10 Tips for Making More Photorealistic 3D Renders in Blender

how's it going guys so today i'm going to talk about 10 things that i do on almost all of my renders to just give it a little bit more photo realism now before i get into this i do want to address who this video is for because i've talked about photorealism on the channel before and people love to get mad at me when i do that because it can be a touchy subject and there are hundreds of tips and tricks that are very specific to each individual thing and again people have to get mad at me because they're very opinionated if you have been doing blender in 3d for several years this video is not for you i made these specific tips for people who are kind of in their early months and years of doing 3d and your goal is to just get something out that looks good just something that you can fix some issues different things like that that make your render less distracting and so you that the viewer can focus on why your render is good again you're just trying to render out something that looks good and you're trying to avoid mistakes or things that are so distracting that it's like golly that looks super 3d and beginner and that's who this is for so if you're professional if you have a lot of cool tips and tricks put them in the comments be kind that's who this is for let's get into the tips so the first one is a little hacky but just don't don't show everything the less you show the less you have to make look better and i'm going to give you an example here here's a picture of just a car notice how it's not lit in every piece not everything has a light on it's a lot there's a lot of negative space there's a lot of shadow and it's showing off the shape of the car and how nice it is you have a simple paint material simple just it's just a nice car and so if you are working on a modeling tutorial or working on your own model you don't have to focus on the environment around it just light the things that are important don't show everything let me show you a contrasting example here this car they added an environment around it hdri a floor all that and what that does is it kind of takes you out of how good this model is because it is a really good model but the environment around it makes it look very cg-esque and the first render with the black and white car just looks better looks cleaner looks sharper looks more professional that's what you kind of want to go for if you're just trying to focus on making it look a little less 3d looking and more closer to oh maybe this is a real image maybe this is just something that looks more real less fake or you know one step toward photorealism now i get caught in this all the time is getting lost in the world of procedural materials if your goal is photorealism you're going to want to use image textures now if you don't like tiling of course you're going to have to do procedural materials that's why i made the real-time materials pack did want to plug that really quick but image textures are the one-stop shop for just a little bit more florida realism because they're literally photos of real things and they give you a lot of things there so use image textures when you really want to of course procedural materials do allow that flexibility to allow all that fun stuff i use them constantly i rarely use image textures but i'm not always going for photo realism and i've gotten to the point in my art where i know how to kind of make everything look pretty good with what i'm working with and that skill is going to come with time the more you learn the more you work the more a lot of these tips and tricks are just going to become muscle memory one super easy thing to do when it is appropriate is depth of field now be careful not to add too much depth of field then it looks like it's a microscopic render you know with like a really like long light range lens um but use some depth of field two things that really help with photorealism is either mimicking your render to the way your eyes see things or mimicking a render to the way a camera sees things now your eyes do have depth of field you put your hand in front you have that depth of field so you do kind of have that crossover but what i would do is look at photos of things where the the the subject is similar to the subject that you are rendering and see how much depth of field is there and try to mimic that again don't do too much so i'm going to show you here's the render i was using to demonstrate the image textures here it is without depth of field here it is with depth of field it just makes it a little bit better it makes it just a little bit more believable again the goal here is just get one step closer to something that looks a little more real and less cg beginner looking now this is a fun one this one's more focused on having control after you hit the render button and it's render at filmic log with your color space it's going to make everything go from contrasted to super flat and make sure you are rendering it at 16 bit if you choose to do this i'm looking for control the reason i do this is i don't want to have to worry about every single thing in my viewport because things have to render in the viewport so if i can focus on color and post and i do it in photoshop so i can focus on how does it look in the real world and i can use references while i'm color grading doing that in photoshop and on that note do not do everything in blender it's just not realistic and almost no professionals do that i'm going to show you an image here this is my max hey this is a before and after it looks so much better with the after it looks awesome and it just looks one step closer to the photo realism one clip closer to that beautiful realism he's doing all that in photoshop i believe it's in photoshop and he does an amazing job do not focus on getting everything perfect in the viewport do what you can in the viewport render it out you have more control and you have the ability to change things and everything doesn't have to render out all that stuff allows more flexibility a lot more control and you can really focus on getting a step closer to some photo realism now i mentioned making things behave like a camera and this one is perfect for that if you've ever been a photographer and you go outside and you're taking photos in broad daylight the sun is like right above you are bringing your exposure you're bringing your iso down making that bright go to dark so if you've ever used the sky texture in um the blender world settings you know as soon as you put it in there it's way too bright and they do that on purpose because they want you to go to your color settings and bring that exposure down it will make a noticeably better effect and it just looks real and that is how a camera works anyway you just bring that exposure down it's going to make it look better it's going to make it look cleaner more believable and i honestly love the way it looks even when i'm using area lights sometimes i bring them way too bright bring my exposure down it allows a little bit more control and it's just a little bit better more believable and a step closer to photo realism if i had a dollar for every time i set a step closer to photo reels it might be rich but that's the whole theme leave some noise again this is about cameras your eyes don't really have noise but your camera does have noise if you're shooting with a camera in low light conditions i hate denoising i almost never do it um but what i do love to do is leave some noise and my renders it's just realistic if you've been a photographer you know the struggle of noise leave a little bit of noise in your render when there is some you don't want to force it in but if there's already some in there don't take it all out don't try to make all your samples so high that there's no noise that's unrealistic again it's going to make it look a little more real or more gritty a little bit more natural now in my opinion the easiest home run for getting closer to photo realism is motion blur it's quite literally one click just click it here's one of my renders without motion blur here's one with it looks better it looks more believable also communicates a little bit emotion but that's not about photorealism but if something's moving and you're filming it at 24 frames a second i mean even your eyes have motion blur add some motion blur it's gonna make it look a little bit more believable now this one is a pretty common beginner mistake is adding too much glow with your lights now if you look around and you look at maybe regular lights and my my cat's coming into the camera i don't know if you can see her um but if you are looking at real images or the lights around you they don't always glow the really the lights that are glowing are flashlights car headlights even your phone lights all of those have glow because they're extremely bright so if you're going to have glow in your renders make sure it has some kind of contextual relevance it needs to have a reason for that i see a lot of beginners just throwing in the glare node because it looks cool looks stylistic but it kind of pulls you out of it so be careful with your glare definitely add it when you can because it does also enforce realism but also can take it back so just like depth of field it's about a balance and about finding what's actually realistic rather than just it's simply existing volumetrics is one of the easiest things to do as a beginner to kind of hide your mistakes um in large scale like sci-fi scenes i used to always add volumetrics hide maybe bad modeling high bad shading because if you add light volume it looks real but let me show you an example of a really effective way to use volumetric so this is a really cool picture of a car i'm linking all my references below i did not make this image but i'm linking some of these references below in case you want to see them this one it's on art station really cool render but check this out here it is without a little bit of volumetrics here it is with a little bit of volumetrics it's probably done in post but i don't really know how he made it notice the difference now both of them look amazing but what the volume does is it hides a little bit of that kind of ultra sharpness of the 3d render and makes it look a little bit more real maybe there was a dust on the camera maybe there was actually some fog outside but regardless it looks better and that volumetrics really pushed it a little bit forward to more of just a beautiful render rather than like maybe a distracting overly sharp design regardless this is a beautiful image and i'm not saying anything bad about it now for the last tip i'm gonna read a comment i got on a recent video i just think this is really great one thing i've read online and started noticing is that in real life really hard contrast and highly saturated colors are very rare nothing will ever be 100 black or 100 pure red and the textures use coloring done on the final render should reflect that that's absolutely true when i'm making a lot of my procedural materials you're adding that color in don't bring that little circle thing to the top bring it down a little bit because again really the only full saturated colors you're seeing is on like tv screens because you're having just bright light other than that just bring it down a little bit it will help with that just photo realism and not make it look super bright you know over contrast over saturation just aren't real so those are my big ticket item big tips and i want to give a couple smaller tips so two things that i think are really going to pull people out of your render and just make it look a little less believable is animals people and vegetation so animals and people are one of them it is extremely hard to make animals and people look real even i mean unless it's like a silhouette if you have a person standing in your render like a really cool environment sometimes it can be distracting sometimes it can make it look very amateur especially and also animals so if you're going to be using people or animal textures you're going to want to get the best you can find otherwise it's going to kind of pull you out of the render so be very sparing with how you use those and also vegetation in trees this is a little bit easier to make look good so if you're putting in models make sure they're good make sure they look believable and realistic now three things i think are home run hitters for realism and just believability one of them is metallic materials they're so easy to make look nice and believable because blender especially with cycles they just handle those reflections really well so using metallic materials is just a very easy way to make something look less distracting like oh that looks super fake also water we have things like a noise texture adding to a bump on a material or even the wave material sorry the wave modifier those are home runs they're extremely easy to just make look good almost by default so if you have an opportunity to use them to make it a render just put it out make it look good add those and the last one this one almost goes without saying but if you have a sky in your scene using hdri it's quite literally an image use hdri skies don't make your own sky don't try to hide the sky keep it in there it's going to make it look good but with that being said thank you guys for watching i hope you got something out of these tips again if you have your own tips please put them in the comments be nice help people out i'd love to see your own comments i'll be pinning to the top one of my favorites but with that being said thank you guys for watching and i'll see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 97,625

Keywords: Blender, Blender 3D, Photoreal, Blender Photoreal, 3D Photoreal, Ducky 3D

Id: Ah4SpFTTJVY

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 19 2022