Hi, I am new to blender, and recently decided to make a scene with mountains in the background a large stone gate/arch in the foreground. I have gone to great pains weathering and carving out detail on it, but after applying a texture this is almost invisible; I have tried playing about with the lighting a bit but that hasn’t helped. How would I make this detail stand out more? I am rendering in cycles and sculpted the gate in dynamic topology mode. Thanks in advance.
3 quick suggestions but there is a lot, lot, lot to be said about acheiving more realistic results.
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The lighting is really important. Just as in real life, you wouldn’t see etched-in details if the lighting was so bright and face-on. So keep experimenting with light coming in from the side. Maybe make a sunset scene where the sun is on the left, out of screen. The shadows would fill the cracks but still illuminate the face somewhat.
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Your texture should change to a dirtier, darker color in the recessed areas. If someone scratched, chiseled, or cracked the stone, you’d expect the texture to reflect those markings. You could use texture painting mode to do it on top of your existing texture or bake an ao pass onto the texture.
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The material you’re using should be improved. Using a bump or normal map based on your texture will help. A specular map would be good too and you should have an ior suitable for the stone you used.
As a beginner this might seem overwhelming. A good way is to youtube the above terms and spend a few hours learning, then jump back in and see what you can do!
Good luck, and welcome to the forums!
If your quest is for “realism,” it might be very useful for you to re-imagine this set as though it were a real(!) photo shoot, with realistic relative dimensions. How many “miles away” are those mountains, and how many “feet high” are they? Likewise, what are the physical dimensions of this obelisk? What’s the topography between the place where this obelisk sits and the distant mountains? And, finally, how many feet away from it have you parked your camera … and is it on a tripod or a boom crane?
Now, to continue: “what f-stop are you using?” Is it a wide-angle lens, or telephoto? Given that Blender attempts to mimic “real world” photography, and that your audience is used to “photography” (and unaware of its technical characteristics, which they blindly accept as “photo == realistic”), heh…, you should condition yourself to think in the same “real world” terms.
If your artistic determination is that the audience is to prominently see the inscriptions that you have placed on your obelisk, you will quickly find that your actual photographic options are extremely limited. May I cordially suggest that you take a trip to a nearby hill overlooking your current domicile, upon which you find (or conveniently place …) a monument, a tombstone, or even a large rock … and “try(!) to shoot the damm thing” with an actual (digital, these days, “of course”) SLR camera. You must keep both the inscribed rock and the (infinitely distant …) background in focus. Furthermore, you must compose the shot so as to irresistibly direct the viewer’s attention … not to the mountains, not to the rock, but specifically to the inscriptions upon(!) the rock.
Go ahead. Take your time . . .
Once you succeed in capturing the shot in your SLR … and I dearly hope(!) that you recorded all the particulars of it (did you bring your measuring tape?) … this will point you in the necessary direction for achieving the same shot in CG.
Lol, that was quite an entertaining read sundialsvc4! He has a real point though theshadow869. It’s a difficult task even in the real world. Refocusing your composition (layout of the scene) would really be a benefit to you.
Cheers!
You need to apply some sort of glossyness to the material. No material is completely diffuse.
The glossyness needs something to reflect. Plug some sky hdri into your background node if you don´t have enough stuff to reflect in the scene.
Then do lighting tests without the texture. Only the glossy/diffuse/mix material on your object until you like the shadow.
Then introduce the texture.