Hello, I’m working a freelance job right now and am faced with a challenge I haven’t really had to deal with before.
I am working on lighting some industrial equipment, and am having a bit of trouble getting it to look right. Usually an easy way to make something look realistic is to add dust and scratches to it, but the company I am working for is using the animation for sales so I doubt they want the thing looking beat up. Problem is, without any wear it looks too clean and really fake, almost like a toy.
Any advise from somebody who has dealt with this before?
metal - even brand new is always in some way manufactured - that involves molds
drilling polishing an all kinds of ways to achieve final elements form
that is one thing (so bevels and surface finishes - directionally scratched and often anisotropic reflections)
the other thing to make things look realistic in the camera approach
depth of field can do wonders if used wisely
also some post pro tricks can achieve a more photographic look of an animation
try a bit of color correction a tiny bit of chromatic aberration maybe
experiment with the compositor
Thanks for the advise @razin and @garagefarm. Due to some of the constraints I don’t have time / budget to clean the complex CAD mesh to work with bevel, and while I always love Post-pro, it’s just not the style we were going for.
I did manage to find a solution though. For some reason I figured I would try a normal map for drywall, and it actually ended up looking pretty good. The model has a lot of large flat faces, and the ever so slight “ripple,” actually adds the detail I was looking for.
Here is a VERY zoomed in part of the result. I’m still going to play around with it a little more, but I think I’m going the right way.
If using the lastest 2.79, try using the bevel node on pretty much everything. Very low scale, like 0.001 or 0.002.
Sometimes I do quite polished metals, where the light stretching is a lot while the low reflections are less. Basically, it appears very smooth and polished, yet strong light sources are able to stretch around like crazy. I use a low factor bechman based aniso shader for this, with 1 in aniso and >1 in roughness (!!!), combined with low aniso shader or just glossy shader.
If you have the cad model, unwrap according to unfolded sheet metal and use that for aniso tangents. For lathed pieces, you’re only interested in quads to define tangent direction (or even just an axis if that works?). Pretty much any metal surface that has seen a machining tool will have aniso shading going on (unless super polished or covered) - unfortunately, because it’s one of the hardest effects to get right.
Yours look painted though. That subtle bumps looks good for that. But even bolts and grease nipples?
Slight variations in the roughness map should help. But you have to be subtle about it. You want to roughen the specular reflection so that it doesn’t look too clean.
Also barely visible color variations should help to. Lighter on the top, darker in ridges and on the bottom parts.
The way I’ve dealt with this is I’ve actually talked about this with my boss/customer and explained the problem and put the decision in their hands. I’ve showed them examples and let them made the decision.
In most cases, they wanted the cleaner result, and disregarded the more realistic approach.
They can’t have both, somebody has to make that artistic decision.
You need to take into account that non-artists don’t have trained eyes like artists do. Where you see problems the customer might see no problems. Doesn’t mean you should lower your quality standard but try to see it through the eyes of the customers and communicate directly with them.
No need to go the extra mile if it isn’t needed/appreciated/payed.
As this is painted metal it behaves like a dielectirc and not like a metal regarding reflectance.
Get the falloff curve right when you mix in your glossy shader and you should be halfways there.
I think at the moment your paint reflects too strongly when facing the camera. In your image we are seeing the object from a pretty straight angle and the reflection is as strong as it would only be when viewing it from a very low angle.
The drywall does look pretty good in the normal map.
Most of the product renders I see look fake to me, that’s generally what you’d expect (except if you’re an artist with a trained eye who is actively searching for flaws, of course). Those ones I’m talking about have generally the same look and feel to it, so I suppose they are simply using pre-made materials and light setups for V-Ray of Keyshot or any popular rendering engine that comes with many presets.
From what I understand, the term “photorealistic” means to the clients anything with smooth shadows and reflections and good materials, because they’re used to working with blueprints and solidworks/autocad/sketchup, so It’s not the same meaning as you expect. search in google and you’ll see many products that are realistic, but almost always too perfect, and that’s what the clients usually need. They don’t need photorealism, they need it to look beautiful and realistic enough
Of course I’m not telling you to do your job poorly, I’m just saying that you don’t have to go 100% photorealistic
Well, “photorealistic” in product renderings ususally means that it is supposed to look as close as possible to product photos as the budget allows. The budget and time constraints sometimes don´t allow for the images to come anywhere near photorealism. But it often doesn´t matter because, as you say they only have to be good enough.
@Romanji definitely the problem I always run into. I always end up seeing a lot of flaws that I need to fix, but the client is usually more than happy “as is” when I show it to them.
