Achieve Photorealism in Your Animations with This Simple Trick!

I recently shared some animations where people kept asking me how I made the environments why does it look so realistic so today I'm going to break down my method of creating large scale environments that for once look photorealistic but also render super quick so how does it work I normally start by animations with a simple idea like in this case I knew I wanted to have some world world two bombers Li information but I wasn't quite sure what the rest should look like so after adding and animating the planes I went online and looked for aerial photos taken from a plane or drone for this I usually use sites like pixels or pixabay since the license allows me to use it in my own project in this case though I got it from textures.com after trying out a few different ones I found one that I liked So I placed it in the background which instantly made it look realistic important here is to match the perspective in this case I especially needed to make sure the horizon line isn't too low or too high otherwise the whole image would fall apart just adding an image as the background will go a long way of making the scene look realistic but you also need to match the foreground to that image especially the lighting for that you can find an hdri that somewhat matches the image in its colors brightness and general mood if you can't get close enough you can use a mixed color note to tint it the way you want what I did for this scene though was a bit different instead of using an hdri I mapped the image from the background onto a big sphere and used that in combination with an emission Shader to cast the correct colors into the scene oft times you need to bump up the emission strength a bit to get enough light into the scene since the image most likely will be an 8bit JPEG and not have a high dynamic range like HG normally do this method might not work for everyone in my case though it was enough to combine it with a sun lamp for that extra realism just make sure to set the light sphere to not cast Shadows otherwise you won't see your Sun as with anything this method both has advantages and disadvantages which will help you decide on when to use it and when to actually build the environment in 3D the benefits are quite obvious first you can easily test out different environments just by changing the background image especially if you don't already know what you want this helps you find something fitting an example for this is this animation I made recently I had the fighter jets already animated and thought the scene would be over some flat terrain with some clouds in the background when looking for images matching that idea I actually found an image of snowy mountains I plac it in the background and instantly knew I wanted to go in that direction secondly using real photos means achieving a photo environment is as easy as as it gets since they are already photos of real places this will instantly bring the realism to a new level thirdly since it's just an image emitting light it renders super fast and doesn't slow down your PC in the viewport I often get comments on my animations asking if my PC exploded while rendering that or how many years it took even though these are obviously jokes people expect the render time to increase drastically with increasing realism but with this method the scene render super fast since the image is emitting light itself so it does not need some heavy Computing to calculate complex shaders or models finally if you have some photo editing skills you can combine multiple images and elements to create totally new places making it easier to match a specific idea or scenario for more 3D look you can also create some simple geometry where you project these images on top to get some paralle in the scene the downside of using images as background is that you can't move the camera too much without the effect quickly falling apart if you're not quite happy with the angle of your shot and you want to change it you probably need to find a completely new image for the background since images have specific angles baked into it you can't really varry too much from Additionally you are limited by the image resolution so zooming in too much can be problematic or having low rest or noisy images in the first place will affect the look and lastly you need to pay attention to the image license you can just use any image you find online but you need to make sure that you are actually allowed to use it in your project so in short using images as backgrounds is quick easy and realistic but it is not flexible with these things in mind if you need an environment for a few scenes from a similar perspective this can be a quick and realistic option for you one other example where I used this method is with this Arctic animation in this case I did create the foreground environment in 3D but used a flat image to extend the scene and give it some realistic depth I often use this method to add specific skies in the background matching the mood I'm going for this is especially fun once you have a whole folder of interesting Skies you can simply iterate through them seeing how they drastically change the look of the shot as mentioned before if you split your image into different layers like different mountains clouds and sky and place these in different depths in your scene you can get a 3d effect even though you are just using 2D elements I used this in the fighter plane scene to give the mountains some paralle when the camera moves this whole project isn't new or something that I came up with it's actually something that has been around for many years and has been used in the early Star Wars movies and even before that back then this was done with artists drawing landscapes in cities on a sheet of glass and leaving out the part the footage goes when movie making shifted into the digital space so did this technique mostly refer to as mat painting even today this method is still heavily used and you can spot it when watching vfix breakdowns or behind the scenes footage in the end there will always be multiple ways to get the job done so it is up to you how much time and resources you want to spend doing that if you're interested in animations and want to know how I create them in more detail consider supporting me on patreon I've started uploading smaller step-by-step tutorials on there showing my different techniques I use I'm also sharing my blend fights so that you can download them for your own project or just to study them for learning purposes you will find a link in the description

Channel: MLT Studios

Views: 18,821

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Id: e-pbQDDqdmc

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 07 2024