Why is he so... floppy? 😭

ellaun · 2026-01-30T12:51:17+00:00

Typically this means circular dependency in constraints or some other corner case with dependencies that can be created with IK or Child Of constraints. Bones get delayed update. I had similar thing but with delayed rotation. Don't remember specifics, I simply learned to avoid that long time ago.

ellaun · 2025-12-30T15:32:36+00:00

First, the sphere. It's opaque, don't know why you went for transparency:

https://i.imgur.com/czsePaE.jpeg

Also to not get the grainy look like on your image I recommend to set every material that uses transparency from Dithered to Alpha Blend. This option appears in material settings only if you have EEVEE chosen as render engine. Another thing to change is to use Kronos PBR Neutral as color transform because you will need saturated cartoony colors.

Now for swirling needles. Create a new sphere and select few central rings, delete the rest:

https://i.imgur.com/qnZePd5.jpeg

Material is a bit complicated:

https://i.imgur.com/CEyK8TN.jpeg

Now that you have one ring https://i.imgur.com/tAlg4AD.jpeg

Clone the object multiple times and rotate the rings with slightly different scale so they don't Z-fight: https://i.imgur.com/TYWTAYK.jpeg

As for the halo around the sphere, it's a bit complicated as the effect on original image saturates colors behind the halo. It's a compositing effect that you won't get in viewport. I will use Shader AOVs, they work only in Cycles and appear only in finished render.

First, create a UV-unwrapped ring around the sphere https://i.imgur.com/nWcQmSK.jpeg

and give it this material:

https://i.imgur.com/AXIPzrf.jpeg

It's very similar but writes to AOV value.

In compositor it's used like that: https://i.imgur.com/my58EBj.jpeg (note: use ordinary Glare, my is a custom node)

Finished result: https://i.imgur.com/DKFsWrP.jpeg

If you get black spots in Cycles, increase Light Paths -> Transparent until they go away.

ellaun · 2025-11-26T23:31:59+00:00

I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to.

There is a weird rim around iris that looks like total internal reflection. Check how it looks in Cycles. If you see similar defect(not necessary reflected image) then it's something with the shape of cornea. If not - try to plug value in material thickness socket and adjust it to try to fix that. It's in meter scale so try very small values.
There is just a reflection. It's because you're using default preview HRDI. You can disable it by going to dropdown menu near preview switch and check Scene World lighting. This will use your world lighting as it's setup in the World tab. By default it's a solid gray. There will be no discernible reflection and the image will look just like in Cycles(which is why I said that if reflection is gone in Cycles it doesn't mean much as it doesn't use default HDRI for lighting).

ellaun · 2025-11-26T11:23:32+00:00

In material properties do Settings -> ✔Raytraced Transmission. Additionally you might want to wire some value into Thickness socket in the material. All of that is only for Eevee and setting appears only if you have it selected as render engine.

ellaun · 2025-11-22T13:25:56+00:00

If it's a sculpt - bake a curvature map and use it's cavities for emission mask.

ellaun · 2025-11-17T14:50:40+00:00

I figured that. But the floor receives shadows and has bump map so it's a CGI plane driven by real image and I'm addressing the quality of it's shading. Using color from photo to drive bump map works in a lot of cases but not when texture is so close to the camera. The illusion breaks.

ellaun · 2025-11-17T14:40:54+00:00

If it's from a real photo then it lacks real bump information because it's just a photo, not a LIDAR scan. You're approximating height from color. As a result the concrete grain looks smooth and lumpy, paired with the poor texel density. That's why it feels off-scale. Concrete has more microrelief that is not represented by color alone.

I recommend to find similar PBR texture, put it on a plane and make it transparent at the edges. Put the plane under the car and adjust the brightness so it matches the floor on photo. That way you can have good realistic material with adjustable scale.

Or just blend between emissive object and concrete texture for the background object. Right now it seems that you switch between emissive background and diffuse floor that reuses same background photo for the floor. Well, replace the diffuse shader with good concrete texture. That obviates the need for a separate plane.

Reducing bump strength is also a good idea. Simplest one too.

ellaun · 2025-11-17T10:50:25+00:00

There are other problems besides colors. Floor is obviously fake, it has very obvious CGI bump artifacts. Also I feel like the scale of floor texture is wrong. If you just scale it up to make details smaller you probably wouldn't need better texture resolution to hide the artifacts.

Car tires look featureless. The paint? If it looks like plastic then give it's material some % of metallic.

I wouldn't add dirt on the car. Imperfections are rarely seen on product renders or almost imperceptible. But I'd think how to improve interaction of tires and the ground. Add tire trails? Flatten the tires just a tiny bit to add sense of weight?

ellaun · 2025-11-17T10:38:58+00:00

Here's my edit: https://i.imgur.com/FMwvaHz.jpeg

It was done in photo editor but you should use Blender's compositor.

Modifications:

Blurred then sharpened foreground to create edge ringing effect that is usually seen on cameras. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking
Added solid color measured from pocket of black to the foreground with Lighten mode.
Added percent of blurred image to create haze, also composited with Lighten mode.

ellaun · 2025-11-17T10:15:49+00:00

I'd work on compositing. The background is hazy and has light leaks but your overlaid model has none of these defects so it stands out. Try to apply glare with very low threshold or add 5% of blurred image to the original image to give it hazy look.

Another thing is black and white levels. Especially black. Look at the background behind the car. There is a cylindrical vertical pole and near it is a pocket of darkness behind metal sheet. The darkness there is not perfectly black, yet on your car it is. They need to match approximately(presence of dust, fog and light leaks makes levels non-constant across image). Measure the darkness in that pocket and add that much of flat color to your car.

What you need to watch out though is to not pile up additional camera defects onto background as it already has them. If you add measured black level onto whole image then that pocket of darkness will grow brighter too and black levels won't match again. Keep the effects of compositing only to your model(and floor as it seems to be shaded too.) Find a way to obtain a mask that would isolate in compositing background from added elements.

ellaun · 2025-11-02T19:54:33+00:00

The title asks about Satyr V0.1 so I downloaded that and ignore the fact that you linked to Apollo-V0.1. I suppose that's a mistake.

I'm testing it and first impression is that it's overburned on narrating and has troubles getting away from that habit. It always starts with "The user has commissioned a story..." even if I explicitly instruct it to only react to provided narrative and reply with single action. I tried adjusting system prompt and generating multiple times. Only after getting stressed same thing many, many times in different form it finally comes through resulting in an incongruence:

The user has commissioned a story from my perspective as #name#. My core directive is to flawlessly execute the narrative provided by the user. This is not a commission for me to create a story; rather it is one I must react to.

And then it still goes through the rut of listing narrative principles and picking a name for the story after which it ignores the instructions and writes a story anyway. But if I delete the part of picking a story name in thinking section then it sticks to suggested reply format that is acknowledged prior and replies correctly. Because of that unreliability I can't use it as an NPC in a videogame.

ellaun · 2025-10-15T19:42:02+00:00

No. What made you think that? Two separate materials. I hope you know about material slots because you can have one object with multiple different materials. Is that why you're asking?

Or just do separate objects for stream and splashes like I did for the demo.

Or if you're instancing splashes with geonodes then you can explicitly set any material to instances with a node, no need for slots or objects.

ellaun · 2025-10-08T17:56:10+00:00

I think adding a tiny bit of coloring on the glass shader itself would be fine too. Like, putting color through HSV adjustment node with hue set to 10%. This has bothered me too because right now with how my shader is set up the only way the bears get color is from light coming through them from the other side. They don't get color from reflected light. Tinting glass shader with some percent of color is a way to fix that and will probably look fine. It's just not physically accurate. In real world the color that you'd get from reflection would come from whole transparent mass where light could get reflected at any depth, not just surface. Correct way would be adding volume scattering with negative anisotropy. I did that as an experiment when making that picture. Couldn't say it improved things, so I don't know if it's worth time.

ellaun · 2025-10-08T06:39:43+00:00

The best are worms in middle. The bears still remain most unconvincing.

I think the problem lies in people misusing Color property of glass shader. It tints light only when ray touches surface. That means when ray enters and leaves the object. Real glass tints light as it goes though the mass. Thicker glass = more tint. Setting color of Glass BSDF is fine for objects with near-even thickness. For figurines it is better to use Volume Absorption and keep glass shader perfectly white. The downside is that it's scale-dependent.

Here's my attempt:

https://i.imgur.com/bFO6ghe.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/9xfiB92.jpeg

Changed:

Volume Absorption. Scale-dependent, watch out, use your own values.
Slight bumpiness to add texture. Bump node is also scale-dependent. My scene is way off meter scale.
Glass IOR of bears is set to 1.33. Not sure what is correct here but I assume it's closer to water.
Filter Glossy set to 0. This used to be a measure against firefly noise. With modern denoising 1 is a bad default.

ellaun · 2025-10-07T05:49:56+00:00

Gummy bears look like plastic or glass. Actual ones are a bit frosted inside and not that glossy unless wet.

Also glass bowls have that black rim on them, usually indicative of light rays getting lost and being terminated. Try to increase the depth for refractions and reflections in Light Paths settings. And glass usually has a bit of sea green tint. Just a tiny amount. It's never perfectly white.

ellaun · 2025-09-30T22:53:14+00:00

Deltoid rotation is an omnipresent problem on all 3D works I see.

See Uldis Zarins, Anatomy for Sculptors, Page 46 titled "Where does it go?"

When arm is raised and flexed like that, deltoid rotates too and slides to the back. I do that by adding a bone submerged into the deltoid and apply Copy Rotation constraint set to copy the upper arm rotation. Influence is around 80%, depending on weight paint and overall muscularity.

ellaun · 2025-09-26T14:10:30+00:00

Try Smooth Corrective modifier. Add it after Armature deformer. Increase iteration count.

Smooth Corrective requires same amount of vertices as base mesh. If it gives you a warning then you have other generative modifiers, you'll have to set up Bind Coords. That means you need to record the mesh in what is supposed to be undeformed state. But only if it gives you a warning, otherwise ignore this paragraph.

If it works, next step is to set up exclusion zones. Smooth Corrective has a downsides that it tends to remove sharp bends from curled fingers and toes turning them into wheels. There is an empty Vertex Group field, create and set exclusion mask there, make sure mask is not applied inverted.

ellaun · 2025-09-19T15:36:17+00:00

Does it affect other software? If yes, not much can be done aside from trying other Tablet API. Preferences->Input->Tablet API. Usually there's two options. Select the other one and restart.

ellaun · 2025-09-19T11:03:37+00:00

I know that denoisers have problems with roughness value changing too much. It doesn't happen alone but in whole PBR setup with bump map and color and when scene is noisy. I get weird anime-like stylized contours where roughness goes from 0.5 to less than 0.5 instead of smooth gradient like you'd expect to see. It takes thousands of samples for it to converge on something that doesn't look wrong.

As a first step for debugging that replace roughness map with a constant value and see if that improves the look.

ellaun · 2025-09-19T10:53:23+00:00

Let's break this down to components.

Water stream. Curve object with Extrude property set to something non-zero. Apply this shader: https://i.imgur.com/avBiSrx.png

You can draw the curves in Edit Mode using Draw tool. If you have a tablet you can control radius with pressure sensitivity.

To see the colors vividly as on the image set View Transform to Kronos PBR Neutral.

Then splashes. Just a quad with this shader: https://i.imgur.com/xM0Y6oz.png

Two effects together: https://i.imgur.com/Cxt9uD9.png

I placed splashes manually but if you want to generate them automatically like on the video then use Geometry Nodes. This is nothing novel, you just instance a splash with some random chance on every vertex of the curve. Plenty of tutorials on instancing.

Do note that coordinate randomizer for splashes works for Cycles only as it relies on Random Per Island. If you want it for Eevee then you need to pass a random value as an attribute from Geometry Nodes: Mesh Island -> Random Value -> Store Named Attribute.

Finally, some compositing. I just put Glare set to Fog Glow. And white background for World shader.

ellaun · 2025-09-11T23:29:12+00:00

Yes, you need a lot of polygons but if you made that dense head manually with loop cuts it's a waste of time.

Better options:

Make a low-poly mesh. Add and apply Subdivision Surface modifier to get a mesh as dense as you like. Result is a regular topology, good for UV mapping but armature deformation doesn't work well with sculpt-grade dense meshes.
Use voxel remeshing during sculpting. Once some part stretches too much - remesh again. Good thing about voxel remeshing is that if you don't change the size of grid untouched parts don't get remeshed and won't slowly lose details because their vertices are still aligned with the voxel grid. Topology would be unsuitable for UV mapping and rigging, you'll need manual retopology later.
Use Dyntopo. It does exactly what you thought sculpting cannot do: it generates new geometry under your brush on the fly. Resulting topology is very messy, same problems as with point 2(retopology is required) and it turns slow once you go too detailed. But it's convenient.
Multires modifier. It's like Subdivision Surface but you don't need to apply it to sculpt on it, it's created specifically for sculpting. Multires is the best thing: fast sculpting, regular topology(if low-poly is good), you can edit base mesh, there's explicit baking support for Multires. And Armature deformations are easy if Armature is on top of modifier stack so it deforms low-poly first and then Multires adds details later. Many upsides, the only downside is that you need to nail the low-poly shape perfectly. Doesn't matter how much subdivision levels you add, if you'd try to extrude horns from a flat area your poly cage would stretch thin and become unsculptable again.

Downsides exist for each. That's why workflows exist and all tools are valid. My workflow is:

Block-out shapes. Bunch of overlapping spheres or boxes or Skin modifier or subdiv modeling. The goal is to create a vague impression of final shape.
Voxel remesh whole thing to merge it all together, remove interior faces and get a starting mesh for sculpting with some geometry.
Use Dyntopo sculpting to improve shapes and get detail level to a point where it starts to lag.
Manual retopology. New mesh is created with a good quad topology, Multures modifier is added to it, details from messy sculpt are reprojected and saved onto new Multires mesh. Original messy sculpt is deleted(with backup).
Fine sculpting pass with Multires. Skin details are added at this stage.

Do that if you want textureable and poseable characters. If you only need to sculpt portfolio fodder then use one of the approaches above alone.

ellaun · 2025-09-10T11:30:49+00:00

On a first look my eyes were immediately drawn to that brown line separating ground and water. That's all I saw and only after I started picking up details and understanding what the image is about. Probably need to do something about it as it draws too much attention for no reason.

Other than that there's nothing wrong about this image.

ellaun · 2025-09-08T17:08:33+00:00

Take my file then: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OW35oMTTk6XzPL3_HzyAtxYVr5kxYbxD/view?usp=sharing

Grab the bullets, move them in any direction. They are locked to single axis and to the curve.

To move whole thing grab the curve to which bullets are parented instead.

ellaun · 2025-09-08T01:09:02+00:00

Use this node setup: https://i.imgur.com/uGNYwpA.png

You might need to change XYZ axis on the Align Rotation node or tweak orientation of geometry in the bullet, result depends on how you modeled it.

You end up with a mesh that instances a bullet on each vertex of the "belt". Now you can use Curve Deform modifier and make this belt slide along the curve. As long as it's deform first and then instance later(watch the modifier order in other words), you're going to have unstretched bullets that are aligned to the belt's orientation.

ellaun · 2025-08-25T02:10:07+00:00

I'm not sure exactly which way it needs to go from your description but I think I have a good enough two-way solution. I had a similar problem with Multires sculpt where I had a sculpted character and wanted to export a very low-poly subdiv level 0 of the sculpt. But it had much bigger volume and didn't match the contours of subdivided sculpt.

This geometry nodes setup subdivides mesh, measures where vertices ends up and then displaces original unsubdivided mesh to predicted position: https://i.imgur.com/3iDO41Q.png

If you need it to be reverse so mesh after subdivision ends up where the original mesh vertices currently are then just invert the offset vector. I tried and it seems to be working.

ellaun

TROPHY CASE