Thunderstone, huge improvement. Well done. It's a very good image now. I only have two distractions left. I'd make the shadows more blurry. The other is perhaps too much to deal with, but I hate the shape of her ear. If I cover that, I'm much happier.

In every discussion of CG art, we observe that pursuit of realism is not going to make a great render. Got it - and driving a car with three good tires and one flat tire isn't going to get you where you're going, either. This seems kind of obvious to me. Of course you pull over and repair the flat tire, not one of the inflated ones.

So, the four wheels of our CG artist car (ok more than four) are shape (geometry), color, and texture (materials), lighting, pose, expression, composition, and of course the story. When I see that materials or lighting are distracting, i.e. they are such a departure from reality that we can't even appreciate the expression or story, that needs fixing. By "fix" I mean removing distractions - departures from reality that are so obvious and disturbing the harmony of the piece that you might as well not tell a story at all. Once all the tires are inflated, then we can worry about where we're going.  

 

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)