I made a few circles in your first render
Those are places where I expect more shadow. So I think it could be the settings for the lights and and shadows: shadows, bias, contact shadow, etc
Later on I see you want to improve the lighting/HDRI, but world light doesn’t cast shadows in EEVE, so I doubt if that will make things better.
I am curious how those shadows would look like in the free spEEVEE addon.
If you want to give it a try a few tips:
- You can turn on HDRI, but just a tiny bit, like 0.1 strength
- Use the beige-looking preset which has a grid and very colorful bouncing-light-box (cube for indirect lighting). I believe that preset looks less sterile.
- Always bake after changing lights / before rendering.
- You can give the backdrop a lighter color before baking, after baking you turn it down again. (bit of cheating).
In your second render I the shadows in the basket with apples looks a bit weird, and I think that’s because you are using to much HDRI / World light. (It doesn’t cast shadow)
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Much, much improved! This almost passes the reality test for me… I would remove the apple leaves as they are in my experience more often seen in cartoons than in real life… and I would readjust the knife as it looks like it’s clipping into the plate.
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Here’s another update to the render.
Added:
Outer band to plate (With/Without cheap edge wear to material)
Bubbles to Pint, Now officially Cider
Normal map added to cut apples
DoF changed along with Lighting tweaks
Knife placement altered slightly
Cycles render attached.
Thanks again for all your kind comments.
Hi, thanks for the feedback, heres a quick cycles render without the apple leaves, this has the edge wear missing from the plate so please check my other render if you want to see that.
Thanks again 
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I think you should add the blender mist pass, hopefully find a tutorial on how to enable it, its pretty easy then you just mix it in with nodes in the compositor after the render is done. Also try and figure out how to get a bright white rim light lighting up all the edges of those apples from behind. And maybe re-think the lighting, i think just trying different HDRIs might help.
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Do you mean different HDRI’s using the EEVEE render engine? Or when using Cycles?
If you load an HDRI into the scene even if you are using EEVEE you can click the ‘scene world’ and scene lights’ buttons in the option boxes in the toolbar at the top of the viewport, this will enable HDRI lighting in EEVEE…It should result in very similar renders to the cycles render.
Owh,
It might be ok to check the material on a sphere.
But HDRI’s don’t cast shadows in EEVEE. And It destroys the quality of an EEVEE render completely for scenes. I mean that’s why you see so many ugly EEVEE renders: the users turn on HDRI / world light.
The Blender devs should disable world light in EEVEE completely if you ask me.
And no shadow catcher or AO will help.
