How to Achieve Photorealism - Blender Photorealism Workflow

photo realism in 3d art is something a lot of artists struggle with and for good reason it's really hard to recreate something in real life in a 3d application especially if you don't know exactly what you're doing or how the real world works so in this video i'm basically just going to go over how i make my renders as realistic as possible uh i'm not completely completely at photorealism yet but i'm pretty close so i feel like i can give some advice to some people out there who are struggling with making realistic or photorealistic renders so let's get right into this so there's a few things that go into making a photorealistic render and those things are lighting composition assets textures hdris shadows post processing and color correction those are the main things that you're going to want to focus on to give your vendors a more realistic edge and a more cinematic photo realistic look so getting started uh let's start with lighting i'm basically going to explain how lighting works um how shadows work um in it pretty much everything you need to know about blender's lighting system and how to work with it so let's go into blender and i'll show you guys what light is so lighting in any 3d software can be uh pretty difficult to get the hang of especially if you haven't studied lighting or you don't know how lighting works it's very obvious that adding a light into a 3d scene is going to light up the models and it's going to light up everything that needs to light up but how does that actually work how does it affect the objects and how does the properties of the light affect how the light puts out light so um we're going to be focusing on cycles for this video um i can make another video on evie if you guys would like to see that but right now we're going to be focusing on cycles just because cycles is the main render engine i use and i'm pretty familiar with how lighting works in it so um i have this very basic scene laid out it's literally just default materials default background but it has the default point light so we're going to be using this light as an example right now if we go into rendered view we can see what we get immediately um we can see how uh this is working so basically we have this light up here this position the light is basically casting light right here it's kind of hitting the front of this sphere and we can see we have the shadow under it in the shadow reaching out behind it so um if we go down to this lighting panel we can see all of our light settings right here um basically the main ones that you're gonna want to change are color power and radius uh max bounces you don't really need to worry about that that can be left as default but pretty much the most important ones are radius and power the color can be anything you want it won't affect how the actual light reacts so also excuse me if i'm sniffling a lot i know it can get annoying but i'm still recovering from strep throat so just bear with me but yeah um so immediately if we start adjusting the power um let's say we change this to like five fifty thousand we can immediately see the power is what controls the strength of the light so i'm going to turn this back down to a thousand because that's the default um but what we can notice uh first off is the shadow so right now this shadow we can see we have a little bit of a soft edge right here but for the most part the shadow is pretty sharp that is to do with the size of the light we can see right here this is a point light it's a pretty small light it has a radius of 0.1 meters so what happens if we increase that radius let's say we increase it to 0.5 so uh if you look at the shadow right here we can notice that the soft part of the shadow is extended a lot and we have a lot less of that harsh sharp shadow right here and now if we keep increasing this uh radius we can see the shadow gets softer and softer so that's what the radius does we see immediately the light is a lot bigger than it was if we turn it back down to 0.1 we see we have that soft shadow back um and then obviously you have the position of the light itself it's going to affect how the light um is cast on and how the shadow is cast on it like if we move this around to the very top the shadow is going to be very very harsh um very just under it uh but if we increase the radius again we can see that um the shadow gets softer um so uh that's the point lights so how do other light sources react well basically other light sources react the same way in terms of lighting and shadows properties but the shape of the light and how they output and how they diffuse light is a little bit different so uh if you're not familiar with blender's lamps or blender's lights basically we have a few to choose from so we have a point light which is the light that i just explained a sunlight which um simulates sunlight a spotlight and an area light they're all pretty much self-explanatory aerial lights are for lighting up an area um spotlights or if you want like a spotlight on something sunlight are used for outdoor scenes or anything that you need sun for and point light is just for lighting up a small area point lights aren't very good at lighting up huge areas that would be an area light so let's go with the sunlight because the sunlight especially if you're making outdoor realistic scenes the sunlight is probably going to be your most important one so let's go ahead and add a sunlight in so when you add a sunlight in blender it's automatically going to be pointing down and no matter where you put the sunlight it's always going to be the same no matter where you put the sunlight in your scene it doesn't matter it's not going to cast light on a specific part it is the sun it's going to light up the whole scene no matter where it is uh but what we can change though is the angle of the sunlight so you can see right now i'm going to move this back over here uh we can see the sunlight is pointing down right now uh meaning that we have the shadow directly under uh this um sphere so if we look over at our light properties again uh you'll see that the radius is gone and instead we have this angle so um if we change the angle of the sunlight um let me change it to maybe 90 degrees we can see that the shadow is gone uh pretty much from this because it's not uh casting or it's not directly on it uh now to be honest uh i usually keep this angle the same and i manually rotate it by just clicking on the light and then just hitting r and rotating around because i find that's a lot better but basically what we can notice i want to point out a few things right here is this shadow is insanely sharp and you might be thinking to yourself okay well i just explained with the point lights that increasing the radius is going to give you a softer shadow and the shadow is going to look better well we obviously don't have that uh radius option with the sunlight so what's up with that well if you go outside uh if you go outside anywhere pretty much and the sun's out doesn't matter if it will midday would be the best because that's when the sun is at its strongest you'll notice that the shadows that are being cast from the objects in real life are always going to have a sharp shadow the sun is never going to cast a sharp shadow and the reason for that is because the sun compared to the distance of the earth how far away we are from the sun the sun is pretty small um distance wise the sun obviously isn't small but distance wise it's kind of small but it is also outputting a ton of light because you know it's the sun so it's going to output a ton of light so that's going to result in very very harsh shadows because the radius of the sun isn't that big compared to how far away we are from it so you have this tiny light source and then you have a bunch of power coming out of it a bunch of light radiating out of it so that's going to cast very sharp shadows and that's how the sun works in real life so you're never going to get a soft shadow from the sun no matter what time of day it is no matter where the earth is at in the solar system you're always going to have sharp shadows from the sun so that's how the sunlight works uh basically you just have the angle uh you can rotate it uh different angles obviously if it's pointing up away from it um it's not casting light anywhere uh down so it's gonna be completely dark but yeah that's how the sunlight works so uh the next light is going to be our spotlight so if we move our spotlight up uh we can see that we have a little bit of light but it's very very weak so we have some more uh we have some more um options for our uh spotlight so you can see right here we have our radius back and we also have our power so i'm gonna go ahead and change the power up to like a thousand um and so now we can see that we have this direct spotlight on it um and so uh spotlights usually are not at an angle obviously you can put the spotlight name at an angle you can rotate it usually spotlights are straight down on a focus object so uh what can we do with this so um if we look around we can see that um the shadow is pretty harsh but what's around here uh where the light is is pretty soft so if we increase the radius to maybe 0.75 we can see that that the outside ring gets softer and also the inner shadow gets softer it's basically the same thing i explained for point lights uh bigger the radius the softer the shadows are going to be but now what we have is uh these beam shapes so uh if we look at the cone itself we can see that by default um these are very close together the inner and outer ring and then we have the angle of the cone so if we change the spot size we can see that the cone gets shorter but the spot itself gets bigger that's because it still has to be a cone the light is still it still needs to be in the same position so uh it's going to get shorter and wider um compared to what you need it so you can make a huge spotlight over an entire area or you can make something very very small like this so i'm pretty sure yeah i was at 45 before and then we have the blend so um if we click show cone right here we can see the exact um cone where the light is coming off of um and then we can change the blend uh the blend is basically that inner and outer ring um between these so if we increase the blend we can see it blends a lot smoother uh through these and if we decrease the blend we can see that it's just completely gone and we just have this huge ring uh that just kind of falls off right here uh so that's how the spotlight works so now moving on to the next light we have area lights aerial lights are quite possibly one of my favorite lights on blender just because they're so easy to use and you can pretty much do anything with them so if we bring the aerial light up we can see uh right now it's casting a little bit of light i'm gonna go ahead and change this to a thousand um but right now uh this is how the area light is looking i'm actually gonna change this down to 500 probably so we can see how this area light is working right here it's basically we have this square light and it's just lighting wherever it needs to light wherever this uh beam is pointing that's where it's gonna light so if i move this over and then i just kind of rotate it like this we can see that is now lighting up this area and anything behind it is darker we still have some light behind it because it's diffusing the light all around um global illumination and whatnot but we can see right here um we have a pretty pretty soft shadow uh well not pretty solid we have a moderately soft shadow um same thing um except instead of radius its size um if we change this to maybe five meters we can see the shadow gets a ton softer uh the size is basically the equivalent to the radius and anything else um and then we have uh let's change this up to maybe two uh just so we have a little bit of a softer shadow and then we have the shape uh the shape um it's not really important um it does cast light in the certain shapes like this is casting like a square but typically you don't need to change this but depending on your specific lighting setup you might need you might want uh to change this so shapes we have are square and then rectangle the rectangle is a rectangle uh then we have a disk uh this is just a circle light and an ellipse uh this is the rectangle equivalent of the circle uh so you see it didn't really change much because like i said you don't really need to change it uh and then we have the beam shape uh the beam shape we can change the spread on this um let's change it to 90. we can see that it basically focuses the beam in um a lot tighter of an area so uh imagine it uh like we were working with the spotlights when we changed the cone size um and then it changed the like where the light is being put um i don't i don't really know what i just said there but you probably get the point but changing this changes how much the light spreads uh which is like 45 degrees we're gonna see that the light is just coming off of there um and then we can see a little bit better uh how the lighting changes uh depending on what shape the lighting is so um if i just put this on one degree we can see that the light itself is casting in uh whatever shape it is um it's just you can't really see that a lot of the times because the light's being diffused so much but i'm gonna put this back on 180 degrees and that is that so the next thing that we're going to want to do the next thing uh that we're going to want to explain is composition so uh composition composition is one of the biggest things that you could possibly put into your render um it's very easy to just slap assets into a 3d scene and call it a day and they might look really good that you might have a like seemingly photo realistic render but composition is basically guiding your viewer to where they need to look it's telling your viewer whoever's looking at your artwork or your render hey you need to look at this because this is the focal point of the image so how do you do composition how do you know where to put everything how do you know where everything should be laid out how do you know it looks good so i'm going to open a project file that i made the other day um it's basically it's a hot springs um it's gonna it's gonna be the thumbnail for this video probably but yeah uh we have this so uh looking at the scene we can see it's a pretty small scene um this is the same project file i used for my cinematic tutorial i just created something else out of it so that's why this building is just here randomly but if we look at this scene i don't have any kind of overlays on right now but looking at this even without the render you're probably looking at that waterfall in the pond over there and i know that because one that's it's not even the biggest thing in the scene but it is the main element of the scene so uh how did i go about this composition so uh there are things called composition guides there's a ton of different composition guides um the rule of thirds is basically the go-to for everybody uh but you don't have to use the rule of thirds there's like harmless triangles golden triangles um center composition everything like that so blender has a handy feature where in your viewport you can use composition guides um it'll overlay it over your camera so how do you enable that so first excuse me if we go to our camera object in the scene and then we go down to the camera properties somewhere in here uh it's in viewport display uh under viewport display if we go down to composition guides we can see we have all these composition guides here so i use the rule of thirds for this one uh but you can use any of these really um and your composition should be all right so how do you read these composition guides though like what do you do with them so if we turn on my overlays right here you can't really see it because i have a lot of lamps and stuff going on but uh if you follow my mouse cursor you can see that there's a dotted line right here that goes down that intersects with another dotted line going across and then down here there's another dotted line and then down here or there's another intersection right here and there's another intersection right here so um this is the rule of thirds it's called the rule of thirds because it's in thirds um the camera view is in in thirds uh so what it what is this what am i what are you looking at right now so basically the way uh these intersections are lined up is where you want your focal elements to be um so um looking at it right now uh it doesn't really look like there's a bunch of focal elements in these but there actually are and i'll explain that so uh first and foremost if we go down here to the bottom or the bottom left one we can see that it's at the waterfall and it's right at where the waterfall meets the water because that's where i want the viewer to look really i want them to look where the waterfall hits the water and i want them to look at the water and be like oh that's that's that's water um yeah that's where that one is because i want that's the main focal element in this and then over here on the right we have it coming up just off of this rock and the way these rocks are laid out is very specific because if you notice if you follow my cursor down here at the bottom right of the um camera viewport we see that the rocks take this kind of trail that come down here where it's pretty flat right here it rises a little bit right here and then this rock rises it up even more and then there's a intersection right here above the rock and above these two flowers because i also want you to look over here because these rocks look really pretty and i want you to look at the rocks so i want you to follow the rocks over here back to the water looking at the flowers and then we have the top two um intersections and these are put um almost at the peak of this mountain uh you can't really see it uh because of a volume cube but it's over here on this mountain so when you're looking in the background you're going to look at the mountains and then over here it's on the edge of this mountain right where the sky is the sky is going to be right here so you're going to follow this and then you're going to see the sky over here and we also have this tree that's going to guide you to the peak of this mountain once you're looking over here because the intersection is like right here um so you're always gonna uh when you have uh your composition you're uh you're gonna wanna use that composition guide but you're also going to want to have complementary composition that guides the viewer to something else like we have this we have this rule of thirds here and we have all of our focal elements we want but again i also have these rocks that are going to guide the viewer from the edge of the screen into the middle of it and we have this tree stump that's going to guide the viewer over here over here to the sky and we have these plants and stuff and different stuff like that you're always going to want to guide your viewer from the edge of your render into whatever your focal point is so that's something very important about that but we also have a ton of different composition guides uh for example we have a center composition guide which is basically literally just the center um we have a diagonal composition guide which would guide the viewers from the four corners of the image into the center uh we have the golden ratio uh which is it's kind of like the rule of thirds but this middle square is a little bit uh smaller than all the other ones we have golden triangles uh this is basically like uh just like the diagonal one uh triangle b is basically the same thing and then we have the harmonious triangles which have intersections right here where this tree is uh down here where this rock is uh and then we have triangle b which is up here in the sky and then down here where this rock is so uh composition guides you can use pretty much any one you want depends on your scene and how you want your scene laid out but just keep in mind uh going to want to guide your viewers over to wherever your focal point is and wherever it needs to be so next um in creating your photorealistic render is textures or not textures assets um what assets you're using so um obviously if you're using very low poly assets or very low quality assets then it's not going to look very photorealistic even if your lighting is really good lighting will definitely help a lot even if you don't have very good assets or you don't have um very high polygon assets lighting will complement that a lot but to get the most photo realism you're gonna want your assets themselves to look photorealistic so um the assets that i use most of the time in my renders are from quixote mega scans uh because i usually don't make my assets myself because i don't have the ability i don't have the artistic ability to make photo realistic textures and photo scan assets all the time or make rocks from scratch i'm an artist i just want to build my scenes up and i just want to make my environments so i use quixote mega scans assets and quicksole megascan's assets are really high quality assets so um you can obviously see we have quite a bit of good-looking assets right here so they do look kind of muddy because it's a lower lower polygon version but the textures make up for that so you're going to want to be using uh high quality assets with good and accurate geometry uh that are going to go over your scene another thing is what kind of assets you're using um seen specifically you're not going to want to have a grassy meadows with some kind of canyon rocks or you're not going to want to have a canyon with a spruce tree in it somewhere you're not going to want to do that you're all you're going to want to make all your assets match and if you don't if you have an asset that would look really good but the texture of something is wrong there are things like quixote mixer which is a free program that i've made tutorials on before uh that you can make your own texture um you don't even have to make your own texture you can just take two textures combine them together and then make an entirely new looking asset so one of the uh one example that i've used before is i was making a snow scene um a few months back and i had this pile of logs so we had the snow scene and everything was covered in snow and everything was looking good and this pile of logs would have been very good because it was a snowy forest but the logs didn't have any snow on them so it looked very out of place so i just took it in a mixer and then i mixed it with a snow material changed some settings to make it look like the snow was just on top of it and i wound up with logs with snow on top of them and then that fit the whole the scene a lot better so you're going to want to use um accurate assets and photorealistic assets and assets that just make sense um and the next thing and probably one of the most important things is textures so the textures of your object are going to define how your object looks obviously their texture so um typically uh i'm gonna start with texture resolution first uh because i'm assuming you already have decent textures uh because there's tons of places to get good textures and i'll go into what type of textures you're going to need to use here in a minute the texture resolution um basically uh we see if i just click on one of these assets this texture resolution is 4k 4k resolution is going to be decent pretty decent um it should be perfectly fine for any renders that you're trying to do um if you do have uh the higher texture resolution that you use the more resource the more resources it's going to use from your computer so if you have a very low end computer you're going to want to use a very low resolution texture but if you have a very high end beast computer you can go all out and just go 8k even maybe 16k textures if you have a godly computer but there's really no point in doing that um especially if the object isn't directly like right up on the camera um typically what i do is my objects that i because i have a mid-range computer i have a gtx 1060 um in my computer uh but ak textures really hog my computer so i don't really use 8k textures so i use 4k textures uh for mainly everything um that's in the foreground um and then in the background i will use probably a 2k texture because you're not going to be as close and you're not going to need as much detail into it but obviously if you want a very close-up shot of something let's say you're just making a render that's a very close up detail shot of something you're probably going to want to use an 8k texture just to get that extra detail in there and so now moving on to what type of textures you should use there are all kinds of different types of textures uh but the main texture category that you're going to want to be using is pbr now i've done texturing tutorials i've explained what pbr is but i'm going to explain it again pbr stands for physically based rendered or physically based rendering and basically what it is is it uses different texture maps to define how the texture should react based on how that texture would react in real life so uh obviously this only works with materials that work in the real world you're not going to really be able to get a pbr texture on some completely random texture stylized textures yes those will still work because they still will react a certain way to lighting but it's typically materials that could exist in real life so um and i say stylized materials will work with that because if you paint something in a stylized style you're still going to have that lighting there so uh pbr textures um and what they are basically if we go ahead and look at an asset right here there's a few maps that we can use so uh the first thing um the first asset or the first map is going to be your color map i'm actually going to open an entirely new project for this just to show you guys the uh texture map separately uh so i don't want i don't want to render that entire scene again uh but basically i'm just going to take this plane and i'm going to apply a quick texture to it and i have no wrinkle add-ons this is gonna be very very fast uh but uh let's just use this ground texture right here um and if we go into uh our rendered view it's actually going to be an eevee right now and i don't want it to be in eevee so i'm going to switch to cycles uh gpu and we're just going to render this right here um but right now we can see this is how the texture looks right now um and you can see with all these maps right here uh we have a pretty realistic looking texture so um obviously this isn't the most insanely detailed realistic texture of all time but it's of realistic texture it's reacting fine with lighting so what are these maps so first map we have is our color texture our base color texture um or our albedo or diffuse whatever you want to call it it goes by a ton of different names but this is basically your raw color data of the image it's the flat color data of your image so this is always going to be set to srgb because it's color data uh anything that gives color data to your material is going to be set to srgb color space um and if we ctrl shift click on this we can see that we're now viewing the raw color data of the image so we can see we no longer have that lighting um that's diffusing around it uh we just have this whole thing lit flat uh the next is our roughness shader or a reference map and basically this uses white and gray values to define which parts are rough and which parts are not so um the darker parts are going to be less rough it's either the darker lighter parts or less or more rough i don't know i forgot which one but one of them makes it more glossy and the other one makes it more uh rougher so we can see that here we can see we have the gray areas on the leaves and sticks and stuff and the white areas on the mud and then we have our normal maps uh so normal maps if we click on this we can see that this looks pretty wild um if we take a look at our normal map we can see that this kind of looks 3d this kind of looks like there's geometry here but there's not that's because it's a normal map so uh what a normal map does is it basically fakes geometry through a texture to give your material extra detail it gives your material extra depth next is our displacement texture which uses blacks whites and grays to indicate where the actual geometry should be displaced so unlike a normal map of the displacement node actually displaces the uh the geometry so i can't really show that right now uh well i can i can probably show that right now if i um subdivide this like a hundred times what we can do is we can go into our render view now um raw material [Music] uh we can see uh this is very very high um like the displacement is very very strong so i'm just going to change this to like point two or maybe not point two point zero five ish um this is still very very strong but yeah we can see the displacement map actually displaces the textures so we see in the gray uh darker parts it's lower down and then the whites and gray parts it's higher up so i'm going to go ahead and disconnect this displacement actually and now if we just go up into our regular material again we can see that this is how our material is looking so uh that's basically textures next thing is hdris uh so hdris fall into um our lighting category from the beginning but i wanted to explain them separately because they work a little bit different than every other light so to get an hdr in blender um you just would go to something like hdrihaven.com download hdr to your computer and then go over to the world settings under this color node click this and then change it to environment texture and then just open whatever um uh hdri you want so i have a hdri already set up or already downloaded on my computer so i'm just going to open that and what we can see uh what you probably notice right away is this is providing lighting data to our scene so even if i take this light away which is the only official light in the scene we see the scene is still lit so hdris are basically a 360 degree image that provides real accurate lighting data to your scene so there's tons of different hdris uh depending on what kind of environment you're going for depending on what scene you're trying to make you're going to want to match your hdri as closely as you can to that so if you're making a very cinematic gloomy forest you're not gonna want a very bright and sunny beach hcri if that makes sense um so uh yeah um depending on what type of hdri you want it's it's up to you uh but just try to match it as closely as you can to your scene uh but we can see we have a strength value here turning it down um turning it up obviously makes it lighter and darker you can also adjust that depending on your scene but i would recommend leaving this at one unless that's too strong i wouldn't recommend going over one um unless you really need to because you could probably just use sunlight and stuff for that and stuff like that um so now uh what i want to do is i want to explain uh lighting in uh how to actually set up lighting in a scene so if we go back to that uh hot springs uh render that i did before um how do you set up how what's the best way to set up lighting in an outdoor scene so uh the first thing you're gonna want to always have is your hdri so this hdri is the exact same hdri that i just showed and the reason for that is because i really like the sky how cloudy it is and stuff i really like that and it went really well with the scene so i used it uh the strength is still set on one it's the default value but what we have is we have a sun lamp right here and this sun lamp is set at a very very high value so with outdoor scenes you're gonna want to have a very high value sunlight because the sun is obviously very very bright and the reason this is so high is we have this cube right here so what is this cube this cube is a volume cube so volumetrics in blender it's very very simple you just add a volume cube um under surface make sure nothing's attached and under volume click principal volume and then just change all the settings here typically the only one i mess with is density because everything else is fine uh you can change these to whatever you want but this is how i do it um and just make sure the volume cube is pretty much taking up your entire scene um or whatever you want to be affected by the volume so uh i have this over everything obviously so everything is being affected by volume and if you're making outdoor renders you're always going to want to have some sort of volume metrics obviously you're not always going to have to go crazy with volume metrics unless you're making like a really foggy atmospheric scene but you're always going to want to have some sort of volumetrics because every the real world has volume metrics if you look out in the distance um like even on a very very clear day at some point if you could just look in the distance as far as you can without any kind of mountains or any kind of things stopping you from seeing you'll see in the distance that it falls off there is some sort of fog or volume metrics there so you're always going to want to have some sort of volumetrics in your scene and honestly um done correctly volume volume metrics add a ton uh to scenes especially outdoor scenes um and so um with uh this higher the density of your volume um the stronger your volumetrics are the less your light is going to work because the more light is being absorbed um and diffused by the volumetrics so typically if this scene uh didn't have a volume cube i would probably set the strength to maybe 10 but since it does have a volume cube i set it to 50. and so that's how that's pretty much how i lit this scene um lighting is also very finicky um i can't really say exactly how to set up lighting because that's very very scene dependent um and it's very very difficult honestly lighting is one of my favorite and most hated things to do in 3d renders because there's so many values and so many variables that go into lighting that it's just you have to mess around with it it's pretty much just trial and error so just find the correct angle that you want your sun to be casting from you can always mess around with this there's no shame in fixing your lighting a billion times you don't have to just have a lighting setup and then just stick with it uh feel free to just change whatever you need um this angle specifically i found worked really well because it has light coming over the water and then down through these rocks um and it just looks really good that's the lighting i did for this scene so now um we're going to talk about post processing so post processing is one of the more important parts of after your render so i i post process in photoshop so if i open up photoshop right here um i can show you guys pretty much my my process of post-processing so um in photoshop let's say i open this and then i just open um my let's say i just open my hot springs render so this is the render that i've done um already um it's already post-processed and everything but i can still explain um what i've done with this um i don't have the original image unfortunately to repost process but i will explain what i've done so um what the most important thing um well one of the most things i start out with is color curves so color curves basically uh give you a curve um of your highlight or your shadows your mid tones and your highlights so adjusting uh these shadows will obviously bring your shadows out a lot more like this and then bring the um up will make them a lot less will make the lights a lot brighter and then your midtones are basically the middle values of your image so bringing them up and down will just change the midtones of it you can see that if we bring this down the mountains in the back get more visible but the ver the foreground is very very dark because originally the chat or the mountains in the background are very blown out and then highlights highlights are just all the highlights of your image where the um where the uh where the lights are the most bright uh those are your highlights um so we see if we bring this down again where the lights are really really bright on the mountains that brings it down but since the lighting is normally okay right here this is very very i don't even know how to describe how this looks but yeah i'm gonna go ahead and delete that layer for now um next thing i use is sometimes i use the brightness and contrast obviously you probably know what brightness contrast those brightness increases the brightness of your image and then contrast increases the contrast of your image very very self-explanatory and then i have a color balance node uh typically i will either use this or just use the photo filter node or not i keep calling them nodes um they're adjustment layers uh i'm so used to blender but uh depending on which one um i find looks better is the one i'll use like sometimes i'll slap a cooling filter on it if i want more blue or a different warming filter if i want more orange but then sometimes if that just doesn't look good i want to and i want to adjust it manually i can use these sliders to adjust what the scene looks like like that um and then next what i do uh is my hue and saturation sometimes i'll mess with the saturation of the image um depending if i want it more vibrant or not the hue i never mess with because that just sets your colors all wonky i mean if you're making art on acid you can go ahead and go for that because i'm pretty sure that would look cool but we're not doing that so next thing i do is i add my overlays now my overlays um are if we zoom in right here we see we have little dust particles right here we have some mist right here um uh if we go up we can see that we have clouds over here that weren't in the original render just different overlays like that so uh to get overlays um typically i use missed overlays dust overlays rain overlays snow overlays just depends on what i want to use in my scene uh so to get an overlay it's as simple as just going on google and then um pretty much just typing in um let's say we want to um get a dust overlay so we just type in dust overlay um let me go over here into images and as long as it's not very low quality any of these will work just make sure it's a black background uh but what we can do is we can go to file and then place and then i can just open a uh dust overlay i'm going to use this one and you just want to cover your image or cover wherever you want the overlay to be um and then we just place it and then we go over here and then click lighten um and then that just lightens the dust overlay um right now you can't really you can't see it that much on this because it's very blown out because there's a lot of lighting but that's how you uh do an overlay you can also change this to screen um which kind of gives it a little bit more visibility it just depends i've used both lighting uh lighten and screen um screen basically uses the colors in the background to overlay and then lighten basically just takes the dark parts and then brightens them up um so i'm gonna go ahead and delete this um delete this layer and that's pretty much it um afterwards whenever i do post my art on instagram i will edit the uh we'll edit the art through instagram because i like how instagram's color correction and photo editing is but um from the render to this this is pretty much how i do it um so we can see that um we have a very very good lighting setup um like i said the sun comes down from here hits the water lights up these rocks it looks really really good um and we just have a lot of really high quality assets and textures um so you can see the 4k textures are pretty fine um they're completely fine and then we have a 2k textures back here on the trees and stuff and the plants and you can't even tell the difference because they're farther back but yeah another thing that i forgot to mention that i probably should have mentioned is your details in your render you're always going to want to add details especially if you're making an outside render because there's you can never have too much detail but you can go overboard with detail so you don't want to pack in so much detail that it's distracting everything uh it's distracting from everything else like i don't want grass all up in my face and a bunch of twigs but there's also enough detail in this to where the scene is filled out so we can see we have this grass on the rocks right here um we have all the flowers and stuff we have over here we have rocks all on this these are a separate particle system um we have some plants coming out of the water over here with some more grass over here um and we just have a bunch of little tiny plants over here we have some plants right here and just different stuff like that uh details are very very important um if you go outside yeah it's there's tons of details uh there you can never get as much detail as going outside but you can get enough detail to where the scene looks good so uh with that being said uh that's pretty much my entire workflow for making photo realistic or near photorealistic renders if you guys did enjoy the video please hit it with a thumbs up and consider subscribing that really helps me out i just hit 4 100 subscribers thank you guys so much that means so much to me uh my birthday is tomorrow so uh well it's gonna be my birthday when this video is up probably but uh thanks guys so much for watching my name is michael from polygon island hopefully you learned something hopefully you can take some of these tips um and put them into your next render um leave some comments i always love reading comments uh and yeah thanks guys so much for watching my name is michael from polygon island and i'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: Stargaze Imagery

Views: 2,067

Keywords: blender, blender 2.9, photorealism, photorealistic, photorealistic environment, graphics, ue4, ue5, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, cinema4d, c4d, maya, quixel, megascans, blender tutorial, tutorial, blender 2.8, photorealism in blender, blender photorealistic, photoscan, 3d scan, 3d scanning

Id: lnXt1UMMkMM

Length: 45min 40sec (2740 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021