use PBR materials, with fresnel and maps for everything (roughness, gloss, normals). I recommend using the new Principled BSDF.
. If your textures have only a color map, I recommend finding complete materials instead on textures.com, rd-textures or poliigon, which are among the only ones that include full materials with all the maps. If you really didn’t find any complete material that suits your needs you should take the time to make the maps yourself but you have to really know (or get to know) how it’s done.
if you’re not using filmic, use it and use real sunlight values. Again, best explained
.
use real displacement on the walls, especially the wall under the bridge, by using adaptive subdivision. If you’re not familiar with it I advise
this time. Again, the 3 texture websites I mentioned are among the only ones that have displacement maps, some of which are free.
BTW those 3 points I just made are among the 4 most important recent features of Blender which everyone should use almost all the time by now (the 4th being the denoiser)
bevel the edges. Walls like this can’t have sharp edges
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Artistic advice :
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Before even positioning the camera and putting some lights, I would go on Artstation and type “castle”. You can see there are all kinds of very good looking compositions and lighting setups to take inspiration from, even though the castles are very different and mostly painted, this doesn’t matter.
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You can see that for example some castles are lit by a hole in the clouds, like here for example. We can also see it in the
. And to me it looks really cool apart from drawing the attention where it needs to be. Other cool lightings include dawn, twilight, bright sun with a lot of contrast (yours have too soft shadows and lits almost everything from the camera’s point of view) and some very foggy stuff but that’s not what you’re after.
another thing that comes often in these images is that the environment is pretty wild with trees and big rocks put randomly around, even vegetation on the walls, and keep in mind that building a castle took decades in the middle age, so the walls did get some vegetation before they were finished (although your castle is pretty small so I don’t know).
the guy is too perfectly positioned under the… I don’t know how it’s called and his arms are posed weirdly. I would put him behind (on the bridge) and pose his arms like a normal walking man (more relaxed).
I would really work on the grass and the biodiversity. There are plenty of resources on Blendswap, but I also suggest having a look at Grass free or even the Grass essentials, and btw keep an eye on Graswald for when it gets released because it’s going to kick ass!
I would put some trees in the far end and maybe even one or two behind the foreground hill, with only their top showing up)
try to have consistent textures. The big grey bricks around the door don’t match the rest (apart from being super flat).
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I checked the list I made above and could find 2 points you seem to have followed : taking some inspiration for the camera position and lighting and making some wall textures match better.
Otherwise I couldn’t find any of the other points being applied.
Is it a choice to just update the first post instead of keeping track of the evolution of this work ?
I could understand this choice, but I’d like to know if it’s on purpose.
I just tried Filmic Blender, and now my entire image is losing color information!!! I did every single step as Andrew Price told me in the video, and I’m still losing color information!
It looks TERRIBLE! Downright terrible, it looks not like a photo, it looks more like a poorly painted image.
Is there anything I’m doing wrong? And whats “real sunlight values”? Never heard of it before.
The birdflock doesn’t look like a flock of birds. Asside from that it is weirdly positioned and doesn’t add to the composition.
There is unused empty space on the water, left of the castle. Put a boat on there or something.
I’m not sure if the the composition is beneficial for presenting the castle. The castle is croped out at the left, why?
Maybe try different camera positions and composition. Go to Artstation and search for “castle” and use one of the search results as your starting point (for camera position, lighting etc.)
Match the background with the foreground. The grass in the back is much greener and lighter than the grass in the front.
Your render is missing some photo-effects. There is no DoF (subtle), no glow (sublte), no vignette (subtle)
Color Grading. Use the filmic tonemaper and then turn the contrast up and play with some curves.
EDIT: Do the initial grading INSIDE BLENDER!
I highly doubt that. Maybe you didn’t really understand what losing color information means. It doesn’t mean desaturate (unless you desaturate at 100%). Losing color information is irreversible. For example cropping the bright or dark parts (which is clearly happening on the clouds of your image and this wouldn’t happen with filmic), or performing any operation that transforms your image in a way that you can’t get the information back with any additional color adjustment.
Filmic keeps much more color information than sRGB does, aside from looking more realistic.
If your image doesn’t look good with it, it’s because it wasn’t made with it from the begining. Switching from sRGB to filmic requires to rework the lighting and sometimes the materials too.
For sun lamp units, you may want to read this answer by Brecht.
For real sunlight values, to quote this answer very briefly, it follows this formula :
1050*0.77[SUP]sec(x)[/SUP] W/m[SUP]2[/SUP] where x is the angle of incidence of the sunlight.
and sec(x) I’m guessing is the secant of x. But as stuntddude says, the real formula that follows all the physics rules is mathematically much more complicated.
As for that filmic render that “looks TERRIBLE! Downright terrible”, I’d like to see that though.
Also I don’t understand why most of the times only a few of the questions I ask or recommendations I give get answered/applied. Should I stick to 1 or very few questions/recommendations per post ?
I have thrown out the filmic blender, it produced such ugly results, that I didn’t want to keep it.
Add to that, if I have to enter a mathematical equation everytime I adjust my sun lamp, in order to produce a decent quality render, I’m definetly out.
I haven’t saved my render image before, but it looked more like a high contrasted (used base contrast) extremely desaturated render. Not at all realistic, not at all pleasing either, quite the contrary it looked like I had thrown a filter on it from GIMP which says “make my render as ugly as possible”.
There are many perfectly nice renders made in Cycles without Filmic Blender, and I guess I just have to decode their way of rendering/material/light settings, Filmic definetly is not the way to go. BTW. I read in a comment on Andrew Price’s tutorial that he had misunderstood something and Filmic is NOT more realistic than the old method involving sRGB.
Filmic is definately the way to go. You don’t need any math to get decent results (I wouldn’t mind if I did, but it works totally without it). You just have to increase the light’s emission strength, and set the contrast in filmic. Personally I like the higher contrast values a lot. Invest some hours in it, you won’t regret it. Start with an empty scene with just one object and a light source, set it up with sRGB and then change to filmic and see that you just need to increase the brightness of the light source. From this, add an hdri of the sky background, and do the same again.
Regarding the new version, I think that from the model itself, you added someimprovement. But I liked the old composition more, with the castle in the centre.
It all depends on what you are trying to achieve. If it’s for a mueum to illustrate the castle reconstruction, I think that you don’t need to do too fancy perspectives. If you want to go for a very artistic render, do everything the comments here suggest, and think about a meaning you want to transport.
I liked your first picture here, because I understood that you wanted to make museum illustrations. That goal you already achieved at the beginning, in my opinion. Perhaps the museums I have been to are lower in quality than what people here are used to. But in those that I know, your first render would have been good enough for. And you improved it a lot since then, except for the composition.
I also think that you should definately re-upload your different versions here, to show the progress.
I am reconsidering this entire project. Perhaps I should go for a less-realistic (artistically) render, and make an animation instead. It also makes a bit more sense for a museum (it is a volunteer project, I have all the time I need).
Is there anything I should consider before making an animation? It cannot involve a lot of grass on the earthworks/ramparts, because it slows down rendering. Realism is not to be achieved if I go for animation, but then I have to consider a lot of movie methods.
I have made an animation before of another castle, but I want it to look professional (even though I am not).
I don’t understand what you want to do. “Less realistic” is not a style. Minimalistic, lowpoly, cartoony, miniature, you name it, those are graphic styles.
Depending on what you’re after, very different rules apply when rendering an animation.
Sorry, what I meant was a combination of minimalistic, lowpoly model with simple shaders (ie. no fresnel).
What are the different rules when rendering an animation? It involves only camera motion (fly over) combined with different stages of the castle (it was re-build several times) and some drawbridge mechanics + eventually interior (like cutting the building half to see what’s inside).
If it’s lowpoly there’s not much to consider for rendertime apart from all the techniques to clean the noise :
And if only the camera moves, you can bake all the lighting but that may not even be needed if your scene renders fast already.
Again don’t hesitate to search for “low poly castle” on Artstation, Youtube, deviantart, etc…
