Hi guys. I made a model of a building and I want to make it photorealistic. I’ve never tried this before and I don’t have much experience with nodes and cycles.
I watched a couple of tutorials on youtube how to do this, but I’ll mention the one from BlenderGuru:
I don’t really think that I can use this method, because right now I have 1,140,414 vertices and subdiving would make it even more. Plus I’m planning to add few more things, so there’ll be even more.
I tried to make something in cycles. Here are few renders for you to see:
The the first and the second one are same, difference is only light. On first one I used sphere and on the second one I added sun. Sun is in the third one too.
For the first two I only added bump in the node editor:
Well, you’d also have a Fresnel component. Blender Guru recently did a tutorial you might check out. There’s also a number of materials on CG Cookie in the Shader Forge tutorial series. There’s probably a lot more on YouTube as well.
Also: “realism has a helluva lot to do wih realistic light.”
Cycles, like all shaders of its type, is absoutely fantastic at mimicking “a photographer’s softbox,” but it’s “smooth, even, lighting” is also in some ways its Achilles heel.
Consider using a combination of Cycles and BI, composited together. Cycles produces that softbox effect, while BI produces some directional spot-lights, edge definition, and texture-revealing light. (It also does so much more quickly. The 3D Window can use OpenGL to help you approximate what that BI-render will look like even as you are setting up the shot.) Use of the node-based compositor allows you to precisely control how the two renders will be combined.
The fundamental algorithms, even the concept, of Cycles is very different from that of BI … and yet, you have both of them at your beck and call, plus a very excellent compositor, all within the very same tool. (Certain elements, such as light-sources, are different between the two, so you might use a few “layers” to easily let you switch-on and switch-off the things that you need when doing each type of render. “Scenes” are a very convenient way to group all of the necessary settings so that you can readily switch from one to the other, even with a script or Blender command-line parameters.)
Also check out chocofur - he has an interesting way of adding bump maps as displacements to give fine-detail. You can also add displacement texture maps if you are close up.
