Hi,
I decided to ask because I’m loosing it.
Why these renders look so, so fake. I did other stuff before, which I was pretty happy with, but that one looks super unrealistic.
Maybe you could be able to point what is wrong here. I’m posting all renders I did in chronological order, with a lot of changes during process.
I have huge problem with translusent curtains shader, and view outside window. Maybe you have some ideas how to make it properly.
First off, it’s not bad at all.
There are indeed a few elements that contribute to making the picture look artificial. What I can see :
the wood flooring is too big, you should increase the density of this material
generally speaking the normal mapping on some materials (table & flooring especially) is too strong, this gives the impression that we’re dealing with plastic objects
the ceiling looks a little low (or the furniture is too big relative to the size of the room)
Basically most of it is a matter of scale imho. But it’s looking good already, with a few adjustments it’ll be even better.
I’m with Hadriscus. I’m facing the same problem. I’m trying to get better at environment as a 3D animator, and my textures / scale / normal mapping always looks off. Your scene looks good, especially the lighting, but you need to tweak the scale / textures a bit
I think the biggest problem you have is scaling. Your scale looks massively off on just about everything.
Same applies to your textures. They’re all mapped too big, and so it gives everything a miniature look.
Fix the scaling, and I think it will make a huge difference. Then it will just be a case of tweaking the materials. At the moment, everything apart from the mirror looks pretty diffused. Needs some roughness maps.
I think some of it is in the proportions of the furniture pieces. Are those chairs and couch based on real life products? It’s hard to tell for sure based on images alone, but the size of their different parts feel off compared with each other (like the size of the chairs’ legs feels off compared with the seat, which feels off compared with the back) and the different pieces of furniture feel off compared with each other and the room. Ideally, furniture is something that should be based on real world measurements.
For your curtains, I think they look fine. The outside landscape is about as good as you will get with just an image. The only thing to check is to make sure you are using an HDRI and not a regular picture (if you are not already), so the outside has the correct amount of light. Apart from that, the only way to do better would be to actually make the outdoors in 3D and do it with perfect realism.
On a technical level, I think I am seeing some shading issues on some of the models, like the foot of the lamp on the floor and on the ceiling lamp. You should learn about the “auto-smooth” and “mark sharp” features. For objects that have a bevel on them, then the modifier “weighted normals” is what you need, as it will improve their shading.
Thank you guys for sharing opinions. I’ll try to make it right, maybe besides 3d outdoor, because it is as crazy as it sounds
Already tweaked floor and couch. Repaired ambient occlusion in the corners and normals on the wall (visible in 360 sphere).
As outdoor image I just used UV Sphere with HDR texture on it (shadless, without shadows), because working with free HDRIs never suits my needs with lighting, so I try to search for diffrent options.
Out of scale problem is probably thing which I don’t see clearly yet. Maybe it will come with experience Every furniture (not decorations) has been done by me, unfortunately without any refrence, so your points are 100% correct. I was just using Blender measurement and scale, to based everything on reality.
Apart from the textures with too strong bump, as mentioned already, the scale could need work.
A tip is to always model with real scale dimensions when you do ArchViz, then everything will fit perfectly like magic. You can easily Google standard dimensions on different types of buildings and rooms, or measure your own house / apartment and furnitures.
As others have said, too strong normals and scale being wrong just throw your eye off, you just sense something is wrong. In terms of judging scale ofr furniture, it’s really easy, google some actual furniture and grab the dimensions as a pointer to how big they should be. For chairs, that would even included the seat height, so you can build around that. Look at the standard door / window sizes and room heights to get your overall scale. I heartily recommend watching some Architecture Topics videos, his YouTube channel is very informative.
Noise. That’s what’s making the pics look fake. And they don’t look fake at all, I don’t think you used the right word to start with. With the amount of noise in the picture it’s like a roadmap to “it’s gotta be 3D”. Make it look more like a picture would look like and the issues brought up before probably won’t be the issues it once was. A little post processing work goes a long way too for making something that looks average look professional. I’m assuming you know where the denoising button is in the properties section and if you’re like me and need to hunt it up, yeah, it’s a pain to find but that’s probably all you need to do.
The wood materials of the chairs, table, bed are too shiny. The room is too big for the furniture. You need to change the proportions. And the chairs…they are too ordinary. You need to find more interesting chair models.
@rgarber These are preview renders but yeah, noise is pain in the ***. I’ve seen huge visualizations with crazy amount of models, samples were around 500-1000 and it looked perfectly fine. About mine - here it’s render with 3000 samples and still looks noisy. About denoiser, maybe it’s my lack of knowlege, but everytime I use it, details and lightning are blend together, and it’s even worse. (compositor and in render properies). To be honest I didn’t checked it out online yet, and I use default settings usually.
I checked scale, and chairs were little too big, so I corrected them. But rest of it match scale - couch, tv cabinet, table, shelves - everything I compared with real dimensions matches.
Room height is 2,5m which is proper as well.
Still unfortunately I’m not satisfied
But, when I look on these renders, I think it’s about materials of chairs and couch. It’s odd.
Download a free generic low poly human. Add it to the scene. Make it exactly 5ft10in tall and then place it next to things in the room. With a human in the scene some things will feel more or less incorrect and help you more quickly decide what needs to be scaled up or down.
What are your camera settings. Most of your images feel like a very very tall person or a very very short person took the photo.
The noise does not bother me. The lighting in this looks 10x better than anything I’ve done and I’ve been trying very hard for a long time.
If you have actual glass in the windows that could cause noise. The curtains could be a source of noise. The HDRI background could cause noise if it’s not a good quality one. You might need to put portals over the window to better guide the HDRI lighting into the room and reduce noise (actually I think it allows you to use more render samples without increasing render time.) Like window glass, the glass over the lightbulb could be a source of noise too.
One solution to noise (sometimes) is to significantly increase the strength of all of the lights and then adjust the exposure. To quickly test if this might be worth trying, use the nishita sky texture and try to match the sun angle from your HDRI. Do not decrease the nishita strength. If nishita sky is much much brighter than your hdri, make you hdri stronger to be closer to nishita and then adjust the exposure in color management.
Portal is there, so it’s not a cause. HDRI is faked one - scene use background color and sun as lightning (besides indoor lights). HDRI is on UV sphere just as outdoor view, for nothing else
But I’ll try to make it with proper HDRI, maybe it will help.
Idea with exposure is great as well, I’ll check it out.
Below I put screens of metarig I added to check out scale as @joseph said and for me it looks fine. Maybe TV is too big, but it never should be an issue and balcony door.
What’s your camera’s focal length? I also think having camera at more ‘human’ heights might help, too. Try placing the camera looking straight ahead rather than looking down slightly, and at a regular human height a picture might be taken. Camera’s looking downwards often make things seem off, because people won’t generally take pictures from heights like that.
Also, going back to scale - it goes far beyond just making sure that things are roughly the right size. It’s also about making sure that things - in their makeup - make sense from a scale perspective, too.
For example, look at the sofa. Look at the width of the arm rests, compared with the depth/thickness of the cushions. Have you ever sat on a sofa with cushions that thick? Things like that immediately draw the eye, just as much as a bad material or anything else.
Trying to model furniture completely from imagination is often not a great idea, unless it’s something you excel at. Try and look at some real world examples. G to any furniture website, and you’ll find hundreds of things to choose from. Of course you can make it your own, but basic proportions matter a lot.
The renders - to me - still have a dolls house vibe.
Every furniture (not decorations) has been done by me, unfortunately without any refrence, so your points are 100% correct. I was just using Blender measurement and scale, to based everything on reality.
