I am a custom furniture designer and builder, and am trying to create renders that will fool the general public. As you can see my renders are not bad, but what I need to do is to create renders that Joe public will believe are photographs. The renders in the large photo (link below) were created to sell the products on Turbosquid, and are fine for that. I need some concrete advice on how to make them photorealistic.
I can add some depth of field, but as you see in the photo of a chair I built, it’s not there, or extremely subtle. I can add some reflections, but of what? I thought of slightly dirtying the white backdrop a bit, a few mild scuff marks etc. The table has visible facets on the edge, but the model was not made to be super high poly. That’s easy to fix at any rate. If anyone is interested, I can upload the blend file. I’d love some input. Thanks.
The picture below is a low rez version of the picture in the link.
The renders are very good as is, using an unbiased renderer such as Luxrender or Indigo with real world reflective values should give you that heightened sense of realism that you are looking for. Hdr/exr image map lighting would probably be the easiest method or a properly lit studio lighting setup would do just as well. Your texturing work is pretty good, though there is a little stretching at the bottom of the legs, I would also maybe work on your camera angle and lens setting just a little bit.
If the studio background isn’t necessary, for ultimate realism place them in a simple scene with proper surroundings where the different objects shadows and reflective values can play off each other.
edit. If you want to post a .blend I could put it through Indigo or Lux for you, I tend to use the last free version of indigo 1.1.18
for my own work, keep in mind these render engines are pretty slow and take a while to get a good noise free image.
When I get some time today I will make up a little scene and render it, tomorrow i’ll post the results along with the blend file and the settings I’ve used.
As you can see in the renders, I added a little warmth to the lights, and a touch of cool purple to the shadows. I may play with adding a tiny bit of reflection to the floor, to sort of fake radiosity, which I’ve never tried.
+1 for luxrender…
it’s dead simple to set up, very easy to learn, and even has a decent material database online.
the only downside is that it’s slow, because it’s unbiased.
or you could try yafaray, but that can be a pain to set up sometimes.
One difference between the photograph and your renders there is focal length. Try to find a focal length that makes the size of the furniture more sensible to the viewer, now it is too short.
Here’s a very quick set up in indigo renderer, because this site only allows small image sizes you lose a bit of detail, the original .png is in the folder I have uploaded. I only used an exr image map for quick and easy lighting, playing about with light emitting planes would enable you to get exactly the setup you want. I,ve included the exr in the folder
The version I have used is free with no limitations, Indigo has since gone commercial and currently costs 295 euro, there is still an up to date free version but dimensions are limited and there is an indigo logo stamped on the corner of each render.
I made a greyscale bump/displacement map for your wood texture to use in place of the normal map and I also made a specular map, even with the internal renderer I would recommend using spec maps. As mentioned above, the default camera focal length in blender (lens in the editing panel with the camera selected) isn’t ideal and is better changed to a value of around 65-70 for this kind of scene.
My print screen function is playing up at the moment I can’t post screen shots till I get it sorted, I’ll try again shortly.
I’ll do another render with the same setup in Luxrender which is free and opensource just to compare, out of interest for myself as much as anything else.
Material settings. Settings can be further adjusted in the renderer window. I also always do a little tweaking of contrasts, colour correction etc in Photoshop, I didn’t do this in the above render.
Finally, that render had been left to run for a few hours on my old dual core pc and it could have done with a couple more, depending on your system it can take quite a while to get a noise free image in unbiased renderers.
Thanks. The rar file didn’t want to un rar for some reason, but that’s ok. I will probably try to find a good method for the internal renderer, as I understand it, and it’s free. I’ll play with the focal length, which I’d always left at 35mm, and add some basic reflections and a spec map.
To give you a wider range of possibilities, here’s a version rendered with YafaRay.
I will try to upload the corresponding .blend and settings if you are interested…
Here is an experiment I did, based on the advice I received about focal length. As you can see in the 70mm render, there is a lot less distortion - the perspective is less severe. I didn’t change anything else, except that it’s a different piece (it’s what was currently in the scene). I also didn’t play with contrast and color in photoshop, but the focal length makes a big difference right away.
Here is a comparison image. As you can see, the Ikari Shinji render is very close to the real table photo. And yes, I would be interested in the settings. I need to try Yafray…
All YafaRay settings should be stored within the .blend. They should appear as soon as you start the Yafaray exporter in your Blender.
I did not pack the texture files into the .blend though, as I wanted to keep the download size small and you already have the textures anyway.
Also not included is the HDR I used - replace it with a backgroud of your choice. Or try without: Since the materials used are not that reflective, I don’t think the comparatively dark HDR I used was of much significance for the render.
For any YafaRay related questions I can strongly recommend - aside from this forum - the forum at www.yafaray.org, which I found to be very supportive…
