Thanks for the info! It will come in handy whenever I start rendering again. 3-point lighting is what I orginially used when I first started, but it didn't give me the results I desired. This was in MAX though, so that's likely my problem!
Have you guys fiddled around with Marmoset for renders at all? Afaik it's a dedicated rendering program. I'm sure you could get some fancy results with it, though to be honest, your results so far hardly need improvement to begin with!
And yeah, I'm referring to how you guys come up with colour schemes. I have no problem with actually making recolours, at least the technical aspect of it. I just can't make a good colour scheme to save my life. I've used a variety of programs to assist me, I just can't get results I'm happy with a lot of the time. Part of the reason is that I rarely have time nowadays to fine-tune anything I make, so I haven't experimented enough with designing palettes.
I tried Marmoset once, but it never really clicked. I thought Marmoset was more for people to quickly show what their models would look like in ingame environments instead of real renders though, which is why I never really got it either.
As for recolours, I can't really offer concrete advice, but you can grab inspiration from literally anything. It mostly comes down to a knowledge of what works together, and a ton of experimentation. For example, Sakurai mentioned that Smash's red Luigi was based off a strawberry, and green Samus was based off the Zaku from Gundam.
It's also important to remember that characters have rules for what can actually be recoloured. For example, if you recolour Mario's hair to be yellow to make a Rayman recolour, it's no longer Mario because Mario's hair doesn't change colour in his official palettes. Link is a bit different in that his hair can be recoloured, but his hair is only changed when it's to reference the same thing as the costume (white hair for Dark Link, Toon Link's brown NES hair, etc.). Similarly, Ganondorf's skin shouldn't be changed randomly to make a Dracula recolour, but it's a bit more okay if it's referencing his own Beast Ganon form (Smash 4's blue skin one). Study what is and what isn't consistent between the official recolours to get a good sense of the rules that you'd have to follow. Breaking these rules is a mistake I see a lot of people make, especially with things like character's eyes.
I also see a lot of people making recolours
too accurate to source material, that it no longer follows the original character's rules, so try not to do that either.
Here are some various recolour examples from the next update:
Wrecking Crew Ice Climbers. I'm not sure what part of them is Wrecking Crew, but that's what I had in mind when these were created. I figured these two colours would work well together (you do see brown and green a lot in nature) and the purple gloves are there to help break up the palettes.
Not sure if I posted these two on here, but here are Super Mario World Mario and SMB3 Fire Mario. Of course, SMW Mario would be a bit too similar to default if I copied it 1:1, so I changed the main colour to be more pink and gave him teal overalls to accent that. SMB3 Fire was mostly lifted from the sprite, but with a few things changed to be consistent with the Fire Mario costume (brown shoes and yellow buttons, like default Mario).
This Dedede was something Shun made, but there's an example of him challenging himself to make a teal Dedede. It's a result of having a good sense of what works with what. The other new Dedede colour we'll be adding is based off
this kisekae plate for the new 3DS.
And most importantly, try to keep colours unique, and plan out exactly what kind of costume this will be. Will it be a blue costume? A teal costume? Try to design around that.
Hopefully this all makes sense, I'm not too great at explaining why things are done, but I try!
EDIT:
This site as well. It'll help come up with various colour schemes.
