TL; DR Sunday #5
Welcome stranger to the TL; DR Sunday #5, hope you had an amazing week! Go grab something to drink or eat and let us dive into today’s episode.
I will keep it short today, or I’ll try at least. I didn’t have much time to do complex explorations this week, and I’d like to keep the content fun and engaging. Not cheap. So next week, we’ll follow up on today’s topic.
Explore and learn!
This week I wanted to do something different, something way out of my comfort zone. A Product design shot.
So as with every other project, I went on Pinterest, to find inspiration. After a while, I collected just a few shots I liked.
I’m loving this vibe, especially the top left one.
I got the initial idea for the background, so now what should be the star of this show?
A couple of weeks ago, I did a tutorial from Atti, on his Patreon. He showed a lipstick mograph scene, so I leaned into it.
It was a fun and quick exercise on simple modeling.
I mean, as you can see, it’s just a cylinder. Everything is a cylinder actually. With the basic cylinder, I did what everyone does. Extrude, scale, and move.
Abstract for the win
After that, I created the flowers, with a nifty add-on called “Differential growth”, which you can find here. Watched one or two videos on how to use it, and experimented a little with it.
I have to say, this is heavy for my old Mac. Very heavy, it crashed multiple times, when I tried to shade it.
Lights, Camera, Action!
I spent most of the time on lights and shading. Went through a couple of shots on Artstation, but the most influence on me had Atti’s Patreon. Check him out.
Lighting and camera work is a never-ending process. You hate it and love it at the same time. No matter how much you think you know about it, there’s always more. It can always be improved. There are always more tricks. I experimented with it for quite some time, ehm hours. Once I was feeling like I should stop, that it was good enough for me, I sent it to the feedback round.
Feedback time!
I was kinda happy with it. Until I asked for feedback.
Shinyuu, check her blog here, from a discord group I’m at, pointed out that the render lacks “Contrast”. It’s bland.
What I learned from painting is that you want your values to stand out. What does that mean? It’s basically an eye-squint test: squint and see if the features are still distinct. An alternative is to run your render through a greyscale filter and blur it out.
Once we do that, we will get something like this.
It’s uniform. You can’t even tell if there’s lipstick or not. That meant one thing, into the lighting world we go again.
It’s not quite as blurred out, but you can immediately see the difference. There’s more contrast. Your eyes are guided from the right to the center and to the left side of the illustration, where it fades out.
Always remember this, composition and eye guidance are key! If the composition sucks, the shot will too. If your light guides suck, people who see your art will get lost in the piece, because there’s nobody to guide them!
As you can see, the final scene is very cold, with different colors, and different lights. I was initially aiming to have a warm scene, but after testing a few renders, I liked the blue misty one more.
More to come
That’s all I had time for this week. I’m quite happy with the result. I learned a ton of new things trying to do this render.
I also wanted to do an animation shot for this, but after I found out, how heavy this scene is, I kinda gave up. I’ll try to come up with something next week.
Talking about next week. Next weekend we’ll create a simple mobile app concept for this lipstick brand, and maybe do a little bit of branding too.
Until then I wish you all a beautiful end of the weekend and see you at the next one!
