Sunset Render

[ilhanduz]

Hi all,

This is my first post in the forum.
I've made something -maybe a little over post processed. I've modelled it in sketchup. I use Indigo RT, so i can not use IES lights. And i m not pretty much satisfied with the result so any comment will be really useful for me

[Headroom]

Welcome to the forum. Looks quite nice to me. What is it that you don't like ?

[lape]

Looks good to me, too. Perhaps some less orange tint?

[ilhanduz]

Thanks for comments, i cannot describe the thing that i dont like but it seems so "render" to me.

But especially i m not happy with the steel parts, not just about this render, i mean generally. It is really hard for me to create a painted metal with some texture.

And about, orange tint, i agree, i will change it.

[CTZn]

I think that the tint is okay, it's a sunset The high contrast is the thing wich bothers me the most.

Could you please post the raw render for comparison ? It may be easier for us to pinpoint technical details.

[ilhanduz]

Well, i can not send the raw render, cause i use a different method; i take several renders with different Ev, lets say -1 -2 -3 0 etc. then i blend them at photoshop to have a balanced tonemapping. I stack them at photoshop and have a median/medium effect depending on the situation, but for this one i i can attach one of them. At the beginning i was using this method for reducing the noise; since generally i dont have enough time to render long, i was trying to fix it at photoshop then it became a kind of standart procedure for me.

[CTZn]

It's alright to do what you did in stacking different exposures in post. I'm no pro but there are three points on wich I think that the renders might be improved:

- exponent maps on the largest surfaces, along with the chairs/tables. Boost'em a bit if present ?
- variation of the lighting temperatures/colours. Technically more involving, this detail adds a lot to the realism of such scenes.
- the point of view is not realistic. Gives a fuzzy feeling with the patterns of tables and chairs I think.

[ilhanduz]

by boosting i didnt understand what you mean exactly, maybe it s better to ask how? the texture of the chairs has an exponent map, but for wood, it s really hard to find the exact values for me -reflection/rougness- i searched for IOR values for wood, but unfortunately i could not find something useful, so i try different settings everytime.

And for emitting materials, i m a little afraid to use different variations -especially for interiors and night renders- even if i render long, i can not get rid of the noise and small white dots (I know the 205 rule, but i think still there is something i missing) The more emitting material i use, the longer render time i thin? but i m not sure about this.

[Headroom]

I agree with CTZn that a different point of view would enhance image composition. How would it look like from the river bank across or from a boat ?

The orange tint is a result of the setting sun and that's OK. However, assuming this scene is in a somewhat urban environment, in such conditions there is almost always some more ambient light present as a result of street lights partially lit buildings etc. across the river. It would not have to be a very detailed light source either, perhaps a long thin rectangle faintly glowing at a higher (2700 - 3000k) blackbody temperature. Out of view and somewhat distant.

To reduce the white spots you can increase the supersampling factor from the default of 2 to 3 or 4 without penalty in render time. I will increase memory consumption, however

[CTZn]

Using blackbody emission, it's easy to change the base_emission temperature.

If emission_scale is not used, blackbodies tend to require quite a small gain, closer to 0.0 than to 1.0.

The concern with exponent maps is nearly negligeable then