House in the forest

[Zorian]

Hi guys, I need some help with my non-commercial project. I'm a little bit tired of trying to achieve photorealistics results. Tried eveything and nothing can satisfied me . I'm not sure how people can achieve so amazed results.

About the project. It is using photoscanned assets (my own) blended with Speedtree. Painted dirt maps on car or bike. As a main application I use Blender ( modelling, texturing, painting, sculpting, scattering etc).

For example one tree has got something about 2mln polygons (photoscanned part ~40k after retopology) One render take something about 16h (i7-6800k, 64GB ram) to render, and in my opinion it is not worth it.

Maybe somone can help me and tell what makes it unphotorealistic?

Two first renders was rendered using Sky+sun
Third was rendered using PG sky

[aaouviz]

Hm, a lot to say possibly. Here are my notes:

 - Turn up your highlight compression
 - I think your biggest problem is the photoscanned assets that you are using. You made these yourself? I'd highly recommend not wasting your time making these and buy some high-quality existing assets. Mud from Poliigon is fairly cheap, looks great and will improve things a lot.
- Moving from Blender to Max is probably hurting you too. Try modelling in Max. Or using better import settings. (Sorry, I don't know much about blender).
- Tone down the contrast in the wood texture, it's quite ugly.
- Turn down the car reflections...a lot!
- The leaf textures are pretty awful. The shader needs a lot of work, and a bit help would be to have them scattered better - not a single left at the end of each branch (very unrealistic).
- I think if you fixed the ground texture, scattered the grass a bit better, compressed the highlights and got the leaves looking better that'd be a big help.

I cant say why it's taking such a long time to render, but it is very noisy which is making things worse. Perhaps you have too much reflection on your grass blades or leafs? Are you using proxy objects? This should speed up rendering I think?

Hope this helps. I also hope you get more feedback as my experience is limited. Good luck!

[Zorian]

Oh Sorry. I didn't mentioned that I'm not using 3dsmax. Only Blender and Corona Standalone. Everything what you see on the renders are 3d models. I'm using something similiar to proxys, in my aplication it's called linking, but the main rule is the same. There is a problem with car - I've made almost 4 or 5 layers and I think that there is a problem with linking it - some masks are not working as they should work. I think that I need to start from the beginningwith this scene, because the first tests came much better than this renders. or not?

[Zorian]

I;ve changed some settings in car paint material and now it looks like that:

[aaouviz]

Yes! Big improvements :)

Especially the Car. Well done, keep going.

[Zorian]

Thanks again:)

Today I decided to recreate the trees. I wasnt really happy with the results from speed tree, so I used the Blender addon to make it from scratch. As twigs I used Megascans - to avoid dense of polygons.

Imo the images speak for themselfs.

[romullus]

Speedtree definitely is capable to output highly realistic looking trees. I think it might be more to the lack of your experience, rather than limits of the software.

That Blender addon, is it Groove?

[Zorian]

Yes, for Blender I've used the Grove 3d.

I know that Speed tree is great, but it takes some time to be good in creating trees. In this case I bought a tree and I wanted to blend it with my photoscanned assets. I didnt work very well, speccialy with this model. Another models where much better, but i didnt liked conection between Speed tree and Belnder. It creates huge ammmount of polygons and it still didnt look right.

For the grove I don't like how the 1 level of branches is blending with the trunk. But with Speed tree I had the same problem. Overall license for speed tree isnt cheap, and I think that Grove 3d trees are good enough for this kind of scene, where I would like to have a huge amount of trees.

I know that I can create my own branches from megascans assets how I did in Blender, but that's create meshes with polycounts and I Think that using instances for the branches can save me some time with rendering.