Hello guys,
Today I worked all day in a scene that I could have done in few hours ¿Why? Because the client bad habits…
This work is for the ceramic tile sector, and this sector is 20 years working with 3dsmax users to create this type of scenes. This 3dsmax users uses non PBR rules to work, because they are old people that learned 3d with old render engines without PBR rules or they are young people that learned 3d from old people with old habits.
The marketing people in this bussines sector are used to work with this people and they ask for things that I’m not used for.
The most exaggerated is the light. The light is always white light. In 3dsmax They use a dome light and playing with the expossure they have a perfect, soft and regular light in all scene. We have the world background but this don’t work with the same result that vray dome light.
Please look this video at 02:50
For other hand, the light linking… They have a super-lighted scene but the ceramic tiles reflect the light like a soft studio light was used.
I know the light linking will come in the next blender versions, but today for this type of projects we go behind
uh? Max, Maya and the rest have had PBR workflows for years, probably before in Blender. Also, this has nothing to do with “old people”. That’s disrespectful. These “old people” are making money in industries using software other than blender. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong or they are old. They are simply using other software. It could be you don’t know how to use Max and you’re taking it out on the software and people who use it versus “user error” in yourself.
This is toxic.
Also you wrote: “The marketing people in this bussines sector are used to work with this people and they ask for things that I’m not used for.” This means you need to adapt and use the tools they want you to use, or you find other clients. I’ve used various software in my “old” life from Maya, C4D, Houdini, Blender and more. Many places won’t hire you off of Blender experience. They have a pipeline and you are hired based on your knowledge of the tools they use. You can complain about other people and how they aren’t using Blender but that’s not going to get you a job there. It’s real world out there.
I think the complaint is more directed at older workflows, that didn’t include physically based lighting.
This is pretty common actually, marketing people hate physics. They want clean white backgrounds and even, soft lighting. These requests do go against the ‘modern’ PBR way of doing things, but that’s life.
Disable filmic to get pure white without insane brightness. Ignore what the ‘industry standard’ is. Your client wants results that match the results they are used to getting, give them what they want or they will find someone else who will do it for them.
My apologise, I’m not native english and I did not express myself correctly. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to anyone.
I wanted to refer to the fact that the most veteran people know how to work with workflows in which the light is not pbr and in blender that workflow is more complicated to work than in vray.
I don’t think this is related to software, they just don’t use physically correct lighting setup. It doesn’t matter if light is adjusted from exposure or increasing strength from white sphere outside of scene. It is still correct way to use PBR materials and they are likely meant to light it non-realistic way.
It would be very stupid to build assets that can not used in other lighting, so right place to do adjustment is lighting, not materials.
But this is good to know if I ever have same kind of situations, would be better to do render sample materials in Cornell box and physically accurate conditions and do modelling. If client complaints that it look wrong, that means more billable work.
Don’t forget compositing to fudge the lighting in an attempt to match legacy rendering tech. I do not think the client should complain at all when the real-world tiles get to him and they look different (because our environment does not have blinn/phong shading and our eyes are not sRGB cameras).
Filmic tone mapping is a challenge to translate to print, for a lot of simple renders.
Being able to have white be so much easier to reach is of benefit when you are making product renders for a catalog and they all need to have drop shadows on a clean white background.
Yes, you still can get that effect with filmic, but it takes a lot more compositor tricks than I would like.
Also, when you are dealing with clients who have long established product lines, you need to have new renders match the old ones.
You don’t need to go all the way back to 1982 tech, but sometimes, you gotta go back to 2010 tech to get the job done.
Also tiles are notoriously difficult to match, even to themselves. A lot of manufacturers recommend getting everything you need in one batch, because if you order the same product from a different batch, they might not match up exactly. Carpet is like this too. Plastic laminate countertop material is like that too. A lot of things aren’t perfect, so you can have a degree of leeway in your rendering.
Is indeed very old school technique, but also is the most efficient.
If for example you consider that all materials are diffuse shaded and they have the fake-PBR embedded in them (they blend with the ‘environment texture node’ nicely). It will make your rendering process and settings more optmized by a magnituded. No weird artefacts, no heavy calculations… Because you won’t rely on ray bounces to get a nice tone in surfaces, because the environment matcap can give you a foundation to work with.
However all of these need tests and see what looks best at which case.
