Parliment of victoria
Which is located in melbourne australia, I recreated this place in blender. Everything is custom made by myself (besides some textures)
Rendered in cycles with denoising at 256 samples. I created an animation out of the environment.
With some extra composition using darktable.
The one single thing that would most improve it is… use a photo of the stars. (Maybe an HDRI?) Everything looks amazing, but the fake starfield kills the composition.
I agree, in a city with a high amount of light pollution, the night sky would have nowhere near this amount of stars realistically. Is that what you mean?
Well, yes, but light pollution shouldn’t stop you from producing a pretty render with stars.
Something I discovered ages ago is that it is actually freakishly hard to generate stars that look right with a computer… and the ones in your renders are very obviously a simple computer-generated bunch of randomly distributed dots.
The juxtaposition from a beautifully modeled, textured, and rendered scene on a fake starfield is rather jarring to my eye.
(Lol, ever read Nightfall by Asimov?)
EDIT:
For example, either of these could be easily modified (via nodes!) to make them significantly darker and work for your scene.
The skybox is a high resolution exr that I played around with in the node editor to make darker using rgb curves mainly, its understandable you confused it as a procedural skybox as a similar result could definitely be achieved through some simple gradient and voronoi texture.
Ill definitely consider more realistic environment texture options in my next projects tho. The one I used here doesnt make much sense based on how I used it, I wanted to make it abit brighter but increasing the brightness made it look alot worse.
I used the same texture for a different project I did also, here you can see what it looks like when brighter:
And this is the hdr texture I used, the main reason I like this so much is because there is no ground, its a pure skybox which means i dont have to move it downward and risk stretching the top. (I converted it to a png so I can upload it here but its original file type is hdr) Processing: kloppenheim_02_puresky_16k (1).png…
