Musings about renders (Patreon)

So this is a page from my newest comic. In general I love this image, particularly how the light falls on the skin of the woman on the right. Even still there are little complaints I have about the image.

I spend a lot of time trying to get renders that look good and I almost always have to eventually go "Well, I guess this is good enough." I've been known to spend an entire day on a single image and still not be happy with the end result.

If I had to list my most common issues:

1) Lighting. Good lighting can make or break an image. I always get sad when I see people do renders that don't bother with lighting. I also know that really good renders involve tweaking the lighting in photoshop and I'm still debating whether to do that or not. I also look up tutorials on lighting a lot.

2) Poses. I'm not good at posing. I even bought one of those wooden artist mannequins you can pose to try to get a feel for how posing works. For the most part I end up buying tons of pose sets and trying to mix and match them.

3) Character skins. Some of this isn't on me. If the character skin wasn't made well there's only so much I can do. But I struggle a lot, even with good skin. A lot of this goes back to lighting. How to make the skin have accents. I have a lot of issues with this with some African American models. They'll lose a lot of highlights and the character looks kind of flat. I'm trying to work on that.

4) Wet skin. Oh boy. This one is hard. A lot of attempts to make a character look wet also make the skin darken for some reason. Sometimes a lot. It's very annoying.