more in next post…
This is the same scene I put together about 2 years ago to show of my Gaffer add-on when the Blender Market was launched, but I added a couple little details, lit it with some HDRIs I made and rendered it with the amazing filmic blender (huuuuge difference).
Basically all the models in the scene are from Blendswap/Chocofur:
The Sun Room, Wig42 (http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/73277)
Wall Lamp, DennisH2010 (http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/66297)
Tables, sizzler (http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/40865)
Wall Lamps, sizzler (http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/46257)
Little Lamp, up3danimation (http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/57000)
Various details: Chocofur (http://store.chocofur.com/all_free/)
Super Cool!
Very realistic!
Your scene is very realistic, congrats. In fact I’m trying to reach the same result. Have you used a specific add-on? (other than filmic color management). How long did it take to render one of your image? (what is your graphic card ?) Thanks.
Thanks guys 
@jul1o nothing special, the realism is mostly due to HDRI lighting and physically-based materials. These are my own HDRIs too (you can get them here) which I know are unclipped, so they produce very realistic lighting. Many (almost all) HDRIs you can find online, especially the free ones, are clipped so they’re missing the most important part of the lighting information and are thus not so realistic.
Edit: Render time was about 1.5 hours for a 2560x1440 image on a 980ti. Still not 100% noise free, but looks fine when scaled down to 720p.
What sort of samples are you dealing with here? I just tried a basic room I had and even after 1100 samples, it was still as noisy as all heck.
3000 for #1, 3 and 5, 5000 for #2 and 9000 for #4. Having the bright sunlight bouncing off the walls being 90% of the fill light means tons of noise.
I used portals of course, which did help a lot, but mostly just for the 3000 sample ones since they have much more omnidirectional lighting.
Not sure if I’ve understood correctly what you said but just in case, I think that what causes noise is the size of the bright light source not its “omnidirectional or directional” nature.
Since your HDR is unclipped (high quality), the sun in the HDR texture has a very tiny size.
This causes more noise, and that’s why for interiors (mostly in the past for obvious hardware limitations) were used, as a quality-rendertime compromise, a low quality HDR maps + sun lamp instead of a high quality HDR texture with the sun in it.
Edit: Oh… forgot btw, good job.:yes:
Looks completely realistic, as far as I can tell.
That could be part of it, but I think it’s mostly just from indirect bounces (where the sun hits the wall and bounces all over the place). If I had used a sunlamp (as I did in the original render 2 years ago), it would still be just as noisy.
Edit: Cycle’s Multiple Importance Sampling for the environment lighting does a really good job of sampling the tiny bright sun more than the darker parts. Without MIS then your explanation would certainly be right.
Very stylish - lovely variations!
It looks Great!
I tried to use filmic blender, but it never shows up, i used blender 2.78, and renamed the file correctly. Do i have to use a certain make of blender?
Thanks
It works with any build of blender afaik. After you put the files in the right place, you have to restart blender, and then it’ll just show up like this:
If you still have trouble, I wrote a tiny add-on yesterday that downloads and installs if for you: https://github.com/gregzaal/filmic-blender-add-on
Cool, don’t forget it’s a good tool for setting up lighting… but does nothing to the internal data of the render… Save as 32bit OpenEXR and you can do anything with your render, inside or outside of blender!