Lounge filmic

OK, I’m not going to final with this, because I know if I do I’ll immediately learn something that could improve it.

This is my lounge render using the blender filmic colour management model. Since previous renders I’ve improved the leather texture (still all 100% procedural, which I like - it makes tweaking so much easier than having to fire up GIMP and start tweaking maps).

Lighting tweaked, and colour correction and a slight soften filter - required because even after 11 hours render it was still too noisy for my liking. The colour correction is simply to warm it up a little.

Looking for critiques as to what else I can do to improve.

For info, earlier renders used a bucket load of fake lighting tricks, whereas now I’m down to HDRI and a single sun. I’m happy with the modelling now (and tweaked a couple of minor modelling areas that you probably won’t notice unless I point them out).

All materials are PBR (having gradually converted them, and using different PBR models depending on the material - some work better than others with different materials.

Crits both positive and negative are welcome at this stage. Positive for the ego boost, and negative because I’m running out of ideas how to improve it.

NB. The full render is saved as png, converted to jpg for upload. I can’t really see a difference between the two, but please bear in mind that there may be some compression artifacts in the image.


Definitely some post-production is needed. I’ve made quickly some slight tweaks in Gimp, but it needs more PP attention.


Hi!

Yeah post process it, it helps a ton! at least do some color corrrection. Its ok to think of a render as a photo comming out from a camera, most of them need some color correction.

11 hours seems like a very long time for this image to render. If you are using an hdr maybe portals could help you.

and here is some other general tips that I have found useful for render times.

other than that, you got yourself a scene, congratz! =)

Thank you for your comments.

I’m already using portals, and in fact have tried different portal methods (on each window, large covering multiple windows etc.) though there’s little to choose between them in terms of render time.

I could probably get away with a shorter render, especially using the soften filter in post which removes some noise. The reason it was 11 hours is simply because the render time is sufficiently long anyway that it’s easier to set an insanely high number of samples and then just leave it to refine whilst I’m at work, stopping the render when I get home. Even so, all materials are PBR, which means there’s some reflection on everything. You can’t see the detail at this stage, but fine detail normals/bumps are on almost everything, too (even the pictures have a canvas texture on them), which all adds to the render time.

I tend to find, though, that even where such refinements are not noticable, their absence can be when aiming for realism.

I honestly think I’ve tweaked for render as much as I can, and so I’m resigned to this just being a particularly heavy scene.

A touch more post. Slightly increased contrast and a touch of colour correction. It brings the detail out more. Still deciding which I prefer, but I think this one.


And the noise on the far wall was still irritating me, so a selective despeckle filter in GIMP applied just to that wall.


I don’t like the last one, far too much post to remove the noise, you lose a lot of details in the stores or the carpet for example. My favorite is the post #5, I don’t think it’s so noisy.
My main concern is the wood floor, I don’t find it good looking in the foreground, but I don’t know much about PBR materials so maybe it’s realistic.

After coming back and viewing, I tend to agree, although the far wall still looks too noisy to me. For #6 I did do a general despeckle first, and that may be what’s killing it. I will probably re-visit 5 (or possibly a re-render - see below) this weekend.

Below: With regards to the floor, I think the problem is the bump/displacement is a touch too much. It’s very low, but where the light catches it in the foreground it’s still too noticable. I was hoping no-one else would notice :wink:

Unfortunately, I can’t fix that in post and will need to re-render. I may get away with a region render and stitch them together, if I still have an unmodified version of the original (not so sure I have).


All hail legendary geometry bender!

also wrong thread lol

None of those are booleans - all modelled by hand. I can share the couch as an example to prove it, if you want. The pictures were done with inset faces and extrude (very simple)

What the hell, anyone want to use the couch, here it is, without Booles, and not re-topo’d either. It was built from a single plane.

Attachments

couch.blend (3.05 MB)

I didn’t call you out on booleans, i called you out on that you don’t have any idea of topology, yet stating that you like to control geometry, and will always find a way. Yet can’t use supporting edges. Why do you shit on actual 3d artists, i have no idea. People in other thread actualy try to politely explain to you how to do it right, but you keep shitting.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I have not criticised anybody’s work or opinion other than constructively, and no-one has taken issue with anything that I’ve said, except you apparently, without citation, I may add.

Please link to where I have, allegedly, “shit on actual 3d artists”.

Oh, pardon me, just looked through some of your other posts. It seems you have form when it comes to being abusive. Consider yourself added to my ignore list (congratulations - 1st person).

Come back to this with a touch of yafaray caustics thrown in. The casutics render is composited on top of the original image with some extra colour correction thrown in for good measure.


Am I the only one noticing that the image gets blurrier as time goes on?

You need to step back and think of a game plan as to what tools you’re going to use, combining passes from multiple render engines is not guaranteed to work well because some things like the tonemapping and the shading are incompatible (so you get bad results when they’re together).

You also need to figure out when it’s time to determine that you’ve gone overboard and start again with the original Cycles image, because it is clear to me that the more rounds of post-processing it gets, the worse the quality gets. Trust me on this, because I myself have had to make the decision to start over from square 1 rather than haphazardly try to patch away issues.

Start again with the original Cycles image, apply some color correction and contrast, and (very selectively) denoise some of the problem areas while making sure you preserve edges and as much detail as possible. Even better, download a buildbot build, re-render using Cycles with the new built-in denoiser, and only use GIMP to tweak the colors and contrast.

I hadn’t noticed, though the caustics pass shouldn’t be affecting the overall image - most of the pass is transparent. Nevertheless, perhaps compositing onto an already corrected image wasn’t the best idea, and I think I’ll take your advice and start from a clean render straight out of cycles, and correct the new composite.

OK, I went back to raw render, using the denoising build, and compositing the yafaray caustics pass onto the raw render, and then colour correcting.

Attachments


Looks good, but here a few suggestions from me (who am I) :

  • The specular reflections on the floor looks intense to me.
  • Everything that has here the low albedo values (like the carpet, couch, table, pillows), look perfect
    But when I look at things that have higher albedo values, I see another kind of contrast. I think those albedo values are to high.
    For the wall on the right side, I would choose the values for R, G and B in the diffuse shader for example not higher than: 0.5.
    Probably none of your materials should go higher than that. Instead, put more light in the scene if need by cranking up the strength for HDRI or other lightsource. Especially with Filmic it is: the higher the albedo values the less contrast and (wrong) saturation.
    That’s what I think I see here when I compare that area on the left bottom side of the render and the rest.
  • There is a strange kind of specular reflection on the paintings. It looks to washed out.
  • It seems you cannot just put textures in Filmic (or probably other views as well, I don’t know that). But especially in Filmic, because of what I said here above. See filmic thread for more info about this.

I agree, especially about the wall on the right. I don’t think it’s the textures though, I think my problem is the post work. For comparison, here’s the raw render, uncorrected and without the caustics pass. The contrast is better, and the washed out specular is much better.

I really need to work on my post processing.

Attachments


Ah I see. Now I see much more consistency in the whole render.
By the way: Usually when I do post-processing, I only make the render worse.
Out of the 100 times, I think it happend only 3 times I was able to improve it.
It could be that a) I don’t have the knowledge b)Software is “Broken” c)What you don’t put in can’t come out. I don’t know what it is.

Quite the same experience with audio recording. If the recording is not good, you can’t make it better with mixing.