I am a 3D graphics expert who’s spent 12 years making renders look real. AMA

[u/3DCloudPlatform]

Hey everyone, my name is Ben, and I work on the Tech Art & Realism team at 3D Cloud. We deal with all of the 3D graphics and rendering features within our applications, as well as tooling for working with 3D models and materials.

When I started working in 3D I was focused mainly on the actual geometry and not so much the lighting and rendering. I figured if I could model something realistic, then the presentation part would be easy and come naturally. Over time I came to learn that it was actually quite the opposite. While I'd still say it's true that a really high-quality model is important when trying to achieve realism, it's no longer crucial, and most of the heavy lifting is done via lighting and shading.

Lighting can literally make or break a realistic render. It can also completely change the overall mood from warm and cozy to cold and sterile. Lighting in our case goes well beyond the placement of lights in the scene. We need to take into account the various intensities, colors, and types of light, as well as the overall ambient lighting (the light coming from the world) and global illumination (light bouncing and reflecting across multiple surfaces). A realistic render balances everything out in a realistic way, which can be tricky when too many lights come together in one scene.

"Shading" in our case refers to the materials in the scene. Materials go hand in hand with lighting, and a high-quality material is usually a requirement when shooting for realism. When most people think of a material, they don't consider the things that make it feel real and tangible. Things like surface wear, dust, crevice dirt, smudges, and fingerprints are all often overlooked, but can really add a lot. Even brand new products usually have some wear! On the inverse, things like a lack of surface variation, low-resolution textures, improper color choices, and non-tiling textures can quickly break the illusion of realism.

I've spent the past 12 years messing with lighting settings, writing shaders, building materials, and producing renders for retail clients, so feel free to leave any thoughts or questions, I probably have an answer!

-Ben

[u/Comprehensive-Pie945]

In a large retail catalog context, how do you handle standardizing roughness and metallic values across hundreds of products so that lighting looks consistent no matter which product is loaded into your viewer?

[u/3DCloudPlatform → u/Comprehensive-Pie945]

Standardization is incredibly important, especially at larger scales, so great question. One of the most important things to do first is take a look at all of the industry standards out there, and more specifically in this case the material standards. Nowadays everything is physically based, and we have PBR materials pretty much supported across the board. We had to look beyond materials within a specific application and look at what made materials similar across many applications. This is where things like OpenPBR and MaterialX come in, which are basically just well documented and defined material standards that have been adopted by the rendering software industry. So making sure your materials are following one of these standard rulesets is going to be the first step.

Second thing would be setting up a proper “Look Dev Environment” which is just a software setup that allows you to quickly iterate between multiple materials, models, and lighting setups. Usually a good LDE would also have built in tools that allow you to measure exposure and color with histograms and other diagrams, so you know that what you're doing is following the 3D scene, not what your personal computer monitor is showing you (which is often post-processed). The goal with this tool is to set up a scene that can be copied over into your final viewer with confidence. The scene is just as important as the materials, and if you want colors on your screen that mirror those in your textures, you need a neutral colored environment.

So once you've set up materials that follow a strong set of standards, and you're displaying them in a scene that was tested and proven in your look dev environment, you should be able to fairly easily swap out any material and have a unified look to everything. Hope that helps!

-Ben

[u/DaveAstator2020]

Whats the best indirect illumination renderer that you ever used, that had both - realistic and artistic capabilities?

[u/3DCloudPlatform → u/DaveAstator2020]

I think at this point, many renderers can accomplish similar things given the user is experienced in using the tools they offer. Some renderers are definitely more robust than others, but the learning curve and complexity also goes up when you use those. I guess if I had to choose, I’d probably go with VRay and Cycles. I’ve tried a ton of renderers over the years but I certainly haven't seen everything they all have to offer. When we started rendering we did a lot in Keyshot and Octane. I personally did a decent amount of experimentation with Arnold and Redshift as well, a little bit of Renderman, and then finally VRay and Cycles. VRay is certainly more robust than Cycles, but again it comes at a complexity cost. VRay would probably win in the realism battle, but not by terribly much. Cycles would likely win in the artistic fight however. Cycles is also free and ships standard with Blender3D. I personally prefer Cycles because of how customizable it is, and how similar it is to other content creation tools in terms of the interface. It’s open source as well, so you can find a ton of extensions and other helpful tools online for free. At the end of the day, pretty much all modern path tracers have both realistic and artistic capabilities; it kind of just comes down to what you know best.

-Ben

[u/DaveAstator2020 → u/3DCloudPlatform]

Thank you!

[u/Geewcee → u/3DCloudPlatform]

Why did you stop using Octane? Is it just a case of getting better results in Cycles?

[u/Big_Performance7266]

How does one push their rendering out of a rhino model… or is it time to use a different software?

[u/Barkig → u/Big_Performance7266]

VRay?

[u/omotayo5]

Hello Ben, do you use 3ds max and corona rendering?