OTOY Forums

Well Rick if you try to paint the Mona Lisa with water-colors then it applies even to the best artist.

You are one of the best artists here, mybe you could help out a bit with some artistic hints? Is using composition channels better as rendering out one beauty image for example?

Exteriors are more complicated than interiors, nature is not easy to replicate.
On exteriors things are dirt, most of them have imperfections very difficult to model.
When I look at Vray renders I notice some unnatural colors, contrast, super sharp edges. Most of them are illustrations not simulations of the real world. Vray is the most popular renderer on the planet because it doesn't need expensive gpus and because Vlado is a good programmer. Because I do mostly interiors I preferred to switch to Octane.
On the Evermotion or Ronen Bekerman forum there are a lot of examples of unrealistic renders.
The photo realism depends by the artist not by the renderer.
If you render a glossy teapot with a studio HDR environment it will appear photorealistic on all renderers.
I tried to switch to Corona because I wanted to have a full path tracing renderer as Octane.
As Vray Corona needs enabled the light cache otherwise you will wait for hours, pure path tracing renders needs gpus.
Today the answer to my needs is Fstorm.
1st because It translates on the fly every scene you have: Octane, Corona, Vray.
2nd is super fast and it's in a beta stage. I can't imagine what performance can be reached optimizing the code.
3rd is stable and has all the necessary tools to make beautiful renders.
4th is faster than Octane on interiors with many ies lights.
5th it is easy to use as Corona.
I tested everything: Arion, Thea, Vray 3.3, Indigo, IRay+. The two plugins that really works on gpus within Max are only Fstorm and Octane.

I'm testing FStorm too for some time now. Its really cool. Supporting Railclone and Forest pack too. I think it gets slower when more features are in.

I agree with sentiments expressed by Glimpse in this thread, and I have asked myself many times about why something looks or doesn't look real. In my view, it's more meaningful getting a client's human brain to agree an image is real than it is to have the confidence as a creator in saying to yourself, "I rendered this as realistic as I could..." The human brain is socially adept at seeing computer graphics as computer graphics these days, so maybe in the past a photo would pass as real, but not now. Reality has way to many minor HD imperfections, it's hard to get a model and a background image equally noised. In the rendering world the lack of minor HD imperfections of equal noise can only be masked by effects (like blur or a white glow). I tend to think Octane comes closest to real when you can squeeze effects out of it that would other wise be done in post, but many times pre-post effects are not enough.

As a parallel, in the music world, as creators we often think a good mix is when our ears like what we hear. But then we compare that to professional mixes on a radio, we will wonder why their's sounds so much better. It's the effects they use - compression, delay, reverb, EQ, limiters to ceiling high volume sounds, etc. So, while it may not be the most acoustically pure production one could imagine, the effects are what makes it 'work'. Now, you're brain can tell when something sounds weird and 'over-produced', but there is no doubt the effects will be necessary to some degree. Not to mention that photographers of straight-up real images will use many effects to bring a photo to 'life'. Don't feel bad because you might have to expand your tool set beyond Octane, it only means that you are that much father along at producing excellent 'real' images

Real world often looks to me as a bit unreal. For example, bright sunny morning, sunlight in a wet tarmac looks often way too bright and over exposed. I would never render it like that, because it would seem unreal.

Most realistic stuff I have rendered, comes from a very detailed bumb or normal map. Even if the house is viewed from a distance, those very small details in walls ads realism.

Best tool to create these details is Quixel Suite, Ndo / Ddo..

Also, remember to add dirt, especially on exterior walls. Not too much, but subtle, if it is supposed to be a new building. If older, more dirt.

Perfection is something where imperfection is included. Otherwise, perfection would lack something and therefore wouldn't be perfect at all. Perfect is something that lacks nothing. Therefore, in every perfect thing must be imperfections.

Flawless is something where is no imperfections, but that's different than perfect.

[/philosophy]

With quixel suite, you can be very precise on details, add images, paint the dirt precisely on right spots, layers upon layers etc. Tool that I can't live without anymore.