts his left eye almost in half, which really gives his character a slightly mysterious and intense feel. 

Hope that helps and keep up the good work! I would love to see another crack at this if you feel up to it to see if you can capture the feeling in reference rather than the technical light placement. It’s a lot harder than it looks but I know you can do it!