I’ve been following this site for quite some time, and it helped me a lot in learning Blender.
Now I would like to share a few of my renders and see what advice you guys give me, because I want to improve my work.
Render engine is Cycles, lighting was done by Pro-Lighting:Skies addon from Blender Guru (awesome). Samples are in 1500-3000 range, no Ambient Occlusion. Texturing was done with Specular and Normal maps, done by Crazybump and Photoshop. Colors and Curves were also done in Photoshop after renders.
I found that I’m having most of the problems when trying to realistically render certain materials - like stone, leaves… Wonder if there’s any good physically-based cycles node-setups available online? Also, having problems getting good background trees (as you probably noticed). I seriously need some good alpha-mapped trees.
I hope you guys can point me to the flaws which can be improved here.
My goal is to achieve something close to photorealism.
I’m open for any advice and will be happy to improve my work.
Hi, @robilad, you have a nice scene, the house on the 1st and 2nd pics is good, well composed, lighting is fine, but the nature environment isnt that good - the first is the lowpolyness of the trees, bushes and especially ferns at the corners looks blocky, the second is not matching color of the leaves with the background image, it looks very unsaturated. Seems like the pool is extremely deep cause it has no transparency)) bottle with ship looks also very opaque, i guess you set low amount of samples on transmission
Nice images! I enjoy seeing quality outdoor/landscape scenes. I just wanted to touch on your comment about needing better quality alpha-masked trees for the background. The best thing I have discovered for this is to create your own, using tree models you already have. Place one or two trees in the background and render them alone with a transparent background. Now you can add them as “images as planes” with transparency and place them in the background. This ensures that they match the current lighting setup for your scene. Yes, it is a bit more work, but you can probably save the alpha masked trees for future projects as well. Also, because they are in the background you can get away with rendering at lower sampling to save some time.
To address your question of texturing nature, you first need to address the modelling. The grass is too uniform, and needs variation of colour, thickness etc. As for texturing, practically all flora and fauna will display some SSS, but that will kill render times. Experiment with faking it, perhaps using backlighting.
