How to take my arch viz further?

Hey there blender artists, I’m nearing the end of my largest and most ambitious arch-viz project yet and need some advice on how to push it over the edge from being decent to actually looking good. I know this is vague but I’ve already addressed everything that I can pick out myself and yet something still looks off.

The project is a full-site model of a winery currently under construction at lake Chelan in eastern Washington. Everything is lifted directly from the plans and (rather lowres) photos of the site pre-construction. Because of this there is basically no room for changing the actual structures or landscape. Sadly, these main faces of the buildings are all north-facing which has been less than ideal lighting-wise but I’m doing what I can to give some depth.

Any advice on how to improve this without altering the geometry would be greatly appreciated. Also bear in mind this is just a test render at ~1500 samples.

thanks

Hi! This is something amazing you have created!

The main thing that catches my eye and draws my attention away from the central subject is the vacant and dry environment behind the houses.

I think some more trees along with some cropping, slight DOF, and color tweaks might help in various ways.

Here is a quick example of that, which I encourage you feel free to disagree with or dismiss, as these are just some suggestions on an image that is already excellent:

Congratulations on such fine work, and best wishes on all your projects!

RobertT

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I think the trees in the background are a bit too big.

Thanks for the input, sadly there isn’t an option to include more trees as the trees pictured in the original are the only trees on the site. I agree that it looks much better with more trees behind the house so I might make a version like that for my own portfolio. Additionally the size of the trees certainly seems a bit off and i think this is because the tree models represent smaller trees than the ones on the site and just making them bigger doesn’t quite work for obvious reasons.

nice render! I love the humans they are very unique looking. Im working on a architecture render. May I ask you if there is any add on or something to make humans? Thanks

Not an addon although that would be awesome. These are just some cc0 photo scans I’ve had on my hard-drive for ages but I cant remember where they came from exactly. They initially came with textures as well but a simple diffuse image texture looks quite strange for a human subject so I just went ahead and gave them pastel colors instead.

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As someone who works in architecture for a living - renders don’t always have to be 100% accurate to the actual way things will look after construction :wink: Trees take a long time to grow and if I rendered everything as it’ll look after construction, no one would like anything I did because it would be so empty. Also mid-afternoon lighting is often not visually appealing because everything is a flat bright light or dark shadow. Play around with your times of day to find the perfect lighting. This is probably the part of rendering I spend the most time on after materials. I will bump the sun around by millimetres until it perfectly filters through some leaves in a tree and creates interesting shadows on the scene or nice colours (orange/pink light with blue/purple shadows).

Thanks for the tips, unfortunately I am fairly restricted with both the existing vegetation the background and the lighting as the client specified that they wanted both of these to match the site as closely as possible. Since this shot is showcasing the north face of the buildings and I’ve been asked to keep the lighting realistic I have a lot less freedom than I’d like to in terms of tweaking the location of the sunlamp. I rendered a new back-plate a few weeks ago that I think will help bring the scene to life.