Ok, so I’ve pretty much admitted defeat. Over the past few years I’ve been learning blender3d on my own with the help of tutorials and my good friend trial and error. Because of this self guided method, I’ve become a fairly decent modeler. My problem is that no matter how real I make a mesh, it never looks photo realistic. At first, I saw all of those photo realistic pictures on Yafray.org and blender3d.org and though"Oh well i’m not going to be that good for a while". But i’m getting closer and its driving me insane that I can’t do it. I’ve looked for tutorials and can’t find any on advanced lighting/texturing. So basicly my question is, is there anyone here who has made one of those photo realistic pictures i drool over and would be willing to tell me how? Like what to do for lighting (how many lights, what kind etc.). And how to put the meterials section to good use. I’ve never used the ramps option, and rarely change the shaders because I don’t know what any of them do.
I’ve been trying to do this for a LONG time now, and I’ve basicaly given up. If anyone out there would be willing to help me with this I will forever be in debt to you.
This is my latest atempt to make a realistic scene. As you can tell, the glass does not look anything like realistic. The new sub surface scattering makes me happy…even though i suck at it…
Real world is imperfect. It contains dirt. It’s not clean. It has all kind of flaws. Surfaces exist rarely without some kind of visible imperfection. You can get closer to realism by remembering this. This is the very basic reason of so called “cg look”. People make too perfect works which paradoxically results in greater imperfection (from viewer’s point of view) than thriving for imperfection.
also when you’re thinking of realistic renders, think of realistic camera postitions/angles/perspectives as well as the reflection shown in shiny things - if it’s just reflecting white or the “world” setup color, it’s not as realistic as if you had some images mapped on planes to be reflected. Using ray traced shadows will rarely give realistic looking lighting, as every shadow created is soft and blurred - unless it’s coming from a strong light source (sun) or it’s very close to the light. So try shadow maps, area lights (with increased samples) or a light ring of point lamps.
Also make sure AO is on (in world settings). You can control the effective distance the AO works on, where it gets it’s color and energy from, as well as how each material affects the AO with the Amb slider in the shader tab.
As was said by BeBraw - add in some inperfection. Some scratches on the table, maybe some extra things on the table (like the corner of a book, some crumbs, edge of a plate or bowl, spoon, bottle of chocolate sauce ready to spruce up that milk…
Hey, sorry for not replying, blenderartists wouldent let me on for 3 days…
thanks for the help guys, as soon as i finish my school work i’ll check out some of those websites. I’m not exactly sure how to get imperfections, but i know that i need them. I guess i need to figure out how to edit the textures…also, some of those things I wont be able to do for a while. I’m using a laptop. Its a dual core 2ghz so its not too bad, but it over heats REALLY bad when i render. It levels off at around 75 C which is not great for it. I’ll work on the lighting tutorials, maybe that’ll help some. Thanks for the help! And if anyone has any other input i’d love to hear it.
75 C :eek::spin::no: which CPU & chipset?
I think the table looks fine from that angle - but explore the contetrace/blurry/glossy reflections that yafray can offer through XML editing. Which renderer are you using primarily?
I recommend to give up and join the realtime department i.e. Blender GE. I can understand your frustration where even hours of waiting don’t give you an edge over RT frames. It made me sooo frustrated to sit in front of the comp, waitiing for a render to complete, that i exclusively engage in realtime stuff now. Much, much less frustrating. Come and join us at the game engine forums:p
Oh man, i don’t even atempt to figure out the Game Engine. WAY too confusing…and the chipset i’m using is an AMD Turion 64. I use both cores to render so it heats up a lot.
And the picture i put up is just an example. I actually didn’t spend too much time on it, but most of my pictures end up turning out that way. You can always tell what it is, but it never has that amazing photo realistic look you see on yafray.org. Yafray is the render engine i use, I don’t really know anything about the XML function. Anyway, i was really just looking for general tips for making things look real. I havent had a chance to look over those website yet but i’ll see what i can do once i’ve done that. Btw, if you’re interested, this is my latest major project. Its nowhere near finished…
your latest project is close and has a lot of potential. Background behind the “windows”, different sky (change in post), some trees/shrubs (use textures mapped onto planes), and some little things to spice it up - maybe a little fountain or birdbath type thing, and a bird up on the peak of one of the rooves.
thats actually half of it. Its going to be a whole courtyard with a fountain in the middle. Right now i’m trying to get that one section as close to photo realistic as i can so i can just copy the technique on the rest of it…any ideas with the lighting? Nothing i do seems right. I got a little closer after reading the tutorial someone posted here, but it still looks fake…
Right now i’m getting a better looking picture with one far away spotlight with a yellowish tint. And one above area light with a blue tint. Yafray GI is turned off to save render time, and the indirect bounce depth is pretty high, i don’t remember exactly. It looks recognizable but not realistic like i was hoping…how do I post the .blend file? And would you need the textures as well?
The problem is that the image is too simple. In reality, it’s almost impossible to find a single object sitting on a perfectly flat surface. Even if you can find such a situation, your mind actually takes into account the other things going on outside of the picture frame when deciding whether or not the scene looks ‘real’. So even if you perfectly model that particular glass of milk, it will still look somewhat fake until you add some more complexity to the surroundings.
You also need to take advantage of every feature Blender can offer you. Specifically, you should always be using the following:
Soft, distance-based shadow lamps
Ambient Occlusion at medium/high quality
HDR image-based lighting/reflections (via world panel & ambient occlusion settings)
Your lighting is also very flat; in reality there’s a lot more light bouncing around from different directions. There are two ways you can go with light: either make it more realistic (adding more lights and tweaking them carefully) or less realistic (go for a more artsy feel, like sepia-toning). It’s funny, but making the lighting less realistic often makes the scene as a whole look more realistic, because your mind subconciously lowers its expectations.
Something wasn’t quite right with the textures in your blend. I had to assign each material to the texture, and set the mapping size. As far as lighting goes, I haven’t tried playing much yet. I set it up with full GI and deleted the area light to see what happens, and the render is taking ~forever on my iMac G5 1.8 (roughly equivalent to a P4 3.0 GHz).
