This will eventually be part of a larger project, but I thought it looked pretty on it’s own, so I’m posting it here.
Thank you to Mr. Zaal for his incredible HDRIs, and to GIMP for allowing me to cheat a bit and put the bee from my research photos in there. And also many thanks to Wybren van Keulen for his lovely Grove addon.
All materials are taken from my own photographs - possibly a first for me. I also stuck flower petals on my scanner.
[edit: I forgot to give credit Lukas Stockner for denoise and shadowcatcher!! Makes things so much easier!!]
Wow that’s amazing!! Beautiful flowers! Great materials! Very photo realistic! I’ve done the petal/leaf in a scanner trick a couple times too, cool to see someone else does the same thing.
That’s an incredible photo. I thought it was a real image for about two minutes. The lighting is fantastic and the color are incredible. I’m curious how you got it to look so photo realistic.
Thanks! It’s hard to describe how one gets ‘photorealism’. Filmic really helps. Having the actual plant in my yard helps because I can just go get a clipping if I need to study it. Lots of real photos that I took certainly helped. Believe it or not, the model is really only about half done. I need a few more phases of the bloom plus my textures need to be a little better. Depth of Field is great to make things look real. Also I used the principled BSDF node when creating materials. It REALLY makes things more real.
The GIMP bee sort of helped and made me wonder what would happen if I threw in a few strands of spider silk.
Those leaves and flowers are particles, and I had to make many adjustments to get them to quit intersecting with each other!
The lighting comes from Greg Zaal! (https://hdrihaven.com/) Sunny Vondelpark is the HDRI, and I made some color and contrast adjustments in the final because that light tends to be a little yellow. Added some glare as well - all with Blender’s compositor.
EasyFX by Nils Soderman is a great addon that makes that stuff easy.
Thanks, bbmaran and djwaterman! Photoreal was what I was going for. I thought I’d put the clay up - just to show what the model looks like without materials.
