I’ve been playing around with compositing. This is what I achieved so far:
Original Image:
Composited Image:
My Node Setup:
for photorealistic work you need more details in the models, better texture maps (think of diffuse, specular, bump, reflection maps), better lighting (are there any shadows in your rendering) and even a better image composition (camera angle and view)
sorry, if its a hard answer but compositing can imporve renderings, but it cant do all the work alone
You need better everything…Trees, materials, characters, modeling. Photo-real renders take alot of work. You need the tiny details in your models.
I would honestly suggest picking an object, and making that look photo-real. Get some practice and come back to trying a full scene.
So I created a sun lamp to cast shadows, applied bump map to each textures and enabled full global illumination.
I enabled Full Global Illumination:
putting higher numbers in the renderer wont make it better. your models and texures need way more detail, your lighting is not good. a sun lamp and so much fog will still result in a very diffuse render.
take a look at some theory about lighting in photography and about image composition (how to place objects in the frame)
then start with a real small object, maybe from you desk. if you can make this look real, then start with a slightly bigger scene and then you can go and try to create a full cg enviroment.
take a look at some tutorials. i have mixed feelings about the blenderguru ones, but overall they are great. andrew price (the owner of blender guru) has recently made some very good ones about texturing
A perfect lighting solution with a gazillion bounces and samples is not going to make unrealistic models and textures look photorealistic. All it will do is tie up your computer in calculations that result in something that could be made just as well in 1/100th the time.
Your soldier boy is not standing on asphalt pavement. He is not wearing fatigues, body armor, a flight suit, or any other recognizable military gear. Something that is not a Ka-bar nor any other actual combat knife is suspended in front of him. A fog thick enough to limit visibility to around 60 feet would have more effect in the foreground, but somehow this fog only affects the houses in the background…
Until you get basic fixes made to your models and textures, you are spinning your wheels playing with the lighting panel numbers.
People responding here seem to believe since your thread title ends in a question mark that you are, in fact, asking a question, namely: “How can I make this image more photorealistic?” Perhaps we are incorrect in this assumption. Do you want advice, or are you simply showing us your experiments?
Thanks for the good advices. I remember watching a tutorial about realistic texturing by Price. I will take a look at it once more.
I’m also looking for HDR Bloom Effect compositor node setups.
This is what I’m trying to achieve actually:
The very-best advice that I could offer you, here, is a piece of advice that I first heard when “the world” still consisted of “photographic film”:
“Look at The Light.”
In other words: don’t look at ‘The Subject.’ Don’t look at ‘your intent.’ Don’t look at ‘whatever you were trying to do.’
Instead, look at “pixel-matrix <<I wanna make my picture look like that>>,” and then, soberly(!) and objectively(!!), hold it up against <<my latest render>>.
“Of course,” your eye is telling you that your current effort [strike]sucks large[/strike] falls short of your intended objective. That is not(!) the point. Instead, focus on this question: “exactly how shall I, now, tell a digital computer to transform <<my latest render>> to look like <<I wanna …>>?”
For instance: your “ideal” picture (#7) seems to be uniformly “very misty throughout,” whereas your “my latest” (#4) effort superimposes an obvously-not-misty character upon a “rather nicely misty” background, and your #1 post seems to be very much the same. “Okay, then … a fairly-basic compositing problem.” Maybe.
In any case: “Look at The Light.” In other words, “see critically.” And then, from this point-of-view, develop an action-plan.
… and, discard the term, “photorealistic!” :eek: Truth be told, no real-world photograph is “realistic.” The only practical requirement is that you persuade the eye.
If I were you I would begin with the most simple scene and concentrate on that only, and over time improve. There are so many variable in your scene!