How can I get a render as detailed as this?
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Top quality models, properly adjusted shaders, and lighting that highlights the details. Poor lighting will kill the details even on the best models and shaders. Poor shaders/materials will make even the best models with good lighting look not so good. Poorly constructed models will kill the overall feel and quality of a render quickly as well.
IMHO, your sample image uses all three very well. It has lighting that accentuates the fine details of the models and the pbr shaders/materials. Plus the artist did an outstanding job of kit bashing sets from two outstanding PAs here (Linday and Aeon Soul).
I would say the best way to improve might be to post one of your renders and people here can help with suggestions on how to improve. Feel free to browse my gallery (links below), and if you find an image of nearly as good (I'm not super good, but some images do have great details), I'll tell you what I did to get the results you liked in the image, so you can the same techniques yourself.
Well, talking about 'depth', I guess its backdrop is not render together with the figure, it maybe a jpg or rendered seperately.
To be clear and sharp, turn off the camara's 'deep of field', and setup render setting pixel with 4K, Max Samples 30K, Max Time 10 hrs, Rendering quality off.
I really appreciate the answer! I think I'm overlighting things right now and maybe blasting away the details.
I'm attaching one I did that is vaguely similar and you can see how the darks are too dark and the lights are too light. Also the skin or armor don't have nearly the same quality of detail as the example.
Any advice would be super appreciated.
Actually, it's not that bad, your getting close. Unfortunately, often black clothing can be quite difficult to get looking good and to see the details/shape (at least for me it is). Especially with a light skinned character, you can easily blow out the skin details trying to get enough light/energy to get the black to respond well. I think you are right that there is too much light. Lets start with something simple so you can see how the light behaves on everything in a standard environment.
To begin with, use the default HDRI that loads up with DS/Iray (DTHDR-RuinsB-500.hdr), and make sure all of your lights are off, as well as the headlamp on the camera you are using. See the Environment Settings image below and make sure yours are the same (if you have changed this, you can just reload the "Default" render settings and it will bring it back). If your figure is facing forward, you will want to rotate the HDRI (Render Settings>Environment>Dome Rotation) to somewhere between 35-50 degrees. This will change your lighting to have the dominant light coming from the front right, with a rim light from the back left. (Note: This may not be the ideal lighting for your characters pose and what you want, but it will illustrate the importance of using an HDRI for environmental lighting to help bring out the details on surfaces when you have a figure in an empty environment.. The surfaces need something to reflect, where in your sample image, it looks like there are only white lights to reflect.)
The environment settings below will also enable shadows on the "ground" (Draw Ground>On); This will render the shadows on a invisible ground surface that will help when compositing the image with a background. to help you figure stand out from the background, you will want to add rim lights to the right rear of the figure, and possibly above and behind the figure. For rim lights I typically will use spot lights because they are easy to control and to focus on a specific area I want to highlight (you can also look through them like a camera to easily see what they are illuminating). You will need to adjust the spotlight lumens to a much larger value than the default to make the effect visible (try adding 1 or 2 zeros). This is a very basic, but effective set up. There are light sets available in the store that will do most of the work for you, but I find setting up my own lighting typically gives me the results I want much easier/faster. Also, IMHO learning to light a scene by yourself really helps you improve as an artist.
I think the skin may need some shader adjustments, and possible some other things as well. But first lets "control" the lighting, then he can work on getting the surfaces to react to the lighting the way you want.
Opps, forgot to add the image!!! Here it is.
Environment settings
You can get a sharper Iray render by changing the Render Settings Pixel Filter Radius to mitchell and Pixel Filter Radius to 1.00. These are just suggested values. See what works for you. A Pixel Filter Radius that is too low will cause aliasing.The default Gausian and 1.5 are not real sharp. If you use the Post Denoiser, that can also cause a lot of detail to be lost in the render.
Yeah, what Barb said!!
There can be a tradeoff between the crispness of the image and jagged un-anti aliased lines (though I don't often see it). I do typically set the pixel filter to around 1.00. Another trick to get the details to "pop", is in post work (in Gimp, Photoshop, etc.) . Copy the image to a new layer, run an unsharp mask on the new layer, then set the layers transparency/opacity to the desired level to let the original image "dominate" with the unsharp mask image provides subtle details not easily see in the original (10%-35% opacitiy). An additional step that can be used to add a sort of soft focus effect while retaining the details from the unsharp mask image is to copy the unsharp mask layer, paste it as a new layer, and run a Gaussian blur on the new layer, and set it to 10-30% opacity.
These are fantastic tips. Thank you!
I'll give them a try later tonight and report back.
Hi!
I used DustRider's render settings and Barbult's recommendation on the Mitchell rendering setting and have come back to share the result. The render is attached. I haven't done any post work on it.
I did a second version using the Unsharp mask technique and the most noticeable effect was that it greatly filled in the hair, which was awesome. Thanks for that.
I'm pretty hapyy with these results but Dustrider, you mentioned adjusting shaders? Could you tell me about that?
Sorry for the delay, I should have something for you in 2-3 hours.
Hey Porrmojo. sorry again for the delay. I got distracted by the NFL draft (yes, I'm a football junky) ..... and I wanted to provide an example render that might help (no postwork).
First, yes, it's looking better! I think your lighting still might be a bit too complex, and light positioning/complexity may be washing out some ot the details???
The outfit and hair are looking really good, I don't think there needs to be any adjustment of the shaders there. But her skin looks a little flat and lifeless. Skin shaders are tough, because of all the different ways vendors set them up, but in general it needs a little more glossiness, and I would up the translucency just a bit too. For the glossiness, it may work to increase Glossy Reflectivity to and additional 0.10 to 0.30. You may need to adjust Glossy Roughness as well. Glossy Roughness spreads out the effect of Glossy Reflectivity. Depending on other factors, a setting can be anywhere between 0.10 to 0.60. Often if the Bump Map settings are too high it will affect your ability to get a bit of gloss on the skin, some vendors do make the bump too strong. so that's always something to try as well if adjusting glossiness doesn't work (great for close ups, but not so good for full figure shots). Compare the skin highlights of your last image to the image below. You can see there is a bit more shine that helps define surfaces and details much better. Oh, I almost always set the Cornea Bulge on the eyes to 100%. This helps to get a realistic reflection in the eyes.
The bow and arrow also look quite flat compared to everything else. If the different sections of the bow and arrow have different shaders (i.e. on the bow, separate shaders/materials for the metal, wood, and handle), I would increase the "Metallicity" of the metal elements, and increase the "Glossy Reflectivity" of the wooden elements (and possibly the roughness). The idea here is to get more interplay between light reflection and shadows to give a better feel for the 3D shape of them.
Now back too the lighting. Below is an example with the same pose you used (I don't have the same hair and outfit) to give you an example of the results using just the default HDRI that comes with DS/Iray. I tried to use a similarly dark outfit, and a bow (that needed shader adjustment). The dome is rotated to 140 degrees. which helps to give some very nice highlight and shadows to the details on the surfaces of the outfit, and the figures skin (I also adjusted the Environment value to 1.8). The HDRI also provides a lower level fill light that both helps to keep most areas of the image well lit, while not washing out the shadows that are key to keeping the 3Dness of the image. The HDRi also provides something for the reflective surfaces to reflect.and adds interest to the image (our minds instinctively notice when pure white is all that is reflected, even though looking at the image we often can't easily identify what makes it feel "wrong"). Note too, that this HDRI provides rim lighting on the right side of the image. Anymore, I usually try to keep the main light at a greater angle from the camera position rather than close to the camera. True, by doing so sometimes some really nice or interesting features on the clothing on the figure will be more difficult to see. However the big trade off is that the images in general are more visually appealing, detailed, and it's easier to get them to stand out from the background. Of course this is all just stylistic preference, but I thought it might be worth mentioning.
I hope something here helps a little!
Do a google or youtube search for the term "3 point lighting". Rim lighting aka. back lighting is one of the components of that lighting system. In your own archer pictures you dont use rim lighting. If you look at the very first pic the archer in the forest has rim lighting. On the right side of the pic if you look along her left shoulder, left bicep, left torso and left hip you see how there is light on the edge there that is kinda bright? thats what rim/back lighting is.
I actually kind of liked what I came up with on the sample image above. I thought it might help porrmojo. and possible others, if I just finished the image, and gave a few details on what I did.
One important thing in any image is to make the figure look/feel balanced, and the pose look proper/natural. Without that, regardless of how detailed the image is, things will always feel a bit off. I had to adjust the legs and feet just a bit to get a better feel of balance, and a bit of body language to match the facial expressions (could be a bit better, but it seems to work now). I also had to do quite a bit of re-posing of the arms and hands/fingers to get everything to match how a real archer might be posed (the draw hand/fingers to me were at a very uncomfortable/un-natural position). I should have probably put her left index finger over the arrow, which is common to make sure the arrow stays in place, but I have also been quite successful in keeping the arrow in place with proper handling with the draw hand/fingers. I also did some minor adjustments of the head and eyes.
I added several items to the figure to make her a little more interesting. and of course she needed an arrow too. I also added five spot lights to give a rim light effect on the figures right side (see first image below). This helps the figure to stand out from the the background. The scene she is in is Muelsfell Modular Red Rock Canyon from E-Arckham. I modified almost all of the visible shaders in the scene to get the look I wanted. The most important modifications were to slightly darken the base color of the cliff and background rocks. This also helps the figure to stand out better, and become the focus of the scene. Speaking of focus, I also enabled DOF and adjusted it to help make the figure stand out (note the tip of the arrow is slightly out of focus, this helps to give the arrow length and depth too). I should probably also note that I enabled just a slight bit of bloom in the render, and set the pixel radius to 1. I also added a SY Swift Steam Iray prop between the figure anf the cliff to add a very subtle effect to help set the foreground apart from the background (Opacity was set to 0.1 and Base Color was set to a very light brown).
The raw render before post processing is the second image below.. I added the image with no post processing so you can compare it to the post processed image which is the third image below. The post processing was done in GIMP steps I used were:
1. Adjusted levels to improve contrast and brightness. This image was a bit dark, and normally I would adjust the exposure value in Tone Mapping, but I thought this would provide a bit better example of how adjusting level can make an image much better.
2. Copied and pasted the levels adjusted image to a new layer.
3. Added vignette to the base (1st) image using the Vignette filter in the G'MIC QT plugin in GIMP.
4. Ran the unsharp mask filter on the top layer (pasted layer) to enhance the details.
5. Added vignette to the base (1st) image using the Vignette filter in the G'MIC QT plugin in GIMP.
6. Ran the "Light Glow" filter in the G'MIC QT plugin in GIMP to help highlight the figure.
7. Set the opacity of the top figure to 23%
8. Added signature.
I hope you find this somewhat helpful
PS: Please click on images to see the details at full resolution.
Light set up
Base un-processed image
Final Image
This is all awesome. Thank you all for the insight regarding Lighting and Surfaces, and DustRider, for the quick but detailed look into a knowledgeable workflow including post processing. Very nice results!
i was so impressed with what the op came back with after following the simple advice... well done to all involved.
it's a page i'm gonna bookmark.
Your very welcome, I'm really glad you found it useful.
Hope it helps in the future!
Fantastic advice i have just followed myself and my renders look much better. big thankyou and definately a page i will be bookmarking.
Adding my voice to the choir here. Thank you so much for your guides and tips, DustRider! This has hugely improved by render results.
I'm really glad it helped!!
on a side note:
If you want your render to be sharp and crisps, you still can set your Pixel Filter to 0.5 /Mitchell.Just use a larger canvas, 4K or 8K and scale it down in post. Or render longer or with more iterations until the artifacts disappear.Blurring the render in post kind of defeats the purpose.
I'm not saying you shouldn't blur in post. For artistic purposes, gaussian blur filter is an excellent tool, but that's another subject.
The original render, althought eye pleasing looks a bit odd. The background (lighting) does not line up with the figure. It's as if the figure was lit by artificial lights. Dustrider's example, however, has a more balanced feel. The background is more in tune with the figure.
JV