Need help to improve

[Ugo Iglesias]

Hello all,

 

These are some renderings I've been working on and there are some things I'd like to improve.

 

I'd love to have a more natural look.. I've seen some jobs here that have this "halo" which makes them more realistic. IMO these look "cartoonish" in some way.

 

I would like to minimize the hairline on the alpha channel boundary. 

 

If you would help me to input the right settings for exterior renderings like this, I'd really appreciate it. Pretty much, I'm using the standard with very little changes.

 

Thanks in advance for your help, guys..

 

Ugo

[Sampdoria]

Nice detailed work! Some things I think which are making the renders look a bit dull are things like *probably* the lighting and the flooring for the renders.

 

The lighting seems too soft - I dont like the studio lighting thing for either exterior or interior renders. I simply use the default Exterior or Interior settings. I used to point the sun "Directly" but these days I use the the sun as per daylight timings and for some reason it comes out much more natural.

 

I've noticed that a bad flooring/ground material can destroy a good rendering as much as a rather terrible sky in the bg. It sometimes takes me some time to create a ground material because most projects vary from each other.

 

Another aspect is I use the Pathtracer for 90% of my renderings. Sometimes I overlay the Packet Renderer image over the pathtracer where I have a lot of green because Packet Renderer gives more brighter tree/leaves colours.

 

I like to throw some foreground shadows or place corner plants to give the scene a bit of "binding" feel.

 

If necessary, you could play with the Brightness/Contrast settings while the scene is rendering (or just after its done).

 

Another final aspect is a little bit of photoshop which for Nxt has reduced considerably because it renders so well!

 

Attached are few works based on what Ive been doing.

[Sampdoria]

I forgot to add, Marc C. trees are the best.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Really nice work-- do we have all of these in the gallery?

[Sampdoria]

Hi Roy, if the query is for me, yep, 1/3 are in the gallery. Others I will upload later on.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

It was, thanks.  I remembered the bottom one, but not the other two.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Composite you base material like the nxt brick with normal/bump maps to help give it more realism. use the renee's material for your car park.

[akinlolu olugboji]

for the walkway this or similar.

 

The sunlight direction or azimuth should be perpendicular to the camera for good shade and shadow cast as this helps gives the rendering a sense of depth.

 

A bit of glossiness to the walls will not be a bad idea and having exterior indirect on if you cannot afford the impact of path tracer is not a bad ideas to IMHO.

 

For the figures, stick to RPC's as the non RPC figures am seeing in the attached shots are not looking to good.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Love the water in pool I must say.

[Ugo Iglesias]

Thanks for your reply, tips and files provided. I'll give them a try.

 

All the figures I'm using are RPC, as well as the trees. The shrubs and others are NXT groundcovers.  There seems to be a problem with the self luminance setting on the RPC's: I raised them to 2.0 and still render dark. I wish to make them brighter because it's easier to touch up than if they're dark to make them fit the overall image contrast/brightness. Dunno if I need to raise the self luminance beyond or which number works.

The pool water took some time to achieve. Whilst the mapping can be scaled beyond the bump image limits, it pixelates at certain step (Drawing units are in milimeters). I had to tweak for a while to achieve this result and get other images to work with. Still, the model is not done: Some blue mosaic stripe below floatline and a pool flooring perimeter stripe next to the coping must be added to make it "closed" and neat. At that time, I'll make the water material lighter but won't mess with the bump.

 

ATM I'm modeling a third building that goes opposite from the pool view I've provided while generating more exterior views with changes suggested by the staff. So, as you may suspect, things are getting hot but what do you know?.. we just love this job!

 

Thanks again..

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

The pool one, in particular, isn't bad at all.  Unless you're trying to model a coated or sand-blasted glass, make sure glass has sharp reflections.  Start with the nXt Glass template and move the IOR up to 1.55 or so.

I prefer photo-realistic renderings without people (like most architectural photographs.)

[Ugo Iglesias]

Thanks for your responses.

 

@ Sampdoria: Very nice jobs!. The images I've submitted were rendered non-path tracing method, with little adjustments on brightness/burn/saturation. Currently the PC is near 400 passes on a path tracing one. Still there are some undesirable pixels here and there but it's my fault on some material settings. The Sun is set via daylight timings but set manually. I'll try on your tips for the composition. Of course i'd love to have better trees but since I need tropical ones (palms mostly), can't seem to find them>> I must use PS because I have a problem on the contact point between RPC's and displacement grass which generates alpha artifacts over the grass. 

 

@ Roy: Thanks for your time. I will try fixing the glass as you explained but I must retain close to zero transparency while making it look varied between locations. I agree on non-populated renderings but in this case it's the client's prerogative.

This model is wide. I have problems setting up the perimeter and ground plane and can't model it all, so must play with composition tricks a bit more. I'll update asap.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

You probably won't see much inside anyway-- but if you need to make it opaque that's fine-- just kill the blurry reflections.  They make the glass look strange.