So, I’ve been playing with Blender 3.0 for the past 2 days now, and with the release of Cycles X, I’m curious on some settings that’ll make my future products more realistic?
Also, do you guys also know any free motion capture tools for blender? It can be web-based or software based. My OS in Linux btw 
If you want to really push realism, then the first thing you need to do is ditch the built-in Principled Shader node, and either build your own from the individual components or find a comprehensive shader node provided by the community. The node itself was created for the purpose of allowing an artist to direct the look of the scene as opposed to keeping everything within physical boundaries. It works great for those who prioritize artistic flair in their work though.
Second, make sure you have Filmic as your tonemap with a contrast setting set. Keep in mind to also learn the concept of Albedo (as opposed to legacy RGB values like 0.8,0.8,0.8), as knowing that will be needed to make the tonemapping work well.
yeah I start to go away from it myself.
I was kinda shocked to see how my own plastic shader killed the Principled shader …
I never used it for any final image render, so I never fell into the pitfall of thinking it is the only thing you need.
Unfortunately, it has led to a lot of people not discovering the various uber shaders built by the community so we now have commentary about the ‘Cycles look’ (which essentially is saying that the engine just does not cut it compared to commercial solutions). At the least, the Principled Shader needs to be expanded to include a ‘physical mode’ which would be more complex to use, but far more realistic. I do not think it would take a major undertaking because it already appears to be a hardcoded group node.
Bad custom shaders are way slower than the principled one, right?
possible but his point is right. I hate when my students use Keyshot or Enscape or Lumion.
You see the engine.
Is there a list of some of them? I tend to use the principled shader for most things just due to time.
Would love to see a comparison of those!
Me to!
Also is there someone who knows what happens inside the principled shader? I’m not a technical guy so I don’t get the “non realistic computations” happening inside the principled bsdf.
All I found was this:
The base layer is a user controlled mix between diffuse, metal, subsurface scattering and transmission. On top of that there is a specular layer, sheen layer and clearcoat layer.
Particularly plastic reflections I find less believable with the principle shader
A classic mix shader with diffuse and glossary and a custom fresnel / blend value looks better.
Other engines like luxrender or octane have analog film simulation and the ability to use custom LUTs for tone mapping. Where as blender only has filmic. Cycles definitely needs some kind of LUT system built in at the render stage or compositor stage.
I would be really curious, if any of you has the time to do this, to show me the difference a setup with the principled bsdf and a custom shader setup, in terms of quality. From what I understand, there shouldn’t be much difference between this. I personally always took for granted that the PBSDF just packed together the multiple nodes, but that the underlying math was the same. Shader nodes just allow more flexibility (perhaps possibly at the cost of material realism?).
I’ve done a little silly test, recreating the same very simple material (with the same values) with PBSDF and multiple shaders. They look the same, as I would expect.
Would it be possible to see a setup where, with the same settings, multiple shaders produce a better result than the principled shader? This is not meant at all as a polemical remark, I’m just interested in this matter!
I think great and very detailed models, accurate lighting and great shaders are the most important factors. You can apply all the render tricks in the book, but if either one of these aspects is not good enough…
Also what kind or Photorealism do you want?
Photography that tries to depict physical reality as close as possible or artistic/cinematic photography, which is more influenced by artistic interpretation and the desire to create beautiful images.
Also, you probably know this already but saving your renders in 32bit floating point EXR is essential if you want to do proper compositing. Which brings me to the next point, which might be a rather unpopular opinion in this community:
You should probably ditch Blender for compositing and use a pro compositor.
I would recommend (the free version of) Resolve/Fusion.
Guilty. I know that these exist somewhere, but since the Principled Shader was implemented I am using it and nothing else.
I also second what Captainkirk said. I too would appreciate it if you could point us in the right direction to an übershader that gives an increase in quality over the principled shader.
Good to know, I’ll guess I have to rebuild all the 30+ plastic shader of my current project.
Agreed, but if you really need one right now, BlenderBob has mentioned an commercial (~15 bucks) LUT addon for Blender in one of his recent videos. You might want to check that out.
