Advice on pushing more realism in my scene?

[stayinwonderland]

So here's the scene (full view 1100px):

 

 

Here are the settings:

 

Image Sampler: DMC 4/12

Filter: Cook Variable 1.3

Col Mapping: Reinhard burn value 0.005

 

Ambient Occlusion: 0.6/0.25m/128 subdivs

IRR: medium, detail enhancement on radius 60 subdivs mult. 0.8

Light Cache: 2000, retrace threshold 1.0 (for light leaks)

Noise: 0.005

 

Here's the light set up:

 

 

With a sun coming in bottom right.

 

Shadow subdivs are set to between 24 and 32 for those lights.

 

Camera: shutter speed 45, film speed 210, f-number 6.8

 

Materials: Many woods are set to have between 32 and 128 reflection subdivs.

 

 

So just wondering how to get as much lighting realism as possible really, and as clean a render as possible. I'm not sure if I'm overdoing it on the subdivs where some other route should be taken. It currently takes about 3-4 hours to render an 1100px image on a quad core laptop.

 

I personally like the realism in this image. The light really fills the space and there's hardly any noise:

 

http://stas-oliva.deviantart.com/art/The-living-room-in-classic-style-342921662

 

Any tips would be awesome

[Chris MacDonald]

Short of changing what is quite a "bland" design in terms of colour & material, I think you're mostly there really. The rest is down to post production - I'd personally blow out the windows (but I seem to remember in another topic the client wanted to see outside?) and add a subtle glow.

 

Also not a huge fan of the composition of the image, there's nothing that really grabs my eye and draws me in so I'd probably play with a different perspective - remember you don't always have to show the whole room in one shot, counter to what many clients & architects would have you believe. Sometimes you can generate a lot of interest from focusing on one small area.

 

As for lighting, aside from the direct sunlight coming in through the windows, it's all very diffuse and all the same colour. If you create areas of warm, and areas of cool/cold lighting - the contrast of the different tones against one another can make a massive difference. For example a cool blue/slightly purple exterior (think dawn/dusk) and a warm (incandescent, 3500kelvin) interior with a white balance set correctly would look quite magic, I think.

 

Post production; colour corrections, play with the colour of shadows & highlights, add vignettes to draw attention to specific areas.

[stayinwonderland]

Thanks a lot Chris, much food for thought.

 

Points: This is the camera shot the client picked, and the decor (boo). So can't do much about that, especially because I'm on a tight deadline and have modelled to the camera, so any move would mean more modelling.

 

So here's what I just did in post to bring out the composition and colour composition (full size 1000px):

 

 

But now I'm getting concerned with noise. Given the settings I gave you above, why is there still noise!? One guess is detail enhancement? - that often brings noise.

[Chris MacDonald]

Detail enhancement only affects the GI solution, so the only noise you'd get from that would be a subtle blotchiness in corners where it's focused on taking more samples than the surrounding areas - not a fine grainy noise. This is a fairly easy way of determining where noise is coming from; if it's soft & splotchy, it's GI, if it's fine & grainy it's something else - usually reflections/lighting.

 

To find out what's causing the noise you'd need to set up some render elements (lighting, reflection, global illumination) and looking at each to see where the noise appears. My bet is on the reflection pass, to be honest. If time is of the essence, try a region render with the render elements set up.

 

As you said though, with those settings I wouldn't expect to be seeing much noise, especially with your AA filter set to a minimum of 4. However with that said, I usually render at 2k upwards for final renders, so I tend not to see the noise as much.

Edited January 18, 2013 by Macker

[stayinwonderland]

Ok, I'll try a few render passes. Now, the above is not final render size, I will go for 3000px - does render size affect noise levels then?

[Chris MacDonald]

Of course, you're essentially downsampling the noise. It will still be visible when zoomed in to 100%, but when viewed as a whole you wont notice it. I'll make an example as a picture speaks a thousand words.

 

I made the material on this deliberately noisy, the first was rendered at 800x600 and as you can see it's horrible - then the second was rendered with the exact same settings, nothing changed - just a higher resolution (3000x2250), then downscaled to match the 800x600 render (though there's no need for downscaling on your renders, I did this purely for comparison purposes).

 

On the large image the noise is still there when you zoom in to 100%, just as much as the original - but due to the larger output it's far less visible. This process is exactly what an antialiasing filter does, only an antialiasing filter does it on a pixel by pixel level, subdividing each pixel until it reaches a satisfactory noise threshold.

Edited January 18, 2013 by Macker

[stayinwonderland]

Ah, interesting. I suspected this was the case but hadn't really thought it through. So I guess if I get a small amount of noise at around the 1200px mark then I could just render out 3000px and downscale. Which is what I was going to do anyway, it's just that I didn't know if my noise levels were going to need to be perfect at 1200px.

 

Thanks for explaining. I'll keep at it and post updates

[stayinwonderland]

Here's a test render I just did:

 

 

Medium settings I would say. The subdivs on the floor reflection are 64. A/O subdivs 32. Lights subdivs 12.

 

Any thoughts on some final settings there?

 

Cheers

[matthewspencer]

Personally I like your image better than your "motivation" image!

 

I'm not believing the plant leaf textures, maybe throw the smallest amount of translucency on them.

[Chris MacDonald]

Those are some really high settings,i think the noise will be fine at full resolution.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I would start by deleting the light behind the camera, or at the very least make it less intense. This will make the blue areas I marked on your image start to darken up and offer a contrast shadow.

 

Right now your never really moves deep into the image. It is stopped by the table, column, couch, etc... the movement deep into the image isn't happening for me.

 

Doing the lighting trick I mentioned above will help pull your eye to the back of the image because it will be the brightest part, and you will want to go towards the light.

 

But you also need to adjust the composition some despite what the client says. I would loose the couch that seems to be facing the wall on the left. You might also want to slide the camera to the right and rotate a bit towards the fire place. This will reduce the amount counter you are seeing which would be a good thing. Why look at the back of the counter?

 

Or if you can't move that at least move the plant away from the column and put it against the wall on the right. This will hep to block the back of the counter, and offer a foreground object that will help to build depth in the scene.

 

I didn't detail the plant part in my markup, but I think it would be a good move.

[stayinwonderland]

Hey Travis, I really appreciate that composition feedback thanks. But the tricky thing is the client (who in turn is serving another client, so the client's client) is dictating major emphasis on 'things'. So they want a full view of the ocean (even if in reality it would blow out due to interior exposure). They want a kitchen counter visible, they want a dining set visible and they want sofas visible next to the fire.

 

Right now I just want to focus on removing the noise and emphasising realism - I can do another version of this scene to satisfy my portfolio if need be.

 

Currently rendering a 3000x1350px image to see if the noise disappears when reduced to about 1200px wide. We'll know by morning!

[Chris MacDonald]

Don't reduce to 1200px, just keep it at full scale. I only downsampled to prove a point, rendering at high res effectively downsamples noise; it's not necessary to actually reduce the image size.

[stayinwonderland]

Yeah but the client will see it on his screen first and will complain if there's noise. Plus it looks good in both his and my portfolio at those dimensions.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

So they want a full view of the ocean (even if in reality it would blow out due to interior exposure)

 

I didn't realize there was an ocean out the window. Can you open the doors and place someone on the deck that has an upscale summer/beach dress on? Maybe they are staring at the ocean and their hair is blowing int he wind.

 

Can you kill the back light and move that plant into the foreground on the left? Both of these will improve the composition and feel of reality in the image.

[stayinwonderland]

Hey folks,

 

I did a full size render over night and then set photoshop loose on it. Sorry in advance that I can't implement all your suggestions but I did take everything on board and used some of the principles to guide the eye to a focal point and use colour composition to help with that.

 

 

My main issue in this thread was lighting realism rather than overall believability, so bear that in mind. Regardless of whether you think I've made a few mistakes, the suggestions here did get me to push it further than I otherwise would have.

 

Thanks