Practical TIPS for Better Renders in Blender and Post Processing in Photoshop

hi guys are you here in this video we're gonna be continuing the critique it's kind of a part two what i'm gonna be doing is i'm gonna be recreating this uh this render we're gonna be fixing all these problems you know the blur flow the uh levels of the um of the black tones you know the text positioning etc so i will basically show you how would i approach uh creating this render so i have a blend file sent by alec and we have exactly the scene that's been rendered so we're gonna go to cycles and have a look and now first of all you can see that it's really dark and that's the first problem okay this is way too dark if i'm gonna screenshot this and bring it to photoshop you'll see that this is basically the dark okay so let me show you you see that the histogram is really bunched up to the left side i mean these are all these places are you know underexposed they basically clipped they should be probably you know at least okay that bright right at least i would even increase some shadows maybe pop some clarity you know this would be kind of an acceptable level to work with okay so that's the first problem second problem is that you know we we do have some light but the direction could be a bit better there could be some separation between the vessel and the background and we got some problems on the background itself let me just turn off these um grids here so you can see better if this was a still image i mean still image right it's a complete mess because you get these lines slashing the vessel in half literally kind of framing it in here so yeah we got the motion blur done in photoshop which fixes all the problems but if you know if you wanted to render it on this background i would suggest the following out so just moving this light outside outside moving these lines a bit forwards going easy on a detail here because there's a lot of details and you know possibly creating some kind of a blur on the background because if you look at the background the pipes you know the the scaling of the background makes this ship look a bit like a toy all right i mean these pipes are massive if this is if you know this is a ship um you know these pipes are like what 10 meters wide or something that's just mental so you know you need to think of a scale when you when you're creating something okay so if i'm gonna go back here and let me just turn off this grid because uh pisses me off and you know we can scale them down a bit uh so shift y i suppose yeah so you know something like this maybe will be a bit better so you know something just less crazy this should be seriously smaller this is just way too big but anyway i digress so let's leave it as is you know because we're going to be blurring this anyway so technically it doesn't matter now we have a ship here but the ship i can see that it's um the decals have been uh placed separately we have camera lights i'm not sure what the camera lights are we're gonna check it in a second there's a background right uh which we can turn off and we're gonna be rendering this vessel without a background so that's the first thing we're gonna do okay so with this vessel um only in the scene we're gonna make it bigger and so what we're gonna do is uh let me just check the camera this focal length is pretty decent 135 is gonna help us create like a compressed image um so let's maybe zoom in a little bit on this okay so first of all like i told you i think this should be much closer make sure that this vessel takes a bit more space in the image okay it's just you know fill a frame with it do something like this maybe okay uh you know something crazy uh something like this would work something like this would work this could actually work to be honest you know create an illusion that this vessel is bigger than actually is okay that's one two we need to fix this hdri because it's way too dark okay so we're gonna go here and shader world and the first problem we have here that you know it's at half strength this first problem second problem is that this hdri may be not the best for it okay i can see that you're using the essentials alex central sagittarius which are very good let's try different nature right in this situation what i would do i would just change the material here because this is really it doesn't look good i'll time and just drop a blank mod and let's see what happens we can increase the roughness on it a bit and you know make it a bit brighter maybe not as bright something like this would work so there is a separation in elements but you know it's not that dark also this one i think nope uh the wings here on the side which mod is it so dark is this place here that's causing so much shadow okay what we could do is select that you know here and uh simply select a different mod here so uh we could add a material add the one that we just created and assign and it's gonna brighten things up a little bit probably over there a bit not much by a bit it's a little bit better okay it's a little bit better this one actually is pretty cool but needs to be rotated let me go to eevee again and let's rotate it and see what's gonna happen we could do something like this okay directional from the front this actually looks pretty decent let's go back to cycles that isn't terrible this could be darker now see there you go so let's try this one uh strings might be a bit too much uh let's see if we can remove the slide from here uh to create a little bit more drama let me see if we remove this light now this light is actually quite necessary there's a good light over there you could have one more from the back of the reflector uh but this is pretty decent i think so if you're going to render this right now right let's see what we have here okay that's 4k basically 16 perfect okay let's render this also let's go to compositing and see what we have here now you don't really need glare mate okay um i would remove glare here because if you enable glare for this render you're gonna end up with uh kind of like bloomy reflections and you have a lot of reflections on the vessel because it's quite reflective so that's not the best idea okay in fact we could we could dumping down this reflectivity a bit more so go here to roughness amount and you know pump it up a bit to maybe 0.8 so it's not as reflective right and then let's see the render how we're gonna look this is just a test render to see how we're looking let me change the performance here because i don't wanna wait till the end of the of the of the earth um 2048.248 let me just do it again if using card like uh you know something um 1080 ti plus you might try 10 24. um hang on let me just turn off this background here now i can see that the render is blurry which means after resetting the camera we need to change the um manually probably there's a depth of field setup in here so let's select the camera and let's go to depth of field let's uh manually select this one this should be good let me see if i'm unlocked i'm unlocked yeah that will do yeah we're looking decent guys the only problem is it's really reflective so this is quite bright i'm not saying it's bad because if you're going to grab this one and bring it to photoshop so bring it somewhere here yeah we found we find we're not overexposed really so we know we could go with this one details are really visible it's pretty cool i might make it a bit less reflective though because it's a little bit you know on the crazy side so let's just to cancel this render and let's see if we can make it a bit less reflective so select this mod here and roughness amount let's bump it up to you know maybe 1.2 and we see that it's metallic surface we might make it a bit darker you know to dumping it down a bit you see what it means it's not so super reflective let's try it again and let's see how this goes yeah that's a bit better so it's reflective but you can see details if you zoom in you can see details here so it's reflective but not super crazy now you're probably unable to bloom for these to pop but i guarantee you that if you do that you're gonna have bloom uh sort of shining off of these very reflective surfaces so i would suggest creating blue manually in photoshop or using stuff like oneeric plugin okay um and you know going over these elements manually the zero graph sticker is a bit strong i probably would dump it down a bit in photoshop or just before rendering just you know what you can do is go here select that and the sticker and go to uh tools here and drop the alpha you can see it already did that but i'll drop it a bit further in the baby's point six or something so it's not that crazy because this is really white here um or you know what you could do is go here and drop drop this a bit a bit deeper you know to create kind of like a less intrusive sort of text but you know it's not the end of the world but it's really strong it's really strong um i might paint it over in photoshop to make it a bit less crazy but but this is quite decent now so you can see all the details um pretty pretty well i don't think these uh areas here are page black um they're not they appear to be black but they're not pitch black there's still detail over there which is great i'm gonna grab the background so i'm going to turn off the ship and turn off the decals and turn the background on right and my background has moved so let's just select here right click and select objects and then simply move them here shift c now we zoomed in the camera which means we need to you know kind of zoom in the background so to select it and we're going to set the pivot point to cursor and scale the cursor right something like that and these two decals got kind of messed up so you can turn them off this doesn't matter i could just remove this these are really bright i would get rid of them they're probably gonna be when you blur them you can't see them but kind of annoying i would remove these as well to be honest these ones are fine we probably could use something here but it's okay the rest of it's gonna be you know it's gonna be blurred anyway so it doesn't matter um and the background is blurry anyway so we can just simply render it you know like that and then we're gonna blur it in photoshop so like i said if it was me i would be creating something that you know kind of supports the direction of the vessel and it doesn't go you know against the vessel flow this also could be moved a little bit here to be honest but you know it's not the end of the world like i said if you're going to blur this doesn't really matter because you can't see that so but it's always you know good idea to support um the flow of the lines of your main object with the background so i would be rather going this way than you know across your across your vessel bits like this one here don't matter as well because like i said we're gonna be blurring this but if i was rendering this if this was like a you know visible background you really want to be careful with elements like this here you know this one here it's really strong it's near the edge um so you know that's also strong here this is really strong i'll probably remove that if it was you know and this one like i said it would be bad if it was going this way or if it was more blended with the background because it it really stands out it's contrasty right so if you use the same material it wouldn't be as bad okay but because it's really dark in the middle it kind of clashes with everything so especially the vessel goes across a bit you know okay let's bring them both to photoshop and see what we get we got two of them just grab this one hold shift and drop it on top here that looks pretty good and let's grab this one let's go to right click and we're going to convert to smart object so we can adjust the filter blur motion blur and this one filter blur motion blur now you need to adjust the motion blur to the same angle as your vessel okay that's really important so and you want to be precise with it okay so more or less this way right so if i blur that it's gonna make sense you see now see how strong these pipes are they're just way too strong okay way too strong okay and now this is where the precision gets in right you really need to be precise with it so i'm gonna put okay here i'm gonna scale this guys alright so i'm going to you know ctrl t that and scale it out right like this because really and you see how strong this element is how strong this dark element is it just it really doesn't look good in my opinion i i think i'm just gonna redo this so this will do these pipes quite frankly i'll just remove them um you know they're kind of cool but they already they're not gonna be visible anyways it doesn't matter something like that is enough guys okay and then you know render this again so now this is gonna basically follow the follow the direction of of our um of our vessel you know it's gonna be probably better you see that it's there is a difference of colors but it's not too intrusive these sizes don't really matter we could still put something here if you wanted to but the pipes would be okay to be honest in on size um we're gonna work on this one while we wait so ctrl j and let's go to filter and camaro filter let's see the levels i think we still have some dark spots in here on the right side so we can lift up the shadows a bit with a bit of clipping but not too much just a little bit that's okay put some clarity on this vessel because we will need that um and [Music] maybe not as much clarity there we go we could pump exposure a little bit you know a little bit and maybe reduce the highlights just a tiny bit yeah and you know it's gonna pump it up a bit that's cool uh we need this background so let's see how we're doing we're almost there it's kind of helps it's blurred because you know it's going to be easier to to blur it a bit even more um depth of field is kicking in here such that's great and let's go to filter and blur and motion blur and now we can just you know kind of direct it appropriately now if you wanted to blur it like this that's cool but what you need to do is ctrl t that and you need to rotate it to adjust it to the vessel direction i mean you really need to be precise with the decay and then make it simply bigger without okay you can you know do something like this and then you can move it around and see you know if it fits your image right like this for example element here that's not the best idea we might want to do something like this that's going to be good the lines are almost agreeing with the vessel let's align them really really really really precisely okay because it's going to emphasize the you know the vessel direction boom see what i mean look how bad this looks now you can lower the uh the blur here so just simply double click on the blur and just lower the blur and so we could you know lower it lower the bit so you can actually see some background but you don't want to overdo it because you know the background is really strong what you can do right is grab a grab a layer um grab a color whichever color could be the bright one and um you know paint it over and then simply drop the fill or drop a soft light on it right um but uh you could just simply drop the opacity a little bit on it so it's not as competing as this you see what i mean it's less visible now the vessel pops so you know that's the key and we could put some colors on it now the background could be colored as well so what we could do is uh you know grab some levels here and go to rgb in blue and you know add some blue color to it so let me see that a bit of blue to the shadows and some warmth to the highlights so the vessel is going to pop even more and then you could go with some infinite color here on top of it and create some really kick-ass image the first one is actually pretty cool this one isn't bad and then we can harmonize it on top of it it's going to harmonize all the colors across and you get yourself a cool image now this is a little bit dark so you can do you see what's actually causing this uh this image becomes so dark this one so we can change the curves here to color so they will not affect the darkness and brightness and i think harmonizes also we could switch it to color as well right and then on top of it we could just grab some curves grab this hand and lift it up a bit here or we could just you know use it only for the vessel so move it up here move this down and clip it here move it outside this group and clip it to the vessel so it only brightens the vessel you see what i mean and you can reduce the opacity of it so it's a bit darker but not too dark you know what i mean so now this one it could actually dropped a little bit more to create a bit more stronger framing this is cool this is acceptable i like that so let's save it and then let's talk about text okay now this problem here needs to be fixed so we can do is uh shift ctrl alt and e we can grab a lasso tool run the lasso here and on this area here and go content aware fail sort sorted now we need some text here so you know text and what kind of phone did you use i mean we're gonna text the jews let me see that what was it again um search and destroy right i mean the text is okay but i would probably um use a different font something that's a bit more strong like for example this one it fits the angular character of the vessel okay this structure um maybe this one is not ideal but you know something a bit more punchy and maybe just squash it so it's not as prominent and drop it somewhere here now that in terms of color i'll probably grab the color from the vessel and then drop the opacity on it so so it's you know not just crazy see what i mean so the text is there but it's not really fighting for the attention where's the vessel okay the vessel is still more important you could add for example um kind of a kind of area here ctrl d and you know drop the opacity down create something like this ctrl d drop a mask grab a gradient tool hold shift and and run the ingredient here not this one this one there we go something like this you know which will kind of uh correspond with the boxy shape of the vessel in the top here you could have your logo so we could ctrl j this and you know move this in here the logo is what nova right or something um it's a oh it's this one right it's a decal so now and of course we need to clamp a layer here and again sample the color and control delete boom and you know this looks far better okay than this all right do you see what i mean though so let me turn these texts on so see first of all you got punch in in the image okay the image is way more punchy is the direction of the flow of the of the ground and the vessels you know direction is is consistent it makes sense to you because here your brain is like what the is going on it's like the ground is moving and the vessel isn't okay there's just this connection between what's happening and what your brain is telling you this text is way too big way too bright and competing with this one okay too many dark elements right now at the end if you wanted to add some bloom effects here you could but quite frankly you don't really need to but if you wanted to could you could add lights manually you know so you could uh if you really wanted to what color is this kind of bluish right so you could just pump it a bit more bluish and simply you know you would need to be very precise here and paint over these like that and here you could use the brush so pad like wacom tablet or something i'm using mouse but not very precise to be honest and then you switch the blend mode to dodge and let's just zoom out okay and you can see that you know the the quad visible actually so and then what you can do is you can control j days and change to soft light and you could blur them so uh gaussian blur and blur them but not that much and just a little bit right on top of it you could still create more effects to make them even pop even more so just do these dots kind of a soft brush like this right and then simply change to soft light okay and you got this kind of a halo effect and you see you got really easy lights i mean it's pretty easy to do it in photoshop okay they're a bit too strong but you know like i look cool and you say same hearing and it could create the same thing on these lights not the big pro it's really easy okay um so there you go you know this would be my take on this render so you got dark color elements you got brighter elements you know you get really nice definition the text doesn't compete with the object it kind of flows with it because it's the same color and here you got the really strong competition between text and the image and also the the vessel is very kind of a dull you know there is no strong contrast no strong pop okay now if you wanted to create some clouds as well that's cool but you see the problem with your clouds okay it's not a problem the clouds don't move you cannot have the ground moving and the clouds not moving this looks actually like a vessel which is stationary and there is some massive element moving underneath so even if you wanted to add some clouds you would need to make them kind of you know move so um if i wanted to let's see go to my brush and um grab some clouds uh let me see that clouds clouds okay um you know okay something like this let's say and i'm gonna grab the really bright you know tone here and just certify you know just pop some clouds here okay this should they should also move so you know filter blur and motion blur okay i mean there's no other way around it and you see they're gonna become like a mist which is not really super super cool but if you're gonna go with soft light you might achieve something interesting because it's gonna add a little bit more kind of like a punch to the image but you know i would just leave it uh leave it probably alone something like this could work now if you guys would like to get better design i highly recommend you guys get this blender bros design course it's fantastic there's a lot of theory and practice and it will definitely help you in designing compositing composing camera work lighting etc because all the theory is explained and there's a lot of information there and there's also two practical examples this course is really really important now another thing is that if you click on the link in the video description you will get a free pdf with five powerful design tips and possibly some other goodies so i highly recommend you jump on that also consider joining our membership it's kind of like patreon but on steroids there's a lot of perks so hop on our website check it out read about it and uh hopefully you're gonna join us there there's a fantastic community of a lot of people lots of professionals and uh you know we're growing together so hope to see you there thanks for watching and i'll see you soon

Channel: Ponte Ryuurui

Views: 1,118

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, hard surface, scifi, 3d modeling, better render, how to render in blender, portfolio render, improve renders, cycles render, render lighting, render composition, hard surface render

Id: 3Tt5LZnv1ZM

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021