Many people complain about the Fast Food Restaurant Free Scene from the free 3D SCENES section.
They
say it´s hard to get a good render of the scene for their personal
portfolios since it´s too "repetitive", too "plain" and "boring". But I
have bad news for all of you: the
problem is you, not the scene.
It´s certainly not a modelling masterpiece, or a piece of wonderful conceptual art. It´s actually a simple scene, but that´s all you need to have some nice renders in your portfolio. In this post I will show you some settings to get some nice renderings with this scene, and more important yet, I will give you some important tips and concepts for indoor rendering, so you´ll never have to complain about a scene model again.
NOTE: To Keep it simple, I will work with the very basic 3ds max and mental ray tools, no film lighting or concept development rendering for now.
Materials
Most of the materials I used can be found in the mental ray materials section. These materials have maps for reflections, glossiness, bump, etc. giving the image the richness of real life pictures. Wether you use these materials or not, have in mind every texture you use should be processed to work correctly for reflections, glossiness, bump, etc. It´s not enough to desaturate the texture, maybe you will need to adjust the contrast, or posterize, or blur, or anything. Below there´s a diagram showing the materials I used for the scene:
Other materials used: (click to enlarge)
Others materials used in the scene are chrome for light fixtures, frosted glass for divisory elements, and a tile mosaic material.
Illumination
First of all, Linear workflow... Many of the people complaining think this is just an optional thing, like glare or motion blur... Linear workflow is crucial for realism!... Overlooking this advice will inevitably cause you lot of suffering. The gamma correction settings should look like this: (click to enlarge)
Nowdays, if you want to have some natural illumination in your scene, maybe you only have one option: the Daylight System (Create-Systems-Daylight). Fot this sccene, I will use two different types of daylight configuration, for the daylight configuration, I´m using sky portals in the windows, and set the Daylight time to 15:00 pm. (center).
As for the Daylight settings... The fact that it comes with default settings doesn´t mean those are the "right" ones. You can (and sometimes should) adjust the parameters depending on what kind of illumination you want to achieve, or what your scene charactreristics are. In this case the scene is a one story construction, has windows all over two walls and cenital sunlight incidence. This means that the scene will have considerable sunlight incidence, and may cause the scene to be wether too bright, or too dark in the non-sunlight areas.So I´ll reduce the sun multiplier and increase the sky multiplier to help avoid over-exposure.
Next I´m going to adjust the GI parameters.You could use iRay and it would be lot more simple. If you want to use mental ray, these are the parameters I used for indirect illumination, in the render panel (keyboard F10):
1.- FG Precision set to "Medium", that will do for our scene, you can also try with "high".
2.- Noise Filtering set to "High" to avoid any kind of.. well.. noise.
3.- Increasing the trace deph makes the FG rays travel more "deep" into the scene. The numbers tell you the bounces every ray is performing in the scene. In the practice this lets you illuminate dark areas far away from the direct light sources.
4.- Enable GI
5.- For this scene I´m using 6 lights (4 mrSky Portals, mrSun and mrSky), so I will set Average GI photons per light to 100,000, that way I will have enough photons in my scene to avoid ugly GI artifacts.
Then I´m going to adjust the exposure settings. First of all, you should make a preview render so you can see the scene change as you change the settings. Again, the fact that it has default settings doesn´t mean that it´s better not to change them. So first , I set shutter speed to 1/10 to avoid under-exposed areas in the image. Then I reduce the highlights to avoid over-exposure, increase the midtones to have an interesting pale efffect, and increase shadows slightly not to lose contrast. I´m also using a vignette of 4 (the intensity of the effect depends on the camera lens size). I´m using vignette since I´m not planning to do any kind of compositing to the renderded images. These are the settings:(click to enlarge)
Rendering
Before goning into the final rendering, I´m going to adjust some rendering parameters:
1.- Since I have many satin materials, I set Glossy Reflections Precision (Multiplier) to 4, this basically means that if your materials have a Glossy samples parameter of, say, 16, at render time they will be multiplied by 4, that means 64 glossy samples. It´s a high value that will increase render times, but believe me, it´s worth it.
2.- I always use sample per pixel values from 4 to 16 for final rendering (you could use 1 - 16 too). It´s time consuming, but gives great results.
3.- A very small but very powerful setting will give your image an unmatched realism, that´s the Gauss Filter. Unlike the default Box filter, which creates uniformly and slightly sharp edges, Gauss creates very subtle blurry edges that imitates very well the photographic look. I recommend you use Gauss Filter for every realistic image rendering.
Finally I´m going to make the final renders of the daylight series, for some images I changed the Time configuration or rotated the compass. These are the results: (average rendering time: 12 min)
It´s certainly not a modelling masterpiece, or a piece of wonderful conceptual art. It´s actually a simple scene, but that´s all you need to have some nice renders in your portfolio. In this post I will show you some settings to get some nice renderings with this scene, and more important yet, I will give you some important tips and concepts for indoor rendering, so you´ll never have to complain about a scene model again.
NOTE: To Keep it simple, I will work with the very basic 3ds max and mental ray tools, no film lighting or concept development rendering for now.
Materials
Most of the materials I used can be found in the mental ray materials section. These materials have maps for reflections, glossiness, bump, etc. giving the image the richness of real life pictures. Wether you use these materials or not, have in mind every texture you use should be processed to work correctly for reflections, glossiness, bump, etc. It´s not enough to desaturate the texture, maybe you will need to adjust the contrast, or posterize, or blur, or anything. Below there´s a diagram showing the materials I used for the scene:
Other materials used: (click to enlarge)
| Table tops | Chair metal | Seatings | Table borders(and windows) |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |
 |  |
Others materials used in the scene are chrome for light fixtures, frosted glass for divisory elements, and a tile mosaic material.
Illumination
First of all, Linear workflow... Many of the people complaining think this is just an optional thing, like glare or motion blur... Linear workflow is crucial for realism!... Overlooking this advice will inevitably cause you lot of suffering. The gamma correction settings should look like this: (click to enlarge)
Nowdays, if you want to have some natural illumination in your scene, maybe you only have one option: the Daylight System (Create-Systems-Daylight). Fot this sccene, I will use two different types of daylight configuration, for the daylight configuration, I´m using sky portals in the windows, and set the Daylight time to 15:00 pm. (center).
As for the Daylight settings... The fact that it comes with default settings doesn´t mean those are the "right" ones. You can (and sometimes should) adjust the parameters depending on what kind of illumination you want to achieve, or what your scene charactreristics are. In this case the scene is a one story construction, has windows all over two walls and cenital sunlight incidence. This means that the scene will have considerable sunlight incidence, and may cause the scene to be wether too bright, or too dark in the non-sunlight areas.So I´ll reduce the sun multiplier and increase the sky multiplier to help avoid over-exposure.
Next I´m going to adjust the GI parameters.You could use iRay and it would be lot more simple. If you want to use mental ray, these are the parameters I used for indirect illumination, in the render panel (keyboard F10):
1.- FG Precision set to "Medium", that will do for our scene, you can also try with "high".
2.- Noise Filtering set to "High" to avoid any kind of.. well.. noise.
3.- Increasing the trace deph makes the FG rays travel more "deep" into the scene. The numbers tell you the bounces every ray is performing in the scene. In the practice this lets you illuminate dark areas far away from the direct light sources.
4.- Enable GI
5.- For this scene I´m using 6 lights (4 mrSky Portals, mrSun and mrSky), so I will set Average GI photons per light to 100,000, that way I will have enough photons in my scene to avoid ugly GI artifacts.
Then I´m going to adjust the exposure settings. First of all, you should make a preview render so you can see the scene change as you change the settings. Again, the fact that it has default settings doesn´t mean that it´s better not to change them. So first , I set shutter speed to 1/10 to avoid under-exposed areas in the image. Then I reduce the highlights to avoid over-exposure, increase the midtones to have an interesting pale efffect, and increase shadows slightly not to lose contrast. I´m also using a vignette of 4 (the intensity of the effect depends on the camera lens size). I´m using vignette since I´m not planning to do any kind of compositing to the renderded images. These are the settings:(click to enlarge)
Rendering
Before goning into the final rendering, I´m going to adjust some rendering parameters:
1.- Since I have many satin materials, I set Glossy Reflections Precision (Multiplier) to 4, this basically means that if your materials have a Glossy samples parameter of, say, 16, at render time they will be multiplied by 4, that means 64 glossy samples. It´s a high value that will increase render times, but believe me, it´s worth it.
2.- I always use sample per pixel values from 4 to 16 for final rendering (you could use 1 - 16 too). It´s time consuming, but gives great results.
3.- A very small but very powerful setting will give your image an unmatched realism, that´s the Gauss Filter. Unlike the default Box filter, which creates uniformly and slightly sharp edges, Gauss creates very subtle blurry edges that imitates very well the photographic look. I recommend you use Gauss Filter for every realistic image rendering.
Finally I´m going to make the final renders of the daylight series, for some images I changed the Time configuration or rotated the compass. These are the results: (average rendering time: 12 min)
Some important concepts
- Visual richness of the rendered image doesn´t depend much in the model as it does in the reflections. The correct selection of the materials and their properties will define the naturality and complexity of your rendered image more than any other property (yes, even more than illumination itself). If you scroll up, you´ll see a simple render of the scene where I´m using non reflective materials. Look how poor it looks, and even though lightning plays a crucial role in realism, good reflections give the image their appeal. That´s why I recommend high sampling quality values. So if the only reflective surface in your scene is the floor, or reflections are all mirror-like, forget about getting some nice images for your portfolio with this scene (or any other scene).
- Know how your scene will relate to your light, rendering and exposure parameters. In this case, I knew since the beginning I could have hi-contrast issues resulting in over-exposure and/or under-exposure. And with that in mind I adjusted my lighting, rendering and exposure settings to have a balanced result. If you use only the default settings you will have huge limitations... and then you´ll rush to complain about the scene.
- Illumination is not about light and shadows but about tones. A nice image is basically a nice play of tones. Tone is basically the relation between light areas of color and dark areas of color. If you´re not familiar with the term it may be confusing at first. For example, look at the first image (img1), notice how the spherical pendant lights stand in front of a darker background, also the chairs at the right stand in front of a darker section of the floor. Notice how this dark-light play is what makes the images interesting, and where it was not achieved successfully (img4 for example, where green wall, chairs and pendants mix in one big color zone, or img3 where spherical pendants lay on a very clear background and lose protagonism dramatically). These are things you shound think of when you define your materials and illumination, since they will play a major role in the image quality. Look at all rendered (and real-life) images you find excellent, and notice how tone defines the quality of the image.
- Realism is just the bare minumum, not the goal. Mood is the goal. Nowadays technology has made the task of achieving realism much more simple, and therefore it is assumed that you, as a 3D artist, can simulate effectively any light condition in a given scene. Think about the people that work with iRay, Maxwell Render, Octane, Vray GPU, or any unbiased render engine, they are working 100% precise workflow, they can even render in real time now!, can you match that quality using mental ray? But even more important: Can you surpass that quality? Because it´s certainly possible (for super hi-quality stuff, like film, mental ray and renderman monopolize the action). So if realism is your goal, have in mind that thousands of artists can achieve that easily, what else do you have to offer? Because is that "else" that you have what can make stand among all the others. Realism is not as important as "mood", the hability to convey feelings trough your work. To do this you´ll have to work upon a concept, but that will be covered on further tutorials.
- No realism is complete without camera effects. In this case, glare and vignette play an important role in the look of the final images. The vignette drags your attention to the center of the image, and helps with the composition. If you look at the images closely, you will see bright areas are slightly glowing. That´s the Glare shader, I forgot to mention it in here, you just have to enable it in the render panel, Renderer tab - Camera Effects rollout - Camera Shaders group - Output. I strongly recommend you use the "Replace Rendered Image with Glare Only" option from the shader´s parameters, so you can render a draft image to be replaced with the Glare and then compose in Photoshop. In addittion to Glare and Vignette, DOF, Grain, Chromatic aberration, Motion Blur and Lens flare could give your image true realism.
- Same processes give the same results. If you are using the same colors for walls, floor, etc, the same illumination settings, and the same points of view, you´ll most likely get similar results for every of your rendered images. Many of you think about walls as plain cream, floor always wooden, tables and chair all plastic, white ceiling. So when you render your scene, it will look just like another hundred rendered images you´ve seen everywhere else. Experiment with different materials. In this case I´m using a red ceiling. How many times have you used a red ceiling?. What about green? How about some old brick flooring?... It´s the same with lighting, maybe you don´t have much tool choices, but you certainly have plenty of choices for configuration. So try to find interesting materials, lighting conditions, color combinations, etc. that give your renders personality.
- Visual richness of the rendered image doesn´t depend much in the model as it does in the reflections. The correct selection of the materials and their properties will define the naturality and complexity of your rendered image more than any other property (yes, even more than illumination itself). If you scroll up, you´ll see a simple render of the scene where I´m using non reflective materials. Look how poor it looks, and even though lightning plays a crucial role in realism, good reflections give the image their appeal. That´s why I recommend high sampling quality values. So if the only reflective surface in your scene is the floor, or reflections are all mirror-like, forget about getting some nice images for your portfolio with this scene (or any other scene).
- Know how your scene will relate to your light, rendering and exposure parameters. In this case, I knew since the beginning I could have hi-contrast issues resulting in over-exposure and/or under-exposure. And with that in mind I adjusted my lighting, rendering and exposure settings to have a balanced result. If you use only the default settings you will have huge limitations... and then you´ll rush to complain about the scene.
- Illumination is not about light and shadows but about tones. A nice image is basically a nice play of tones. Tone is basically the relation between light areas of color and dark areas of color. If you´re not familiar with the term it may be confusing at first. For example, look at the first image (img1), notice how the spherical pendant lights stand in front of a darker background, also the chairs at the right stand in front of a darker section of the floor. Notice how this dark-light play is what makes the images interesting, and where it was not achieved successfully (img4 for example, where green wall, chairs and pendants mix in one big color zone, or img3 where spherical pendants lay on a very clear background and lose protagonism dramatically). These are things you shound think of when you define your materials and illumination, since they will play a major role in the image quality. Look at all rendered (and real-life) images you find excellent, and notice how tone defines the quality of the image.
- Realism is just the bare minumum, not the goal. Mood is the goal. Nowadays technology has made the task of achieving realism much more simple, and therefore it is assumed that you, as a 3D artist, can simulate effectively any light condition in a given scene. Think about the people that work with iRay, Maxwell Render, Octane, Vray GPU, or any unbiased render engine, they are working 100% precise workflow, they can even render in real time now!, can you match that quality using mental ray? But even more important: Can you surpass that quality? Because it´s certainly possible (for super hi-quality stuff, like film, mental ray and renderman monopolize the action). So if realism is your goal, have in mind that thousands of artists can achieve that easily, what else do you have to offer? Because is that "else" that you have what can make stand among all the others. Realism is not as important as "mood", the hability to convey feelings trough your work. To do this you´ll have to work upon a concept, but that will be covered on further tutorials.
- No realism is complete without camera effects. In this case, glare and vignette play an important role in the look of the final images. The vignette drags your attention to the center of the image, and helps with the composition. If you look at the images closely, you will see bright areas are slightly glowing. That´s the Glare shader, I forgot to mention it in here, you just have to enable it in the render panel, Renderer tab - Camera Effects rollout - Camera Shaders group - Output. I strongly recommend you use the "Replace Rendered Image with Glare Only" option from the shader´s parameters, so you can render a draft image to be replaced with the Glare and then compose in Photoshop. In addittion to Glare and Vignette, DOF, Grain, Chromatic aberration, Motion Blur and Lens flare could give your image true realism.
- Same processes give the same results. If you are using the same colors for walls, floor, etc, the same illumination settings, and the same points of view, you´ll most likely get similar results for every of your rendered images. Many of you think about walls as plain cream, floor always wooden, tables and chair all plastic, white ceiling. So when you render your scene, it will look just like another hundred rendered images you´ve seen everywhere else. Experiment with different materials. In this case I´m using a red ceiling. How many times have you used a red ceiling?. What about green? How about some old brick flooring?... It´s the same with lighting, maybe you don´t have much tool choices, but you certainly have plenty of choices for configuration. So try to find interesting materials, lighting conditions, color combinations, etc. that give your renders personality.
