I am relatively new to Blender, and I have been following some tutorials. This time I tried to make something of my own and tried my hand at blender. I made a very detailed bicycle and it was looking fine past the modeling and texturing. But when I tried for a final render, the image looks completely fake. What am I doing wrong? Texturing or lighting or both or more? Here is the image.
I also used PBR materials.
I know I have to work more on the sun position as it is a sunset scene. How do I make it realistic?
Have you tried lighting using a HDRI instead of a sun lamp? The HDRI will add realistic reflections as well as realistic lighting. The reflections on what should be glossy parts of your mesh (e.g. the spokes and chain sprocket, frame etc) are far too flat and uniform. There are plenty of ‘sunset’ HDRIs available free of charge.
You could also add a bit of depth of field too. Uniformly sharp renders without any DOF are usually a dead giveaway.
As moony says, though even taking lighting into account, the materials look very basic. Could you share a .blend so we can see how you have it all set up?
I want to show a really fresh bike in an outside old place. Old vs new sort of thing. What should I add to it? if I add rust to it, then I will have to add it to the rest of the parts.
I wouldn’t mess around too much with DOF here. Bike is in focus against a wall, shot in a sunny daylit scene so aperture wouldn’t typically be wide open. A post blur in the bottom, and only veeery slightly would suffice if you even bothered.
You haven’t provided a reference photo, so hard to guess what look you’re trying to achieve. But the texturing seems lacking on the bike. You mention you use PBR shaders, but what is actually controlling them?
I would probably hide the tiling, because that is always a dead giveaway. Probably enough to crop it to a square format, or get bigger covering textures for the wall and pavement, or do some node tricks to break up the tiling (use a noise texture to blend two differently oriented and rotated textures, or more).
You search the following words in Google images, and you analyze why:
Bicycle leaning against the wall
Edit:
If it is sunlight, for me it looks very dark.
Regarding scene composition (frame the shot), if you are looking for photorealism, you read some rules that sometimes it is convenient to follow:
There is no reference photo. I designed the bike using multiple photo and just decided to put it against a concrete like wall. That’s all. It’s a very small first independent project for me. I didn’t get the tiling part. Can you please explain?
Quite a few obvious things:
-Bike is straight like it is propped up invisibly -like not against a wall(cock steering sideways and tilt it)
-weird pinching around tires
-thicken the frame-fancy seats have suspension& a longer post
-chain defies gravity-and is devoid of lubrication that is even on a new bike
-brakes are held invisibly-
-larger wheel hubs-shiny chrome spokes
-maybe paint some dirt on tires
Here is a technique I sometimes use to break up repeating patterns in textures, or at least making them a lot less obvious and hard to spot. This one uses a single seamless texture as a basis, and may not be suitable to the ones you’re using which has lines going in fixed directions. Alternatively you could add this stuff to your existing textures and may still be able to break it up a bit.
A simple tip would be to just look out for perfection. For example the most obvious thing to me, by quite a long way, is the perfectly smooth tyres on the bike. Things that are perfectly clean, smooth or straight, just tend to look weird and unnatural. Try adding a tyre tread pattern to the tyres and then see how it looks. Gradually build in detail and look at reference images too.
I know there are lot o tweaks to be made. But my computers lags a lot when working with the bike, that’s why I had to remove a lot o details like the clips that hold the brake wire.
It’s the accumulation of many small things that’ll sell it. Don’t try to go too over the top when adding the finer details to any one part. Trying to do too much can be just as bad as doing nothing at all. Try making some part look just a little bit better, and then move on to something else. After you’ve added several minor improvements, it’ll hopefully add up to a significant improvement. I’m just a beginner too, but I find that this tends to be true of most forms of making things.
some stickers could add some realism, but for the most part I think the model is too ‘linear’… it misses melting joints, some tubes from the frame are normally thicker than others, but in your bike everything is equal, the brakes look like they’re floating and look tiny, etc. The frame material looks too glossy, the seat too thin, the wheels too simple and clean.
On the enviroment, a little dirt, some small plants, and other objects could enhance it even more.
