Some comparisons of differents scenes with and without Oren Nayar diffuse, there’s no specific order in the images just judge by yourself which one do you think it’s better and which one have oren nayar activated
Click this image just to watch all in full view
Excellent work, mate. There is definitely a lot of improvements in the Oren Nayar diffuse versions.
To enable Oren Nayar diffuse, from your blend file, you set roughness here to 1.0?:
it’s linked to the roughness of the glossy like in octane so just work with your material like always, it will give more of the oren nayar diffuse if your material is very rough and will give a little if it is very glossy
That’s awesome, mate. Thanks so much for sharing the blend file. 
Imho, that is a problem then, Blender should be able to achieve “photorealism” without an addon. The fact that Blender lacks an authentic and robust camera setup is a problem and I hope the devs look into improving it.
If that’s the case, this is kinda sorta the type of vitally critical information that should be splashed front and center on the Blender.org site! 
I was under the impression there was some controversy around this plugin. I thought I read up a long thread about it a while ago and some people were saying it doesn’t do anything?
Very awesome, thank you for taking the time. I assume that Oren-Nayar examples are the ones who tend to veer toward slightly darker reflections?
IMHO I’m kinda sold on Oren-Nayar as being a better looking overall result. My next wish would then be that it gets integrated into the Principled Shader ASAP!
It does a lot, I’m not sure what the controversy was (I wasn’t there). I truly consider it essential
OK, well that then raises an interesting question. Does the addon actually add totally new objects/settings (in other words do you in fact get a whole new camera object in addition to the one in default Blender) or is it just a collection of presets/configuration settings and the like.
Basically, if one knew what one was doing and in theory spent the time to do it, the result from default Blender would be exactly the same compared to using this addon. It’s just that the addon makes it way easier and faster to get the same result.
Almost definitely so. I cannot imagine there’s any way to tap into the rendering pipeline deep enough from the python api to provide something ‘entirely new’ which is basically alien to vanilla Blender.
greetings, Kologe
@EntityDesigner Hi, I am trying out the shader, I noticed it does not have the specular tint and IOR or GGX multiscatter only Anisotropic and Anisotropic Rotation.
I am guessing specular is tied to roughness and IOR in the shader?
Hi, I added those parameters.
I don’t use the IOR Level because it’s the same as the IOR you see at the top, devs keep it just to have compatibility with older materials but I added it because it was easy to do, the tint parameter it’s very tricky so don’t expect to be 100% similar to what principled bsdf do I also fixed the reflection normal it was not connected with the normal input 
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Oren Nayar.blend (1.5 MB)
Thanks a lot, mate 
Now that you mentioned this. I remember working on a project using Luxcore and switching to Cycles and I noticed something was off about the objects in the scene when it came to the scale in Cycles compared to Luxcore. Maybe I am wrong. Can you try opening that scene using Luxcore to render and see if the scale looks better or more accurate?
FFS… blender is free, and the Photographer addon is $25. Buy it, move on with life and live the dream.
I am asking if he can do a test with Luxcore Camera. This isn’t about live and dreams. It won’t hurt if there is indeed an issue with Blender’s camera.
He can decide to do so or not. Can you let him respond?
Thank you @EntityDesigner for the new shader. Can’t wait to try it out.
I would like to add my 2 cents.
Cycles can be improved but as @jacek007g proved with his render it can easily deliver highly photorealistic results. 95% of the success lies in hands of artist.
The differences you guys see in the two images are mostly because of lack of details/variations that photo material has. They are also doable in render but artist didn’t want to spend extra amount of time perfecting it.
Now, as for those 5% improvements goes I did some testing with Octane. I set up the same scene in both renderers with same hdri and material textures. What I found out is that the most notable feature Cycles lacks in “bringing up” microdetails on the material. This is mostly noticable in the bumps.
Not sure if this is correct but apparently Cycles only calculates texture per current viewable pixel. So if the texture is far away from the camera, Cycles doesn’t care if there’s 4k or 1k data per pixel, but Octane does. To sum up there is something weird going on with Cycles bumps. Doesn’t matter if you use normal, regular bump or displacement bump.
This is why Octane materials feel more “tactile” and Cycles materials feel more “plastic”.
And when you use low samples and denoiser the problem is even more enhanced.
I remember that on one interior scene I had small details on wall.
First I rendered with 1k samples and denoiser, and then I went as high as 15-20k samples. The difference was really noticable.
Care to share your results so we can all see them, not just the editorial?
That could do it. I mean some of what I’m seeing in Octane is a certain physicality that seems to lack in Cycles.
Having said that, many people don’t use Bump maps at all and opt instead for Normal maps or, even better, Displacement maps which are easier to utilize in render engines with render-time automatic tessellation.
Displacement maps do in fact make a big difference in shading if the surface in question can be tessellated without too much fuss and without using too much memory. Fortunately, Cycles at least has this as a usable feature even though it has been stuck under the experimental set since the beginning.
Fun fact, microdisplacement has been teased by the Blender developers all the way back to the production of Big Buck Bunny, meaning it is currently the Star Citizen of Blender features (dwarfing the amount of time it took to get a complete implementation of GI and Ngons).
To be fair though the majority of the first ten years of Cycle’s life saw it without a single full-time developer dedicated to it (as Brecht even back then was stretched across multiple modules before his temporary departure to Solid Angle). It was not until Cycles X that it got more of a dedicated team.
