First "real" render

[fillishave]

Hi everyone
After lurking around the forum and learning and being inspired by all fantastic renders here is my first attempt at a somewhat proper render in Octane.
I have previously only done very limited swishy swooshy abstract animations and spinning ipads and the likes for clients who want to present boring stuff in a somewhat cooler way

From the beginning I did all my work in After Effects with fake 3D-solutions and then Element 3D came along and I started to get a little bit better grasp of the vast and seemingly endless 3D-world.
Last autumn I finally decided it was time to take the plunge and get into 3D for real, so I opened my wallet and dedicated as much spare time as I could, which between paid work and the full time job of being a father of four kids was not nearly as much time as I needed.
I am still very much learning and trying to figure things out as I go.

Originally I intended to do everything in this scene myself but since I am too much of a beginner in too many fields I realized that it would just take me too long and I would probably end up not finishing the scene at all so I used some models from two different Archmodels-packs too fill out the room. The parts I have made myself are the room itself (with doors, cornices etc), the book-shelf, the table, the two chairs with the pillows and blanket, the brass lamp, picture frames, electrical socket+light switch.

There are some obvious bad spots in this image due to the lack of knowledge from my part (the texture on the Karin-chairs and the way too jagged right edge on the same chair for instance) but all in all I am happy with the end result considering it's my first proper full scene.
All constructive critiscism on how to improve things is of course more than welcome! (Try to be not too harsh considering my newbie-status though )

The scene ended up being too heavy for my graphics cards, since I didn't optimize the textures from the Arcmodels-packs at all, so I ended up rendering one scene without all the books and stuff in the book shelf and the bottom part of the picture separately and then combined them in Photoshop. About 1 hour and 20-30 minutes for each render in PT with 3000 samples using two 780 ti-cards. All light from one hdri.



Thanks for watching and sorry for the history of my life-long post
/Filip

[smicha]

Welcome to the forum.

Very nice render. I like the light.

You could increase render time (samples from 3k to ....) or to reduce GI clamp to get a cleaner image (some noise is visible). Great start anyway.

[glimpse]

Pretty nice image =)

one thing I honestly dislike, that ruins the shot is lighting itself.

Drop white mat to get something more apealing - liek evening/morning shot - paly not only with light angle, but also a bit with responce curves (tweak gama, exposure), whitebalance, vigneting, also post procesing..

Phottography by word means "writing with light" - don't ignore the most important part of it =)

it's really nice start, but if You would not stop here - think You can push it even further, just by adjusting lighting.

Good luck!

[fillishave]

Thank you both for your comments!

smicha: Yes, I will try upping the samples to maybe 5000 and see if there is a big difference in noise. I personally don't mind a little bit of noise since it mimics a real world digital photography but for these situations I should of course try to get a clean image. I did reduce the GI clamp a lot already so I think the solution is to increase samples.

glimpse: Thanks for the very constructive critisism! I played with quite a bit of different lighting scenarios (including evening/morning setups) but ended up liking the mid day somewhat discrete lighting set up best as opposed to a more dramatic one but if it's perceived a "boring" then of course that shouldn't be concidered too successfull. I think the color management on the macbook I did the comping on is a bit off too because the Photoshop-file that I did some color correcting on had a much more vibrant look to it that got lost in the sRGB-conversion. I will try some other lighting setups and re-render to see with what I can come up with.

[clausgs]

Very good render for your first render.
Remember final result it will never be,,,, you always have the possibility to come back and adjust and re-render, a bit like art.

I agree also that the wall is a bit boring to look at,,,,,, maybe get the foreground part of the wall to be a bit darker than the back part.
Try to think about what you want to show with this image.... what part of the image do you want people to look at,,, try to draw the attention to that with color and brightness (image composition).

[fillishave]

Thanks for the reply!
I didn't really set out to create a "finished" image with this (I know all too well that images of all sorts and kinds are never really finished ) but more try to educate myself on different aspects of the 3D workflow and I've always enjoyed looking at archviz-type of images so I'd thought I'd give that a go and see what you more seasoned 3D-guys think should be improved.
I'm really more of a robot, spaceship, monster type of guy so I think the next project I make will be something quite different

Composition wise I was going more for the type of look you see in interior decorating magazines. Here's one of my ref images so you can see the lighting setup and composition I was aiming for with this specific excercise:


I will see if I can bring a little more balance to the image by doing something to the white wall, which I absolutely agree took way too much empty space. Also I see now when looking at the image on another, better color calibrated, monitor that the image I uploaded had way too much of a greenish hue to it. Here is a new differently color corrected version (same render so no difference in noise etc):