Input, tips and tricks or general rendering help

[shilling]

Hello all,


I am new to rendering. I have been following the octane tutorial series. I do believe I have the general idea about rendering...

I am making my models in Rhino.. I have been fiddling around with a few render programs.. Brazil, Octane..
A problem that seems to be bothering me is.. I think most of my rendered images edges seems very hard..
I am having a hard time making my items in my scene look as if they belong together.. My model looks as if they are just cut and paste into the scene..
I have attached an images of a Popcorn machine model I am working on. Other than the actual popcorn machine all other material are from octane live DB

Can any one assist with helping me sort this out or pointing me to some good info on how I can make this scene look allot better??
If you are game I can also share the octane file for someone to render so I can have some thing to keep as a measuring stick..
I am in a bit of in the middle of a rock and a hard place here,
Any help here would be very much appreciated.




Thanks
Shilling

Win 7 64 | Geforce GTX680 | i7 3770k | 32GB | Rhino V 5 | Octane 2.16

[Jaberwocky]

Shilling

A Couple of suggestions

1) Make sure all hard edges are slightly rounded and then remap the mesh accordingly.Nothing has infinitely hard edges.
2) if your using daylight in the scene , try setting the sun size to the max 30 and increase it's turbidity , balance this with the suns power and your camera's exposure setting.

This will all result in softer shadows and will make the lighting that bit less harsh.It will go along way to making the scene more real.

Maybe add a slight dirt map or worn edges, scratch's to the model

Hope this helps

Jaba

[Jaberwocky]

To Illustrate my point, please see the attached

1) The cube has a 5mm radius on it, just enough to diffuse the hard edges.
2) Sun size was set to 30 , but in this case i left the turbidity alone.I just changed the suns north offset to get an effective light to the scene.

[glimpse]

Good tips by Jaberwocky.

You can also check my signature & download full scene to play a bit =)

Octane Render is unbiased engine. As You don't need to put so much time into tweaking the rendering settings help Yourself learning a bit 'bout photography & related stuff (color, framing, composition =) no matter how good the engine is You still need to do all the artfull stuff & decide on lighting/camera textures..- don't stop questioning & You'll soon be very comfortable with OR (as mentioned, it saves ton of time).

Good Luck, Shilling!

[ristoraven]

Good point Glimpse.

With Octane, it´s like having a good camera at hand. Basics of traditional photography, creating a perfect lighting & scene, is essential with Octane. But, unlike the superstars in photography do, with Octane there is no need to sit in a tent on a location couple of weeks in order to catch the perfect light.

[face_off]

Make sure you use the PMC or Path Tracing kernel - so that the light from the surrounding objects effects the light of the popcorn machine.

Paul