Please help, I want to get better in LIGHTING and MATERIAL CREATION

[nealewan]

Hello house, it's great having a place to learn from your experience...I really need help to improve my renders, I am still an average user of 3dsmax vray and my renders are often very boring and lack depth and realism. I found out that I am really weak in creative lighting and material creation. I would really appreciate any help in getting the best study materials and tutorials that would be of help to me. Thanks in advance.

Neal.

[James Vella]

Practice makes better as my father used to tell me.

 

Its good that you know where you need improvement, the best advise I would give you is experiment with your materials and lighting. Tutorials will only teach you technical know how. Study photography, find a collection of your favorite materials, compositions and lighting and emulate these. Basics work best, learn how to use your diffuse, gloss, translucency and bump/normals - you dont really need much more than this to make some great materials. Once you can do this well - then the next step will become logical - adjusting output curves, falloffs, blend materials, composite materials - experimenting is the key when learning.

 

Try this for starters - even if you dont use corona watching it will help you learn a little about how the basics work, from there you should try for yourself

 

 

Edit:

If you really feel like going down the technical rabbit hole, have a look at some of the research that dubcat does - he knows his stuff and shares with the community:

 

https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php?topic=13398.0;all

Edited February 3, 2018 by redvella

[nealewan]

Hello James, thanks for the advice and leads... I would work on my practice.. Thanks a lot.... And nice portfolio

[James Vella]

thanks Neal, if you have any questions along the way feel free to pop in and ask theres lots of knowledgeable people in here

[CliveG]

James' advice is sound... I'd go further and say that a lot of pay tutorials are not worth your hard earned money. Some are actually just taking the Pee (Not mentioning any names ...... Grant Warwick) and most are outdated already, outpaced by the development of the renderers.

 

Study photographs, learn to really look at the sort of things you want to replicate and then to look at the work you produce and be thoroughly critical of it. It's more about learning to look, than learning some technical gumpf. Especially these days as the render engines are just so damn good.

 

Good luck.

[Andrew _GF]

On top of that, observe the materials around you. I know it sounds cliche, but at some point, I got so obsessive about it that I couldn't wait for a bus not watching bus stand materials from different angles. Some folks thought there is something wrong with me .

 

Photographs are good, but working with real objects as references will teach you a lot. You can just take some objects you have around you an try to observe and render them in a studio setting. I know a guy who works in VFX studio now and at some point, he bring lots of garbage from scrapyard as references.

[Larissa Holderness]

Just like everyone else said - practice, and observe the world around you.

 

Right now I am trying to make my materials better as well. Every day I look at how materials reflect light, where that light bounces to, the texture (LITERALLY TOUCH THE MATERIAL), the refraction if any. Go out and take pictures, even a cell phone works for this. Pick a material, lets say concrete, and go out and take pictures of different types of concrete at different angles. You'd be surprised at how reflective a material is at a sharp angle. Almost like glass in some cases.

 

I've also read on various CG Forums that you should exaggerate your materials. Make the color just a bit more saturated, make the reflectivity just a bit more reflective. Also don't forget that everything has fresnel. Everything has reflectivity - or else you wouldn't be able to see the object.

 

Never use 100% black or white (use 180, 180, 180 for white).

[heni30]

Be realistic in your expectations. Just because you get something recognizable by hitting render doesn't mean you're even remotely close to artistic excellence. It's funny but this really IS a big problem with Arch Viz. If someone wanted to learn jazz saxophone and they had been playing for a year there is no way they'd go to a music forum and say "oh darn, how can I sound more like John Coltrane - or Charlie Parker.?" They would KNOW there was 10 years of hard, arduous work ahead of them.

 

I would say in a couple of years of sustained constructive effort you'll start to see a discernable improvement. (lighting, composition, color articulation, materials, etc. etc. etc.)

 

Get rid of this impatience and enjoy the journey!

Edited February 10, 2018 by heni30