Render Engine Limitations?

[Mustafa Sarkisla]

Hi there!

I'm Mustafa and a newbie here. This is a great community, wish I saw this earlier... But anyway, I am an architect and also an archviz artist from Turkey. I wanted to ask for your opinions about rendering engine limitations. In the images below, you will see Lumion renderings of my latest work. I did A LOT of post-production in these images yet they still miss the photorealistic feel. In my humble opinion, it looks OK in an aesthetic way. But more like a Pixar-ish animation style. I was wondering if it is possible to achieve true realism in softwares like Lumion? Or maybe I am doing something wrong in the post-production process... A lot of folks from this profession belives tools are just tools but, is that really true?

What do you people think? Any feedback would be appreciated. Thank you.

[Francisco Penaloza]

I am not obsessed with 'Photorealism' my self.
I do believe that the term it self is missed understood also.

But I get your point, the straight answer, on my opinion is, Yes, Lumion is not a real 'raytracer', all the lighting and material functions are approximation and optimization for fast feedback.  They are doing a very good job any ways, and every release it just gets better. But compared with any other True raytracer such, V-Ray, Corona, Arnold- Renderman (the one that Pixar uses BTW) it is a different approach.

Having said all that, you still can get more out of lumion but you need to increase details, in your textures, materials and modeling.

Your images look very good BTW, a little dark to my eyes, missing some extra punch, but that is all about style and what the client like.

If you would like to absolute hyper realism then you should change your render engine and 3D app to something such, 3D Max and Corona/V-Ray, or Cinema 4D. Even Unreal could get a more advanced look, but it is not magic, to get any image to the next level you need to put much work on modeling, Materials and lighting, much more than your typical workflow.

Best luck.