My blender scene lacks realism and the lighting and reflections just look off

I’ve messed with HDRI’s and sky textures and tweaked settings for like a dozen plus hours but the render still looks extremely fake. I’m already redoing the forest bkg but I don’t think that’s going to fix the lighting issues. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

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Welcome!

I think I see 3 problems.

  • The reflections look a bit blurry to me. Are you rendering with a low number of samples (or high noise treshold) and relying on the denoiser to clean the result? For a still image especially, you are going to want a high quality render, the denoiser should only be used to remove the last hints of noise, it shouldn’t do most of the work.

  • The camera effects are excessive. The amount of chromatic aberration makes it look like a low grade camera was used. The shallow depth of field makes it look like a macro photograph, like this is a tiny toy car.

  • The sunlight is too dim. Full daylight like this should not be dimmer than the car’s headlights.

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I usually do some photoshop work on what I want to say as it’s hard to put in words.

I agree with etn249 already said, too much chromatic aberration.
Also, I think the background is a bit weird too, especially the scale and maybe the blur.

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No one is driving…

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I think the original looks more realistic. What you’ve done looks like you added more contrast for “cinematic look”. Similar way model on a magazine cover is “photoshopped” (aside from physical make up).

Thank you so much for those suggestions. Ill tweak those settings. You’re right, i was using a high denoiser. I plan on making this a full animation so should i still keep low samples for when I do the full animation?

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If you keep low samples in an animation, the effects will be worse than for a still image. The splotchiness will change between frames, causing a flickering effect. This is an infamous problem known as “temporal coherence”.

But I can’t imagine that an outdoor scene like this one takes so much time to render that you need low samples? It might take long if the trees are made with alpha transparency, that’s something that’s slow in Cycles, especially for a full forest where there is layer upon layer of transparency superposed.

ya the leaves especially are killing my render times. My test frames normally take around 5 minuets or so. Probably not much to be done about that unfortunately. Thanks for your help though, I’m going to implement those changes when I get the chance.

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If you can, modelling trees fully polygonal with opaque materials would render much faster (in Cycles only). A tree made with 5 million triangles might sound bad, but if you use instancing, you could build an entire forest out of it and it would render just fine.

If you can’t rebuild the full tree, there are other alternatives:

  • Physically cut the transparent areas around the leaves in edit mode. Limiting the transparent area will lower the chances that any individual light ray needs to go through many layers of transparency. This might only be possible if the leaves are particles and you need to modify only a single object.

  • Try adding this setup at the end of the leaf material.


    Any indirect ray will perceive the foliage as having a simplified shader with no transparency. This will change the visual look of the forest a bit, so you might have to experiment with the exact shade of translucency to get something as close as possible. Replacing the translucent with diffuse might be even faster, but alter the look more.

  • Render the forest and car on separate view layers, with a different number of samples. This does require knowledge of viewlayers as well as the “holdout” and “indirect only” settings for collections. If you do know those things, the blurry forrest can probably get away with much fewer samples than the car.

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※ The image is for seeing the difference. I don't mean a good example.

I think it would be good to refer to various pictures for scene direction and composition.

  1. I don’t think it’s such a good thing to fill your car with a full frame.

  2. In addition to the problem of 1, the background makes it look more stuffy.

  3. The surface texture looks more like plastic than car paint.
    Please refer to the material setting for the car paint.

  4. There is a lot of green overall because HDRI’s color adjustment is not possible.
    HDRI should be used for reflection while maintaining the unique color of the car.

  5. If you use a blurry HDRI, the reflection of the car’s surface is also blurred.
    It’s more realistic to give a little animation and create a natural motionbler.

  6. Even with HDRI, key lighting is required.
    Typically, the sun light is placed in the light source position of the HDRI.

  7. The tires don’t seem to be moving.

When you use HDRI, you don’t use a lot of lighting.
Use a reflective plate or display light in a particular area for production.
Typical photography techniques are used.

The light source effect is not the same as it is represented in the image.
The light source effect seen in the image is exaggerated like a VFX movie.