Realistic Sharper Renders help

sandcastle0369

So I have been reading the forums and watching videos. My renders are coming out ok but still not the greatest. How can i improve the quality, the lights, the render to look  more realistic. I recently made this charcter and set my rendering settings and got these results after some fine tunnig poses and such.

 

Any tips on how to improve this. I followed this video by Thundorn Games to set up my render settings which helped alot

 

I have a Sager laptop with a RTX 2080, I7 cpu and with 16gb Ram

No post processing was done on the image

 

Thanks for the help

margrave

The character herself looks pretty good--aside from the eyes, which are twice as big as a human's, but that's not unusual for the Daz Shop.

The problem is A) weak lights, and B) obviously fake background.

The obvious solution is to put her in an actual environment, set the Environment to Sun-Sky, and rotate it until the light lands on her face.

sandcastle0369

margrave said:

The character herself looks pretty good--aside from the eyes, which are twice as big as a human's, but that's not unusual for the Daz Shop.

The problem is A) weak lights, and B) obviously fake background.

The obvious solution is to put her in an actual environment, set the Environment to Sun-Sky, and rotate it until the light lands on her face.

Ok I will try this. i am still learning environments and adding them. I recently started playing with  3 point light setups to improve my lgihts. Any recomendations on environemtns?  I hace seen a  few, but they all look fake.

Thanks again.

margrave

If you're looking for something similar to that backdrop, try the PA Andrey Pestryakov. He probably does the best nature environments right now. You can probably get away with not using any lights if you angle the Sun-Sky properly, though they won't hurt.

To use scene lights and Sun-Sky, remember to set your environment type to "Dome and Scene", and then manually remove the default HDRI by clicking on its thumbnail.

You can use depth of field to put the focus on your character and hide the artificiality of the background. The important thing is that a viewer gets a subconscious impression of the space and how the light interacts, not necessarily that they can see it.

JVRenderer

IMO 'Sun-Sky' is too limiting. You can't add parametric lights in Sun-Sky mode. You're kind of limited to the time/date/coordinates you put in and emissives you add to. It is somewhat difficult to make figures and images look realistic. Worse off, if you're rendering an indoor scene. Photo-realism really depends on the quality of lighting and materials on the figures and environment.

Looking at your image, since you're doing an partial body portrait, I assume your focus is more on the figure and not the background, so I wouldn't worry too much abou thte details on the back drop. In fact I would even use Depth of Field to give the background a bokeh look.  If you are using an HDRi as abackdrop, I would crank up the intensity of that HDRi to give your image a bit more brightness.

90 percent of the time 'real life' lighting often look bad. Even photographers use additional lighting and diffuser to make their photographs look better.

Strategically adding spot lights, or emissives  here and there is not a crime. They could greatly enhance the overall look of a render.  In art there's a thing called perceived realism. It isn't black and white.

sandcastle0369

ty all for teh help. i will keep working