Classroom preview - looking for advices to improve lighting and materials

Hello everyone, long time lurker here. This is my first setup I think worthy of your time. I made this project for our school furniture company for costumer preview. For this, the setup is pretty much as it is, the perspective must show as much as possible, I know more props could be added and fine tuned, and I should fine time for those too. The picture’s purpose is already filled (costumer ordered the whole setup for production). However I feel like there is a lot of room to upgrade my lighting and material game.



I’ve used a sky HDRI with 30 envoirment lighting and placed lightportals on the windows. The sun is tuned up to 130, ceiling lights are at 50 this caused the scene to get flatter but had intense ammount of noise and this seemed to be a bandaid fix for it. Filmic colors with medium high contrast.
For the materials I’m using blendergurus PBR nodes, however I’m struggling to set up proper procedural imperfections for the powdercoated metals, and the plastic seatback. Render settings can be seen below aswell.


I would be honored to receive some criticism on how could I improve my lightings and materials because these what I’m most interested in and what I think I could improve my scenes generally a lot(because of the nature of the future setups likely be the same)!

edit: no post editing is done on this piece yet, I know with photoshop it could be improved tho.

Is there anything I can provide to encourage at least a partial review on the issues I’ve mentioned?
On the other hand I’ve got some answers on reddit, asof using bump maps instead of displacement as it lacks details and quality, also not to use reflection on these node types.

As for render settings to increase bounces and either completely disable clamping or higher the numbers, also to remove glossy since I did not use cautics.

Not sure I’ve helped much, but this might be some use for someone with similar issues :slight_smile:

For this render, I would look into using filmic color management. there is a blender guru tutorial dealing with it. If you’re already using it, then I would set the settings to higher contrast, boost the hdri sky energy way up to something rediculously high, and then adjust your exposure and gamma accordingly to levels you would like. this looks realistic and visually accurate, but the lighting could be stylized more to show off the geometry of the room. Maybe turn off the cieling lights and add a bloom effect (glare) to the intense light coming in the window (of course, make sure you have the glass treat shadows as a transparent shader and not a glass shader or else you’re gonna have some really noisy caustics that would take multiple renders and tons of samples to fix) I hope this helps!