my render looks flat even if I use pbr displaysment materials

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Hello everyone, I decided to repeat the render from one training video on poolrooms in blender, but my render looks a little flat, even with pbr displaycment materials, what could be causing this?

PS: I’m using blender version 2.93, and my video card is intel hd graphics 3000, cycles render engine

huy
huy960×540 904 KB

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Welcome!

The best materials in the world won’t save your render if the rest isn’t on the same level.

Before anything else, let’s first talk about some obvious technical problems I see.

  • I see the light coming in from the windows is very weak and noisy. This is a flaw of Cycles as a renderer: it has trouble calculating light passing through refractive materials, like glass. Your water probably has the same problem. You can fix this by using this setup in your material:

    glass_material
    glass_material699×751 37.3 KB

    With this setup, the transparent BSDF node will be the one used for shadows instead of the regular glass material. By changing the color of the transparent node, you will be able to decide exactly the color and amount of the glass’ shadow.

  • Did you do the water’s color by just changing the “color” setting on the material? For water, this is actually incorrect, your water will act like its surface was painted. Real water has its color spread through its volume. If you want realistic looking water, you should do this:

    water_volume
    water_volume726×722 40.7 KB

    Same setup as the window, to ensure the light makes it through easily, except I also added a principled volume node. This volume is the one used for coloring the water, the surface is left as pure white. For this to work well, you should also go to the render settings and add a few volume bounces, or else the result will be too dark.
    volume_bounces

Now, lets talk about displacement. When you say you are using materials with displacement, have you actually set the materials and modifiers to use true micro-displacement? Do you even know what displacement is used for, what the difference between displacement and bump is, or did you just get some materials on the Internet and plugged them as you could, hoping it would look good? And that’s not even to mention that most materials in this scene would have next to no difference from using real displacement.

In any case, I don’t think displacement is the reason this scene looks flat. It has more to do with the modeling, lighting and post-processing.

  • Modeling: this looks like a flat scene because it is. If you are trying to make a realistic scene, going for a backrooms render isn’t how you will achieve it. It’s going to look fake no matter how well you do it and it’s kind of the point of the backrooms. Most of these videos manage to make it look convincing by drowning the image in analog/VHS filters and by doing convincing camera movements like it’s footage from a real hand-held camera. But if you do want to improve the modeling here, you could try adding small borders to the bottom of the wood section and use a more complex window design.

  • Lighting: Your lighting is placed in a way that won’t give much contrast or interest to this scene. Everything is in the light and this flattens the shapes of all objects. Is there a light source behind the camera? If yes, try removing it and it will likely improve the render. You might also want to go to the color management settings (in the render settings) and try different contrast options.
    contrast

  • Post-processing: If you want to really convince the viewer that your image is a real photo, you need to replicate the imperfections that real camera lenses add to an image. This includes:

—in the render and camera settings:
-Depth of field (with realistic values for the situation).
-Motion blur if it’s an animation.

—in the compositor:
-Lens distortion and dispertion (keep it subtle).
-Vignetting (a slight darkness that appears near the edges of a lens).
-Camera grain (looks different from render noise, needs to be added back in).
-Bloom/Glare (keep it subtle).

3 Likes
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Wow, @etn249! What a thorough explanation!

I think that, to start, I would imagine that there are several incandescent lights along the ceiling of that room. (They can all be “off-camera,” if you like.) But they will immediately add plausible light. And it will be a warm light, to nicely balance the cooler light from the misty outdoors, and it will work nicely with the warm textures of the wall.

Real rooms often have edging: in the corners, along the walls, maybe along the top edge of the pool. Decorators often use contrasting colors there. Maybe there’s a little something decorative, hanging on the wall …

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Your water has no depth, at all. The bottom of the pool looks like it’s on the same level as the floor. I wouldn’t even call this a pool, it looks more like a section of the floor is tiled and someone spilled blue anti-freeze on it. You need to actually make a hole in the ground for your water, not just color part of the floor differently

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TBH the “room design” makes no sense to me:

huyWhy
huyWhy960×540 81 KB

despite laking any more details like plants or ornaments on the wall or some ladder to go into the pool…: why are the walls tiled with wood directly above a pool ? the lowe tiles stop halfway and the outside walls are checkered… one the outside ther is also a very high wall with nore side walk or anything to take a break… the part at the bottom of the windows is very small … why ? and why this partition. is there a roof ouside ? or how do you close the pool…

… i mean… just have a look at some pools ( almost randomly found site) :

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They said it’s a poolrooms render (a subset of the backrooms). This means it’s supposed to be a slightly abstract liminal space that makes little sense, it’s an intended feature of a backrooms render.

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…subset of…

…okay we can stop any discussion…

they ain’t no cool rooms ( ← pun intended )

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