Nodern03
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Blender evolution
🕑 Added 2022-04-30 06:11:32 +0000 UTCI created and posted my very first Blender render wayyyyy back in 2017.
At that point, I had just restarted my 3D modelling projects after a lengthy 7 year hiatus.
At this point in time, my knowledge of Blender is still very basic; using very basic node setups that I learnt way back when Blender didn't even have a Cycles renderer yet.. Oh, the horrors of setting up nodes just so that the object just wouldn't look so.... dull. At that point, the XPS porting program had just started gaining popularity. A majority of DA artists had a typical workflow:
- Start with the posing in XNALara. Very tedious and unintuitive, I might add.
- Port the XNALara scene over to Blender.
- Do some basic cleaning of mesh in Blender, making sure that the textures work.
- Press F12 on the keyboard.
- Hope that Blender doesn't crash.
And lo and behold, that's how the first render I made for Deviantart started.
As you can see, there were many issues and workarounds I had to do to at least make this presentable. But still, it was something that I was never happy with. The textures looks dull, the posing looks dull and a little conflicting, and there's very little interaction with the meshes. Many camera angles were unsuable, either because of mesh clipping issues(I hate them to my core), or weird joints become more apparent. Oh, and have I already complained about the nodes? Oh wtf, they were seriously messy, I had almost no idea how to make any changes because I didn't even understood what the nodes do.
And so, this begun the era of "Many youtube tutorials"
Then finally, almost a year later, I went back to the same image, and remade a lot of stuff.
Tadah! The textures looks better, the camera composition is a little more lively, and the environment doesn't look as dull too!
At this point in time, Blender was rapidly developing too. The principled shader became a huge game changer. I was pretty much on it the moment it came out. Within the week, I had practically switched over to a new node setup that made use of the principled shader. Gone were the days of tedious node setups for even the basic of texturing. All done within that one simple node. You want it to look metallic? Just drag that metallic slider to the desired value. What about wetness? Same thing. Dragging sliders became fun!
There are other developments too. Blender became even more efficient in rendering too. Nvidia GPUs could render scenes significantly faster. Well, I did upgrade my GPU to a better one, so my render times became a lot better too. And with a beefier PC rig, I started experimenting with graphical settings too. Subsurface scattering for skin. I essentially created my own node setups for skin. I still am constantly iterating on it till this day. Better looking materials for other objects too. While others might neglect the environment, I started paying more attention to them. I wanted my environments to look alive too. So I started working on individual textures within a scene. It took up to 6 hours to completely rework the textures on the DOAX pool.
I wanted my environments to look as photorealistic as possible. After all, what's the point of having realistic looking characters when the environments can't catch up?
Here's another example of fun in recreating the environments:
Now imagine your favourite character in one of these environments that you have created!
Fast forward to today, I have remade that same Kasumi scene with a new environment. I have implemented new Blender techniques.
It looks like this today. Who knows how it will turn out in the future?
Creating content is a never-ending process of learning. Even with the basic stuff, there's always better techniques out there. One of the reasons why I keep coming back to my old renders, is to test out how much improvements I can make to them.
Some closing thoughts: XNALara posing is starting to show it's age. Pretty soon, I forsee artists abandoning it altogether. It's pretty cumbersome when compared to the latests 3D rigs. I myself will eventually stop using them. And when that day comes... Happy learning!
