Cycles for interior?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

hello again.
im looking to get the opinion of people using cycles for interior rendering. before you shower me with expamles be aware that most of interior renders are heavily composed and usually use some kind of custom shader system.
from your experience, what is the best way to setup blender for interior rendering?

2

Please reformulate the question.

3

okay im gonna be honest. i don’t think cycles is capable of rendering interior without heavy composition or some custom branched shader tree. everything cycles puts out is very matte looking, often blurry. vray/corona counterparts seem to do much better. i really want to get a none biased answer here.

4

Unbiased?
Honestly, all you need is the skill.
One can do bad visualization even with Maxwell.

5

There is no fundamental difference between the interior and exterior rendering, except performance.

6

Cycles is capable of rendering any scene you’d render in maxwell, v-ray, etc.

7

There is nothing special about interiors regarding composition or shaders. You just have to throw enough samples at your scene to avoid noise.
Render to multilayer openEXR with all relevant passes and tweak whatever you is needed.

If your materials are too matte you probably need to change your materials. Materials in Cycles work like materials in any other physically based renderer. 90% of the shader is getting your reflectance curve right.

8

Cycles is very capable, but you need to learn how to build photoreal materials to take advantage of it. There’s also plenty of free PBR materials for you to get good results. Render time and noise is another issue you will need to master to get good render times.

9

The only real problem with interior rendering in Cycles is the noise; materials, lighting, etc can be done to look exactly as any other render engine.

Regarding noise:

  • Try to avoid small light sources.
  • Use portals for the windows, if there’s several small windows use one big portal that covers them all.
  • If window glasses are not going to be close to the camera or very noticeable then use Transparent+Glossy, or make it invisible to the cam.
  • You can check Ambient Occlusion to get a bit more light, a factor of 0.5 is a good value to start with.

Color management:
Try to use this instead of the Blender default.