First interior scenes renderings - Need advices

[aquelito]

Hello there,

I have purchased Octane few months ago and I am just starting playing with it.
I will use it to render mainly interior scenes.

Enclosed renders have been rendered into Sketchup, using the plugin.

The first picture enclosed is a later render, using a different floor texture. I do not really like the result on this one, especially the lights...
The three last renders are from the same "batch". Seems better to me.

I used Sketchup ambient light, as well as spots lights emittors (using an IES file).

The renders are around 8000 passes and are postprocessed with Nik Collection Sharpener.

I would like to get your advices to improve the renders, especially

- the lighting,
- white wall treatment,
- FOV, that is how to blur the foregroudn and focus on the background

Thanks !

[enricocerica]

I guess you are using Direct Lighting AO, I would suggest to use Path trace or PMC instead or Direct Lighting diffuse to have indirect light. Also if you really want to use DL AO reduce the AO distance, I guess you are using 3 (default) reduce it to 2.
Your walls are glossy, probably to much, use diffuse or reduce the glossyness and increase the roughness to avoid too much reflection to get a better natural effect. Be aware that glossy materials may produce lot of fireflies. You could also create a mix material with a glossy mat and a diffuse one with a few emitting light to increase the overall lighting on the walls.
Try to get better textures to avoid repeating.
Sunlight produces hard shadows, use HDR instead or increase the sun size to blur the shadows.
Place portals with normals pointing inside, put them in front of the windows inside the room (not outside !), once the portals are placed you could also decide to convert them in emitter planes to increase the lighting entering in the room.
If you get too much fireflies with windows glasses using specular meterial you could also use glossy material with alpha set to ~0.12 and ior set to 1.

[Marvez]

Aquelito, WOW the Master has shared some great insight, thanks for posting so could learn as well

[aquelito]

I guess you are using Direct Lighting AO, I would suggest to use Path trace or PMC instead or Direct Lighting diffuse to have indirect light. Also if you really want to use DL AO reduce the AO distance, I guess you are using 3 (default) reduce it to 2.
Your walls are glossy, probably to much, use diffuse or reduce the glossyness and increase the roughness to avoid too much reflection to get a better natural effect. Be aware that glossy materials may produce lot of fireflies. You could also create a mix material with a glossy mat and a diffuse one with a few emitting light to increase the overall lighting on the walls.
Try to get better textures to avoid repeating.
Sunlight produces hard shadows, use HDR instead or increase the sun size to blur the shadows.
Place portals with normals pointing inside, put them in front of the windows inside the room (not outside !), once the portals are placed you could also decide to convert them in emitter planes to increase the lighting entering in the room.
If you get too much fireflies with windows glasses using specular meterial you could also use glossy material with alpha set to ~0.12 and ior set to 1.

Great, thanks a lot Enrico !

I am indeed using DL AO because it's way way faster than PMC on my tiny computer (only one 750 Ti). I've purchased a GTX 970, we'll see if PMC is an option time-wise.
Thanks a lot for your advices on portal and the sun settings ; hard shadows were indeed my main issue.

I could retrieve the wall material from Octane demo files ; I'll try the other settings asap.