How to Get Realistic Portrait Renders in Blender (6 Steps)

I recently got these animated renders and I thought it would be a good idea to show you guys what you will need in order to get the same results on your character I divided it into six different parts from getting your model ready to the ways you could approach the lighting and setting up the camera at the end then rendering the animation so skip to the parts where you want to know more about and as always if you want to download the 3D files in real-time process of making these characters check out my gumroad and patreon Page everything is in there Link in the description let's go so before anything else we have to have a mesh with decent amount of detail no matter how good is your lighting and other things if your model doesn't have enough detail it might look flat and unappealing also when it comes to close-ups every small components on the face matters ice for example if you only just stick the eyeballs into eye socket you see it looks wrong the reason is when it comes to the eyes we have few things to take care of one of them is coronco which is the pink red prominence at the inner corner of the eye not only it's really important but it should have a nice transition from pink to White which is this clearer also the bottom part of the eye is not dry so it should have a water looking transition from this clearer which we call tear line I have a tutorial about creating the eyes in the channel which are linked on the top right corner I showed you how to make the eyes and coronco and other stuff if you want to check it out second one is textures and shaders you see when it comes to the realism we need a good amount of skin pores and details on the face some people just subdivide and sculpt every little detail on the face which results to incredible amount of details but other ways is to use texture Maps there are a lot of websites that provide amazing skin maps you can also find it for free which has a surprisingly good details considering it's free this is my setup for the skin Shader it's pretty simple we have a diffuse map which is the main texture then roughness and other stuff that I mixed up with color Ram to change its values but the most important thing is these two which is normal map and micro normals normal Maps simulate the details as you probably already know and the micro normal which is a bit different it had those tiny little skin pores all around the face which plays a huge part in the realism especially if you get too close to the character I explain the Shader setup fully in the skin Shader video you can find it on the top right corner third one is lighting obviously it depends on the mood that you're going for but in this case since we spent a lot of time on the skin Shader we want to highlight the details of the character for that we have to have a nice contrast all around so the details are visible if you use soft lights or dull hdri Maps everything will look flat and we can't see the skin pores so we have few choices here we can add an area light scale it down to make it smaller smaller the size equals sharper highlights and more pronounced Shadows larger size meanings softer shadows and highlights you gotta find the balance between these two now we need to place it somewhere for easier control it's better to have two separate Windows to hover the mouse on the top left corner and drag out a new window now you should have another 3D viewport on the left when your mouse is on the right window press 0 to switch to camera view press enter to bring up the right menu and in the view tab enable camera to view find a good spot for the camera then hold Z and select rendered now on the left window select the area lights and move it around since we got rendered view on the right we can now see the results live while we change the lighting if you don't have a good RTX GPU or a high-end CPU it's better to change it to EV for now because it might take a long time to render now move and rotate the area your light until you have a decent contrast and details are visible of course we are not restricted to blender default lights in fact for more realistic results you can use hdri maps you probably already know but for those who don't hdri map is a 360 degree image that contains lighting and reflection of that location we can use them to light the full scene with few clicks to do that click on this icon and change it to Shader editor then switch from object to word now we're presented by only two nodes disable or remove all the lights shift a and add environment texture don't add image texture because that's a totally different thing and doesn't work here then connect the color to the surface while the environment texture is selected press Ctrl T to add the coordinates if nothing happens that means you don't have to know triangular add-on enabled so you should go to edit preference and enable the node Wrangler that should be able to add coordinates by pressing Ctrl t as I said before we want to make the details pop so we should use hdri map with sharper lights and overall more contrast best place to find hdri maps like this is polyhaven.com and by going to hdri section you're presented by tons of different maps that you can download for free in the left you can choose whatever type of map you want based on the look that you're going for since we need a sharper light we need to choose high contrast you can see how object would look at the bottom of each image click on it then in the top right corner you can change the size of the map you can download up to 16k bigger the size meaning it contains more light information in it but it makes the project heavier 2K or 4K does the job pretty well always download bunch of them so we can test that to see which one works best in our case once we downloaded it go back to blender click on open and find the map as you can see I have tons of hdri maps to choose from Once you opened it there's a big chance that it might not look the way you want since the lights are on the other side so using mapping you can change the rotation of the image Zero taste damage horizontally so rotate it until the light direction is placed where you want it next one is camera there are a bunch of different things we should do with the camera once you've selected the camera click on the object data properties which is a camera icon now first thing you can change is focal length we got different lenses on the cameras with different numbers easy explanation would be bigger the number equals more zoom and less perspective and a smaller the number is the exact opposite as you can see perspective is really harsh and the nose is basically coming out of the monitor since it's worked just like a real camera we can approach it the same way as photography for portrait photography people mostly use 55 or 85 millimeter lenses for the right amount of perspective and better depth of field we can use that here as well you can go higher based on the look that you're going for next to make it more cinematic we want some depth up field so turn it on and click on it to open the tab you can see the whole thing got blurred out that's because the distance is not set on our character and as we lower down the distance you see it gets clearer I stop at 4.4 but it's probably different in yours than in the aperture you can change the f-stop of course there are a bunch of explanation behind the F number but what you need to know is that lower the number meaning nor bokeh and blurriness just don't go too low because it gets a bit weird there is a better way to approach the distance and that's assigning the dof to an in the plane axis to do that shift a go to empty and add a plane axis now move it where you want the camera to focus on I want it on the center of the iris so I move it there then I name it the uof select the camera again and in the settings I change the focus object to dof now camera follows the plane axis and focuses on that specific area and you don't have to change anything in the settings again okay it's time to animate some stuff we need another window for the timeline so hover the mouse to the bottom corner and drag out a new window change it to timeline from here first I want to animate the camera to move horizontally and kind of rotate while it's focused on the eyes so I change the left window to the 3D viewport I select the camera and while the timeline frame is on zero press die to bring up the keyframe menu and clicked on the location rotation scale and custom properties now the camera position is set to the first frame then I drag the timeline to frame 80 for example then rotate the camera and press I again and do the same thing now camera rotates around the head from the first frame to the frame 80. I want to give it a handheld feel so it feels more like a real camera easy way would be to change the timeline to graph editor switch to modifier tab then click on this to expand the options select the X rotation and in the modifiers add noise you can switch to solid view because you can't really see the animation fluently in Cycles then press space to play but as you can see it's way too harsh I increase the scale but decrease the strength so it wouldn't be so intense for now it's just shaky to fix that I increase the scale even more until it looks decent I do the exact same thing to Y and Z rotation so it happens to all directions and this is the results I want to simulate the pupil reaction to the light we can achieve that using shape keys so I select the iris and in the object data properties I click on the plus icon and the shape keys to create the bases now click on the plus once again so it can work on this one I press tab to go to edit mode and in the wireframe mode I select the edges of the pupil and make them smaller now if you exit the edit mode and turn up the value you see it gets smaller we can use this to animate it later for now I want to make the hdri map to rotate around the character so I switch the left window to Shader editor again and while some work I hover the mouse on Z rotation and press I to create a keyframe for the hdri map then go on to frame 80 and rotate the hdri map until the Sun hits the iris then press I again to add the keyframe now that I play it sun slowly hits the eye back to pupil I find the frame where the iris is exposed to the sun which is around frame 40 selected the iris and in the shape keys I hover the mouse on the value and press I to make a keyframe then go into the last frame I increase the value to make the pupils smaller and press I again now when we play the animation pupil will react to the sun after the frame 40. okay last step is composition it's not necessary but do it if you're looking for that film effect on your renders go to compositing tab enable use notes to see the notes and the render properties make sure you're on Cycles insert a low number for the time limit and press F12 to get the render now we can see the render in the composite range if they in other viewer burnout connect the image to the viewer so we can see the image in the background we want to add a film grain effect to it so shift a and add a texture node shift again and add mix and drop it between the image and viewer connect the texture to the mix now in the texture settings on the right create a new texture change the type from image to noise and name it noise in the compositing choose the noise as the texture and in the mix change the mode to Overlay or multiply then lower the factor until it's barely noticeable we don't want too much shift a and add glare and drop it before the viewer change it to foggle lower the threshold and mix until you have a very gentle glow on the reflections you can now go ahead and connect the glare to the composite to finish it up but if you want to take things further you can add chromatic aberration we connected the glare to the viewer again to see the render in the background shift a and add separate color and drop it before the viewer now shift a again and add combined color and drop it in between red should be connected to the red green to green and obviously blue to Blue now shift a and add translate node and drop it between the the red line shifted to duplicate and drop it on the green and blue line then increase or decrease the numbers of each translate until you see the colors popping out of their place mess around with the numbers what we're looking for is a really subtle effect once you are happy with the effects connect the combined color to the composite and we're done to finish things up go to Output properties set the resolution to whatever you want so we're gonna get an animated render so choose a folder for the output it's better to choose PNG as the file format but if you don't have a software to attach all the frames together afterwards choose a video format from here press Ctrl F12 and go to something else like play the new Zelda game or something because this thing is going to run for a few hours if you're rendering with cycles and after it's done it's gonna look like this I also got some renders from other angles if you find the video helpful like and sub would be great and also check out my gumroad and patreon page for the real-time process of making these characters see you on the next one peace

Channel: PixelicaCG

Views: 21,765

Keywords: tutorial, how to get realistic portrait renders, blender, modeling, shader, how to create realistic characters, skin texture, character modeling, how to model character, character, realistic, blender character tutorial, skin shader tutorial, texturing, sculpting, animating, how to render character, realism, portrait, 3d character sculpting, 3d, compositing, 3d texturing, 3d tutorial, modeling character, 3d modeling, creating, cycles, cgi, rendering, tips, course, film grain, chromatic aberration

Id: a8ve4Yl6nYE

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023