Tutorial: Photorealistic Rendering using HDRI (Blender 2.80 & Cycles)

hello everyone today I want to show you how to use HD ride environments to create a beautiful render in blender 2.8 HDR eyes are a great way to showcase your work as an example you can see in this image this bicycle object was actually modeled by me but the rest of the stuff is just an image and I have used an HDR environment to make this render look real for this tutorial I will assume that you already know your way around blender and you know what Stra environments are I just want to share my workflow on how to use HTI's in vendor 2.8 so this is not a tutorial for absolute beginners so let's start i will first create a simple scene let's make a cube here and also add a UV sphere go to the left viewport and i will try to position my objects just at 0 for the z axis like so it's just a rough estimation doesn't need to be precise let's send them a little better move cube away from the sphere ok i will turn on smooth shading for both of them and for the cube let's add a bevel modifier ok and also saturween surface ok edge here increase the weight a little bit okay that is smooth it looks good for the sphere that's also add a subdivision modifier okay it looks nice now now let's give some materials to these objects let's go to shading tab and [Applause] change the shading mode to rendering and change the renderer to cycles let's delete the default light for the scene to go and now set up our STR environment like the scene now you can head over to your favorite browser to download some nice HDR images my favorite web site and one I can easily recommend is STR I haven comm they have the good collection for high quality HDRI images and they also have back plates for the HDR images which means that you can use high quality images as a background for your renders as well and it's all free if you want you can support the website at patreon let's use this one okay I will download this 2k version of this tiara it's enough to give us good lights and reflections for our objects and these are all the back plates that you can use as our background image and I will use this one here their back plates are in three qualities there is a row that is an image coming straight from the camera without any post-processing effects a plain JPEG which is converted directly from draw and a pretty JPEG which has some photoshop or post-processing applied to it I will download this plain JPEG after downloading our HDR image and the backplate let's set it up CheY in the shader editor changed this to world mode and let's add my room and texture here open it up and select it this is this one here connect the color here and you have nice environment now let's give some material store objects for the cube seems to object here create a new material cube and set the base color to this bluish maybe increase the roughness a little bit to treat the specularity okay and for the sphere i want to you name it first let's make it metallic no roughness more specularity so that we can see our the reflection of our environment better now to fit our objects according to the backplate image we need to set up our camera angle and some of the camera properties so head over to the Layout tab and select your camera okay go to the camera and let's okay let's see here the image properties details see that the image has this dimension so let's set up the render image size to be the same dimension 72-64 nine one two this elephant is very high so let's reduce the percentage to about 25 now let's see the focal length of the camera this is 38 millimeters so go to camera here and set the focal length to 38 0 on the numpad to see the camera angle now we can set our view to match the backplate for this we can take help from this background image option in camera check it and add an image and let's add our backlit image which is here now we need to move the camera so that it seems like these objects are part of the environment for this we can open up the end panel pressing end here and good view and lock camera to view and the camera will stay in place this is just some trial and error if your scene has some straight lines it can help a bit so you can match the gridlines to see this seems about it also add a plane to the scene let's first turn this off and scale it a bit we will use this plane to capture the shadows of these objects so that they appear to be part of the scene this is very important for the final image now let's go to the shading to set up some final materials first we need to rotate our HDRI to match the backlight this is to make sure that the lighting is correct according to the backplate ok so to the environment texture I will add mapping nodes and this can easily be done using the node Wrangler add-on and pressing ctrl T ok let's rotate this Z value here to rotate our environment okay so camera and you can use this alpha value for the back plate image to see it doesn't need to perfectly match the back plate it just needs to look similar so that the final lighting calculations appear to be correct now let's set up a material for the shadow catcher object first I will change the name to shadow and let's set up a material for it add a new material shadow let's move this principle be SDF and add a simple diffuse be SDF for the color of the shadow catcher I will try to reflect the environment into it so that in the end it also reflects the environment back to the our 3d objects it can be done without this step but I find it it adds a little bit of more realism to the objects so let's copy the loads from the world shader and object system copy the color here and we need to set the scale to minus one and said connect the texture coordinate reflection to vector okay now you can see that it gets reflected but the color doesn't seem to be collected color correct our material here you can either correct the color on this object or correct the color for the environment let's go to the world shader I will not explain how a color correction works since I do not understand it very well myself instead I can point you to this very good resource mesh logic and in this link the author Mickey has explained exposure of stra environment and how to correct it very nicely you can spend some time on it and try to understand it I will instead use the node group that he has shared publicly on this website great thank you to him and I will use it directly to fix my exposure okay let's add it here this is also included in my example file let's connect the wind shader to surface and this is mostly a trial and error for me and so these are the properties that seems to work well for me let's turn off the background image for the camera and it seems a bit okay I think we need to correct the color of the shadow catch a plane as well I will again use a node from the same website okay let's image - let's also add a black body no to set the color and let's mix them add a mix node looks RGB add the color here set the mix type to multiply set the temperature to 7000 okay now it seems to match more or less so once again to understand how I did this color correction you can visit the link in the description of the blog mesh logic by Mickey and you can also download his sample file and these not groups are provided there I will also include these no troops in my sample file and you can use them to color calculation error as well now let's set up our scene for render we need to add some render passes to it so in blender to open it what you need to do is add new view layers here at the top right corner and then you can use it to configure your render pass so the first view layer I will name 3d objects and let's add this cube and sphere to a new collection also called 3d objects ok and the shadow catch on to another collection call okay so for this render layer 3d objects I need this 2d object the camera and for the shadow catcher I only need its indirect influence to the reflection from it so let's set it so it's gone now let's add a new view layer here and let's call it nature and for this one for 3d objects we can set it to set in direct only so now they only have their shadow constant on the shadow catch a plane and add a new layer to share click and for this one we will disable the 3d objects entirely one more thing we need to set up an index for our shadow catcher object go to this property here and let's go to relations and pass and x21 okay and for this render path shadow catcher clean let's enable object index as well okay let's try to render it now let me just check the properties on to weight performance 54 let's turn to GPU style 2 6 6 go to your render tab here and set it to transparent okay okay press f12 and it starts rendering so after rendering is finished and over to compositing workspace and click use nodes and we can start compositing our final image ok let's first add our image here this is the backplate image that we wanted to use connect it to your output and you can select air composite this image is too big so we need to scale it through and you can set it to render size okay now it looks good let's add our render layers here as well set this one to a shadow catch it clean and this one to the shadow kitchen now first we will isolate our shadow from the scene to do this we need to divide our shadow catcher from our shadow get you clean ok let's do this get the mix node over here get here and change the mix type to divide we can view the result of this image by plugging this image no image here and you can see okay let's now add the shadows to our back plate for this we need mix node once again connect this to the lower input this upper input and it doesn't do much we need to set this to multiply okay and we need to use over in this object here ID mask connect this index object output the ID value here [Music] and we need to send the index value here to the index of the object which was which we set as 1 okay now the shadows are there let's add our 3d objects to see you can add them using an alpha over node let's connect the 3d object under passed this input here and output from this node to image here and let's see our result so there you are the objects have been added to this image one thing that I'd like to do is to play around a little bit with the RGB values or shadows so that we can make it match the image more like this okay and you can also play with the RGB values of 3d objects so this is it for now this is how you can easily set up your HDRI renders for blender 2.8 until next time goodbye

Channel: Pixel Adventures

Views: 13,007

Keywords: Blender, HDRI, Backplate, Image, Blender 2.80, HDRI Compositing, HDRI Backplate Image, Photorealistic Rendering, Cycles, Renderer

Id: rHyA4yr6zQg

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 12 2019