Reply To: Feedback on increasing photorealism: is it lighting or materials?

[Omar Domenech]

Well, you’re giving various technical aspects, but none of that really matters so much in the end if you ask me. I used to ask Kent all those sorts of questions all the time, as if there was some button on Blender that I was missing that I needed to push and things would start looking better. But it’s not a technical issue so much as an artistic one. What you actually discover as you practice more and more, is that an appealing image is not that easily put into a procedure that you can follow, as if it was a dish you are preparing. Even dishes in the kitchen go wrong no matter how well you follow the cooking instructions, that’s because cooking is an art form in itself. It has to do with taste or a feel, same with 3D art, it is taste, eye, judgement, micro decisions here and there that add up.

Sure you can follow a tutorial step by step to get an exact result, but that person already went through the artistic decision making process to arrive at that result you’re already looking at. Now you watch the tutorial and you get the sense that it’s about following some steps. What used to happen to me was that I watched a thumbnail on a YouTube video, the render looks amazing, and you’re like wow I want to know how to get that result, I will surely learn some trick here that will unlock all the wonders of rendering, some setting that I’m missing. Typically I watched the video and felt underwhelmed because the person did everything I already know how to do, he pushed all the buttons I pushed. So I slowly realized it’s not technical, it’s artistic, judgments, feel, moving lights a lot, tweaking materials a lot, changing camera angles a lot, re-lighting again, oh look I like how shadows give volume to objects in this situation, scene framing and composition, let your eye and senses guide you, etc.

Lighting and presentation are ultra important. The most awesome and detailed model can fall flat with bad lighting and presentation, while the most simple model can be elevated with pure artist beauty on lighting and composition alone. I know it’s not the answer you’re hoping for, but again, it’s all about practice and doing it a lot. You start to develop the sense. You’ll use 10% of the features in Blender 90% of the time, and in that tiny margin is where all the magic of awesome rendering can happen.

Oh and by the way, your render looks super cool and realistic. Yeah you can push it even further, but most of the time we are our worst critic. Get that scene and start it from scratch and try taking different approaches to lighting and composition, start experimenting. Make bold moves, light colors that you might not use or use extreme camera angles. While you fool around there’s usually an Aha! moment where you feel things look nice and different and something clicks, so you pursue that.