Dear all,
I’m trying to get my head around “photorealism” and reslly struggling with reducing noise and lighting especially. By all means butcher it and let me know how to improve 
Thanks
Good start.
- For now, kill the obvious problems. Hide the wooden chair (shape is not convincing) hide the fake image fire. lower the strength of the bump on the wood floor. on the leather chairs smooth them out, and do a little multires sculpting on them. Also on the leather scale the uvs (make the texture appear smaller) make the lamp table legs thicker. On the window muntin (The squares) remdoel them you have an interesting cross sectional shape. Thise will catch the light and give interesting highlights. on the oustide grass/sky experiment, try blurring the image.
All almost everything, its just too straight and sharp. add a displace modifier and almost all objects, with stucci/musgrvae or noise and then lower the strength untill it’s barely able to be seen.
Add grunge texture to almost everything, using a mixrgb node , just a little bit 5%-20%
Add some lights to the ceiling, or at least put an emission icosphere inside the lamp. The lamp is quite nice, why not use it.
big rug, either scale it down so it not underneath couches, or scale it up to cover almost to the left wall.
for the walls, look for some kind of texture.
experiment with camera angle and framing, this one is too centered, strong angled lines can make it more dynamic.
Good start.
Some assets scale are odd, imagine someone sitting on the leather chair. then visualize his relative size to the room
Photox’s comments are spot on. I have a few additions:
- add a bit of grunge (barely visible) to almost every major surface, especially glass.
- add curtains over the windows. This could give a nice color pop to an otherwise “bland” space (no offense)
- coffee table appears to be touching the fire place. Is it? Also appears to be on fire.
- put more personalized things in the room: blankets, pillows, books, pen and paper, shoes, etc. The purple glass bowl is a bit too lonely and random.
- feels like all of the furniture can be pulled away from the back wall and more toward the camera. Lay this space out in plan view as it would be in real life, then worry about camera placement
Well you’ve got excelent pointers from the guys above, but to add my several cents
- Maybe you know, maybe you don’t, but there is some funny business going on with the pictures in the top right and also the fireplace seems to have “holes” to the outside.
- And also (and I consider this quite important) I would experiment a LOT with some more interesting lighting (Photox already had some ideas), or adding some point of interest. Right now you have an OK picture, but it’s quite dark and for the lack of better words kind of boring…
- And finally, i like to poke holes in the logic of images. I think to be convincing picture have to make sense and not be only nice. Therefore, the bookcase or whatever behind the armchairs on the right seems terribly inaccesible and the very narrow unusable space behind the couch (which would probably get in the way of opening the windows) is also kind of bothering me. And I am not sure wheter the fireplace is supposed to be just some virtual projection or something, but if not, there is no wood for it anywhere and the rug right in front of it would seem like a bad idea.
I Like the design but there is certainly stuff that need to be done in order to make it look real. For the lighting, when you look outside the window you can see its a sunny/bright day but that room looks dark. Try cranking up the lighting and maybe add some light rays coming from those windows. I would suggest making the light coming trought the left windows as you would get nice reflection. The gloss on the table looks really off. Try playing with it until it look good. That wooden chair looks off, remove it. Try making a real fireplace,not just a 2d image.(if you want this to be the focal point, fireplace really draw attention in low light such as a ngiht scene). Add ambiant occlusion. Try rotating stuff and adding things to make it look like someone lives there( look at your own living room for reference for exemple). Overall, id say the major problem is the lighting. Work on that and this render will looks really good!