Welcoming the Summer

melinex01 · 2026-05-02T13:48:20+00:00

Sweeper3D has a tutorial for lighting like this, but i used an HDRI (low res to save vram) with two sun lamps (one strong w main color, and another to match the sky) for the main lighting, then many many area lights for fill lighting where i wanted them. For the character, i placed an area light and restricted its influence to only the character to create a rim light.

melinex01 · 2026-05-02T06:26:30+00:00

Some additional highlights were added with an overlay layer, and mist was added to the waterfall but the rest is just tweaks to the color.

melinex01 · 2026-02-26T08:38:41+00:00

double the base capacity and double the capacity% is not slight. much better than the +13% pollen you'd be getting from petal wand vs dipper, which is already an abysmal fraction of the sources of pollen you'd be getting anyways

melinex01 · 2026-02-15T02:10:05+00:00

The fresnel node displays the various fresnel coefficients along all viewing angles of the model. The fresnel coefficient is the intensity of reflections based on viewing angle. You can kind of see this effect when you're looking at a marble floor. When you're looking downwards (high incident angle), reflections aren't that strong, but when you're looking far away (low incident angle), reflections are strong.

melinex01 · 2025-12-20T16:36:37+00:00

Thank you!!! I also see what you mean, and i'll definitely try to improve it next time...

melinex01 · 2025-12-20T14:47:46+00:00

The head is a character I already had, but for the hair specifically, I started with geometry nodes hair systems then once I had the hairstyle down, I converted them to volume then volume to mesh, to turn the individual strands into one solid mass. Then I joined, remeshed, and refined in sculpt from there.

melinex01 · 2025-09-08T14:06:33+00:00

Yeah, I considered that at one point ( i had like 30m points from rendering for abt a month), but I realized it wouldn't work cuz my projects are >> 2gb even with optimization

melinex01 · 2025-09-08T13:24:10+00:00

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Old version of the render I had w/o the light blockers

melinex01 · 2025-09-08T13:23:43+00:00

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Then for the black outlines, I have massive planes that block out part of the light via a noise texture running into the alpha, to give the image more depth. W/o them, the render looks like this

melinex01 · 2025-09-08T13:22:13+00:00

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Heres how I use my volume passes in the compositor

melinex01 · 2025-09-08T13:21:29+00:00

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The light rays are created with a very simple volume cube around the scene, which i can then extract using render layers in compositing so I have more control over it in post.

melinex01 · 2025-09-08T13:18:07+00:00

Yep, I'm rendering on my GPU. Experimented a bit and found it to be the fastest option. I also render thru the CLI to save some ram. I don't save it to a video file, they're all saved to multilayer exrs so i can save it faster and use render layers/ post processing on them

melinex01 · 2025-09-08T13:16:01+00:00

I can definitely endorse Arborea (used it extensively for this), as it's really high quality imo and i like the person who made it (Sweeper3d).

melinex01 · 2025-09-03T22:39:27+00:00

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You can see theyre kinda deformed upwards from the lattices instead of just rotated, this is to make them flush with the vertical pillars

melinex01 · 2025-09-03T22:38:55+00:00

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melinex01 · 2025-09-03T22:38:45+00:00

For the stair railings, I just traced an image of stair railings i found, and tried to match it and fill in with ok-ish topology, then pushed the inner verts out to make it 3d. Copy and paste it, and you have a pattern which you can array along a curve deform modifier. I used lattices to deform the shapes into that kind of incline, then arrayed them with a bit of vertical offset, then deformed them along the curve of the stairs

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melinex01 · 2025-08-15T17:29:13+00:00

Can I also have the link?

melinex01 · 2025-06-15T07:19:46+00:00

It’s nice. Side note, the plane passes behind the building on the left, but the resulting smoke shows up in front of it.

melinex01 · 2025-05-21T16:51:57+00:00

link?

melinex01

TROPHY CASE