For the past few months, I’d been thinking about switching my renderer from Octane to Arnold. So when I started designing a new character for my game, I decided to render him in Arnold and learn its workflow. Here’s my work in progress.
First colour test in Substance Painter.
First Arnold render test.
Character
The shopkeeper is a character who will mainly appear in the game’s UI. He’s more of a decoration. I want to render him in a few different poses, making weird and funky faces. One idea is to place him at the top of the shop UI, holding a coin with a greedy expression.
An early version of the head material. You can still see that the displacement is too strong, along with a few other problems.
My game has a high-fantasy setting, and the character needs to fit into that world. Because of his role, I also wanted players to see him as a sneaky, greedy and annoying little bastard. So a goblin was an obvious choice for me.
Arnold vs Octane
I had a few reasons for wanting to switch to Arnold. It’s production-ready, well-tested software, and it supports many plugins I’m interested in. Material creation also feels more intuitive to me, especially when working with things like skin, milk or jelly.
A random render.
Octane is still my guilty pleasure because of its GPU support. It’s sooo much faster when I want a quick, rough render. Another advantage is the camera’s Color Response option, which lets me apply colour grading directly to the render in 3ds Max. Last but not least, the standard camera effects feel a bit more intuitive. Maybe that’s because it’s so fast to render and iterate.
In the end, both are really good and have their own advantages.
Hope you enjoy!