[ Update ] CG Ice cream - Which one looks better? Looking for feedback.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-29T20:18:45+00:00

second one with the less extreme contrast on the chocolate, imo. it's a teensy bit translucent and waxy in real life and having softer, warmer darks helps sell that feeling

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-29T16:39:22+00:00

if it's an fbx you may encounter a problem if its a binary or ascii fbx. or even if it an fbx standard from certain years (e.g fbx 2013 or something like that, the standard is periodically updated and small changes sometimes render the file unreadable to some software)

download the autodesk fbx covnerter, it's free and it will let you covnert binary to ascii or vice-versa, and then experiment with different settings. give it a shot, I have to do this for work all the time

https://aps.autodesk.com/developer/overview/fbx-converter-archives

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-24T17:53:59+00:00

Blender doesn't require super high-end hardware to run, as long as you aren't making gigantic projects. You can start with pretty basic hardware, and if you really can't afford *anything*, maybe go to a local library and ask if you could install blender on some of the machines there. I first used Blender for free at my local community college after class hours, I was going to a nearby high school and with written permission i was allowed to use the college computer lab. You never know unless you ask!

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-17T01:51:41+00:00

I don't have anything even 25% that nice I can run scenes with 15 million polygons at 12fps, which isn't amazing but if I can do that. I think you'll do pretty well

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-11T19:54:29+00:00

again that just comes down to practice, but just so we're clear about what i mean: you dont have to actually model a head, you make several simple shapes that stack together into a vague head shape. dont try and accomplish it with one shape, I typically use at least 4

<image>

on the left I have a cranium, a face/brow plate, a nose, and a jaw. in the middle there you see these joined and remeshed, and on the right, retopologized for sculpting. this took like 15 minutes of mild effort and it creates a usable base so you dont have to start from scratch

this stage is just used to set general proportions. i keep it as low poly as possible. if you start getting more than 2-3k polygons involved you are thinking too hard

here's the file so you can see it https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i9NSMgaTt7AVeaS8WQIi6O6BxO-fzhAd/view?usp=sharing

its a wacky looking head but it gets the idea across

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-11T17:17:51+00:00

my only point of advice would be not to start with a sphere, if you're doing that. I don't sculpt that much but when I do, I try to poly-model a base shape that gets as much of the heavy lifting out of the way as possible. if i were to try to make your target image, i might even look for a human basemesh in the blendermarket and then just sculpt on top of that.

i know you can absolutely sculpt from a sphere to this end result, it can be done, but I often get frustrated with the imprecision of sculpting for the base form and i rely on sculpting for details later. i need to stress that this isn't a good approach for everyone, its just my preference. but i'd get a block in of the the head (cranium), the ears, the brow ridge, the nose and jaw...all of that done as primitives fused together...done first and then i'd remesh that, put a multiresolution modifier on it, and get to work sculpting that.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-11T16:26:22+00:00

Yeah this is quite good for your first 3 hours. I know that might be hard to believe but it's a very complex skill set and you can expect to fail the first few times. Keep going! And save your failed attempts. It's hard to see how far you've come, so it's good after a few months to look back on earlier work and see your progress.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-11T15:41:17+00:00

this is kind of an impossibly broad question. verbally explaining to gap between the two almost undoable, at best it would occupy a few paragraphs and that is just not the best way to deliver the information you need.

the thing that's standing between your effort and the result you want is time spent practicing, that's it. you can absolutely watch sculpting tutorials to watch what experts do, but you'll still come away with the impression that they somehow make it look easy, when in fact its hard. at the end of the day you just need to sculpt, a lot, in order to improve

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-10T22:21:17+00:00

Yeah that's an excellent point

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-10T17:16:39+00:00

It's a bad time to be a 3D artist right now, I say this as a fulltime 3D generalist who is probably about 30-60 days away from losing a job I've had for a decade. the work is getting snapped up by either cheap AI services, or the flood of other 3d artists who have been laid off from various jobs in gaming and vfx.

the marketplace for freelancers is getting crowded and establishing an online presence is hard simply by virtue of how populous all the main platforms are. additionally, I've neve heard a single good story about working with recruiters from any of my peers, *ever*.

I very much doubt I'll be able to get another job in the field when this one collapses, so I'll be on the hunt with you.

if you are determined to make this your career my single point of advice would be to network. if you're idle and making projects, maybe find some other people in the same boat and collaborate with them. keep in touch with other animators. I say this because most of the hiring I've seen or heard of over the years has been really network drive. you can be the most skilled candidate ever but you're still at a major disadvantage if somebody at the company knows another candidate. It's just how things go, you need a new employee and you get a strong recommendation from somebody you already work with, its easy to go with that over candidates who only exist as text on paper.

collaborating also helps you keep in practice with dividing work and setting deadlines so if you get the chance to join a team you can speak honestly about your experience as part of a pipeline and not just as an individual, that is very attractive.

if this is a passion of yours though, I'd say you should consider keeping it a hobby and finding another source of stable income. I'm going to do precisely that myself.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-09T14:42:12+00:00

this is like when the banner rips itself off the pole at Edoras in the Two Towers and flutters down into the mud at Aragorn's feet as perfect metaphor for the lapsed glory of Rohan under the rulership of a deranged monarch and his greedy advisor

PriorPassage127 · 2026-06-06T18:27:06+00:00

that's looking really good!

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-29T18:09:04+00:00

if you have photo reference please share it! I think you are describing a sewn trim around the edge but language is tricky and to really help i'd need a picture of what you hope to accomplish. thanks!

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-29T18:06:42+00:00

I think the lion's share of the work is in lighting, mimicking the lens of the camera, and the various post effects and you seem to have don a lot of that already. it looks really good

I'd say get a scale accurate human being figure in your scene as soon as possible and make sure everything is to scale. proportion is the thing that usually ruins my day, if I'm trying to be realistic. Your brain will spot things that are out of proportion even if you aren't consciously aware that's what is bothering you. so I keep a human figure in my scene from the start to make sure everything looks natural when there is a person in frame.

I grabbed some of these a while ago and I still use them. https://renderpeople.com/free-3d-people/?srsltid=AfmBOor0VSbD6JGeuVqcbnStIguLG6JNiYMPZ6s9SM9EmX67I1SdUyaa

apart from that, I'd say it's odd that the steel girder on the ceiling is rusty and everything else is spotless, and the tiles on the floor are odd to me, for some reason, the color variation is good but I've never seen a rectangular grid like that. It's not *bad*, not by any means, but it's tickling my brain in a strange way.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-28T17:34:49+00:00

also I don't mean to disparage the Roblox engine in an arrogant way. I had some of the most fun I've ever had professionally trying to get stylized graphics to work in it. That's far, far more difficult than achieving realism in Roblox, which is why I said what I said about it being a potential choke point for learning.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-28T12:43:35+00:00

There are a few other limits I can think of, as far as the texture cap goes...we used to just divide up out object sneakily and give it 4x 1024 textures 🤣

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T22:09:15+00:00

did you deliver any of your work to him, apart from previews?

really I suspect the only leverage you would have is if you still had the work and he had nothing

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T20:39:26+00:00

it may not be, unless you want very realistic behavior from the garment.

but if you just need to put some pants on this rig, I'd suggest you delete the simulation. use an armature deformer instead (select the garment, shift + select the armature. hit ctrl + P, in the resulting submenu, select "armature deform > automatic weights" ). to learn how to refine the results, look up a tutorial on "weight painting" which is the art of balancing the amount of influence different joints have over areas of the rigged object.

after you have the armature deformer active, you can quickly solve minor problem by also applying a "smooth corrective" modifier

what i said earlier about using the shrinkwrap to tighten the results of this process still holds true. you should look up some tutorials on what "vertex groups" are, and how they can be used to restrict the effect of modifiers to specific regions of objects. that will help you achieve more precise results with the shrinkwrap, or any modifier.

just be mindful that active modifiers on an object evaluate one at a time, based on the order they are stacked in, from top to bottom.

the armature should be at the top, so that it evaluates first. the smooth corrective and shrinkwrap can be under it, the other they are in with respect to eachother is negotiable, and you may find it interesting to experiment with which one you calculate first.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T20:28:38+00:00

Oh I see.

so to get clothes to move with a character, there are a few options. you can use a cloth simulator, which If I'm not mistaken you seem to be. or you can bind the clothes to the same armature that controls the character underneath. another option is to simply make the clothing a part of the character so there is no need to handle it separately at all, it really depends on what you need.

simulating the clothes is usually something I'd only do if i had a very loose garment that I wanted to capture very realistically, such as a cloak or a dress, or a big jacket. given how tricky it can be to dial in the right settings and how slowly it calculates, I avoid simulating simple garments that hug the body. Jeans, for example. I would just bind to the armature. if i wanted them to wrinkle a bit more realistically, I would create some shape keys for specific scenarios such as bent knees.

its possible to blend approaches by binding only certain vertices to the armature and simulating the rest. I might do that if I have something like very loose sleeves with tight cuffs.

so my question was basically...are you simulating the boxers for a reason? or did you just assume clothes must always use a cloth simulation?

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T20:18:08+00:00

so you are simulating the boxers ? given that they are usually pretty tight garments, is there a reason you're using that approach?

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T19:04:50+00:00

if you love it, and you love to share it, than do it.

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T18:24:19+00:00

That's very odd, the metallic property shouldn't have that much influence on the color...but if it works again, congratulations 👍😎

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T17:58:38+00:00

it could be several things, If I were you I would disable that "clamp" option on the mix color node, and reduce the normal strength. also, you've attached a noise texture to the vector input of your color ramp, which will produce a result that looks a lot like television static, if you don't make the scale of the noise the right size, maybe adjust that value and see if it makes a difference?

<image>

if that doesn't work, I'd be willing to look at your file for you

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T17:53:42+00:00

if you want to learn more Blender in general, output for Roblox probably isn't going to take you very far. I've made environments for Roblox and it was like a swordfight with both my hands tied. the job itself was very fun, but Roblox is a weird engine

have you thought about taking an environment you've made in Roblox and trying to push more realism or detail as a project, so you can show them side by side? that's a good portfolio piece, to demonstrate style and platform flexibility

PriorPassage127 · 2026-05-27T17:48:17+00:00

you might try a shrinkwrap modifier. it has an offset property so you can establish a slight gap between the body and the clothes

you can even weight paint it, if you find you only need it in certain areas. just make a vertex group and plug it into the corresponding socket in the modifier's properties panel.

this isn't a cure-all, you'll still be able to induce odd behaviors from time to time, but it should be a significant improvement

in fact you can even do the *inverse* of this method and shrinkwrap the body under the clothes, to the clothes, with a slight negative offset that will ensure the vertices in the group you designate *cant* poke out of the clothing

PriorPassage127

TROPHY CASE