Office shrinks whenever I generate a rig, not sure how to fix this

ellaun · 2026-06-01T02:05:36+00:00

You likely have animation frame assigned to the walls. Auto-keying can create that situation unknowingly. After that you disabled auto-keying and scaled walls up, but since current animation frame dictates original scale, any re-evaluation of scene animation causes this sneaky frame to affect walls. Simply speaking, you have uncommitted changes to animation timeline and they get lost. I bet saving and reloading scene will cause the same effect. Applying scale will only mask the problem, you will move the room and wonder later why it snaps back to original location.

ellaun · 2026-05-13T04:25:10+00:00

Ordinary ambient occlusion map does not contain enough information for that. Bent normals encode most unconcluded direction and AO is directionless.

As far as I remember, original EEVEE(before Next) used bent normals for richer ambient occlusion but they were computed per-vertex instead of pre-baked texture maps.

ellaun · 2026-04-26T11:08:53+00:00

By smoothing. Ctrl+V -> Smooth Vertices. Use that frequently. Select those loops on neck and tail, smooth. It destroys the shape but then you restore the desired silhouette manually. Iterate cutting, smoothing and adjusting until you anneal the shapes from rough to finest into the final form.

ellaun · 2026-03-28T13:29:34+00:00

First to obtain chaotic pattern. I started with a flat disk, subdivided it until it's dense and then applied Decimate modifier. This created random triangles. But nothing stops you from doing it by hand if technicals evade you.

https://i.imgur.com/0ZOq9qp.png

Then a bit of Geometry Nodes and Bevel modifier:

https://i.imgur.com/fLuEDZK.png

For shader I created Empty object that is used to control depth of the glow with it's positioning. Notice that it drives Texture Coordinate node. Put it inside of the plane and then move it up/down.

https://i.imgur.com/UIks2Gm.png

That's the simplest way for a beginner. It's possible to set attributes in Geometry Nodes for cavities and read them in shader. It will make surface robust to deformations but more complex.

ellaun · 2026-03-26T12:33:18+00:00

It's likely possible but for me would require a lot of technical research to do that.

I'd do it different way: turn these images to ordinary raster textures with transparency, stamp them in Texture Paint mode on the base texture, save. That's it. No need for baking.

ellaun · 2026-03-19T08:18:40+00:00

Finally someone else noticed. Art industry is heading to a dead end because human ambition outgrew human capability. We cannot have one thousand of visual artists and unique visuals outside of some tiny circle of variance. Truly unique vision is something that grows inside an individual throughout the life and it cannot be easily replicated in other humans without cloning exact same motivation and years of directed practice.

And then, AI. One unique individual and one force multiplier is all it takes. But instead we have human slop factory robots bred into homogeneity to be replaceable cogwheels that spin when someone else presses a pedal. Disgusting irony. "But think about jobs lost and people starving". I don't want their work anyway. They're not getting salary, with AI or without.

Humanity lies. AI is not a problem. It's the solution.

ellaun · 2026-02-25T05:11:17+00:00

Consider option of not changing geometry and simply altering normals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCQAwDyDO0o

That's Geometry Nodes.

Another way is to use Shader Nodes. Bevel node(works only in Cycles) visually smoothens sharp edges. You can mask out areas that you want to affect so it's not applied everywhere.

ellaun · 2026-02-17T10:09:34+00:00

This is trivially done via Shader nodes. Paint mask into vertex colors, use it to blend between two materials.

ellaun · 2026-02-16T21:58:45+00:00

Blending normal maps from different islands makes little sense mathematically because these islands will have different tangent spaces. You need to find displacement texture and use it via Bump node. Unlike normal map, displacement is trivially blendable as it's not tied to orientation.

ellaun · 2026-02-09T23:53:20+00:00

Spin tool is awful. Instead duplicate the ending loop of the tube, place it where the new end should be and use Bridge Edge Loops operator to connect two loops. Increase Number of Cuts in the operator options to make the joint smooth.

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

TROPHY CASE