More photo realistic renders

[mikeakar]

Hello all,

I have come a long way in rendering on VW, but this is as close to realism as I can achieve. Is this the limit for photorealism on VW? If so, what programs do you recommend for achieving realistic renders, ideally something that plugs into VW?

 

Some questions regarding this render specifically:

1. For the background, I put a photo as a texture and applied it to a rectangle. I am looking through a window, but its coming out washed, not sure why?

 

2. What is the best way to add reflectivity to materials? For example the floor material, is an image I chose, and needs very slight reflectivity, but not sure what method is best to achieve this. Even 1% of the "mirror" selection on reflectivity is too reflective.

 

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. For context, I am using Final Quality Renderworks with most of my textures being images. (Please ignore the yellow hazes on the window and front hood cover, these were logos I blurred out to preserve client confidentiality). 

[grant_PD]

I don't think you've hit the limit to what Renderworks can do.  

Things that improve renderings:

-Make sure your textures are aligned on faces of objects in a realistic manner.  I'm looking at your roof trusses and your 2nd story wood.  

-Realistic modelling techniques.  In the real world, objects have material seams, almost never have sharp 90 degree corners, have connectors.  

-Textures themselves have imperfections and don't look like they repeat.  Do some reading online about PBR textures and how they are built.  Not all aspects of PBR are achievable in Renderworks but you can apply some of them. ie. you can assign an image map to the reflections that will adjust how things reflect based upon the grayscale values in the image.

-Are you using soft shadows, global illumination, and motivated lighting?  I can't tell where the shadows on the floor are coming from, and they look pretty sharp.  There's a lot of light coming up out of the second story, where is that coming from?  You're correct, the outdoor looks pretty washed out even though the photo looks like a sunny day.  Is it a light emitting texture?  Looking at photographs of real spaces is a great way to really study light and see what "looks real."  Global illumination can go a long way to letting light bounce around for a while and mimic how rooms fill with light.  

 

These are all things you can do in renderworks without going to a different program.  Software like Twinmotion, Cinema 4d, Lumion, they will have quicker/better access to a lot of these features, but in the end you will benefit most from understanding the concepts first.

[Jeff Prince]

Software doesn’t make the rendering…

the artist does.  VWX has a lot of capability when good lighting, multi-shader materials, and correct window lighting technique is used.  It’s just a matter of how much time you can invest.

[cberg]

Or you can export the model into Twinmotion (free) and get output much more to your liking in about one-tenth the amount of time.  With VW, the effort-to-reward ratio is not especially efficient.  I gave up when I tried to import textures into VW and realized that the rendering engine doesn't support the texture categories and settings associated with many other render programs.

 

Sorry to sound contrarian, and hopefully this doesn't come off as criticism.

 

 

 

[cberg]

@mikeakar You may want to check the scale of your bricks.  To my eye, they seem a little large.  Also, the black of the table legs and posts in the center feels better than the black of the stairs, light fixture, and table along the window.  Is it the same material?  When the black gets too black (without reflection), it makes that area look fake and flat.

 

Also, I would like to see if you can adjust the wood textures (per face) so that the grain aligns, especially at the trusses.  There is something a little quirky with all the wood at the ceiling. 

 

Overall, you've done a much better job in VW than I could ever do!

 

 

 

 

Edited December 17, 2024 by cberg

[bcd]

4 hours ago, mikeakar said:

What programs do you recommend for achieving realistic renders, ideally something that plugs into VW?

Lumion

You still need a pc but it plugs happily into VW and produces good results very quickly - great results with more effort, finesse and care.

[Benson Shaw]

Final Quality Renderworks is not the highest quality available in vwx renders. Use the Custom option and explore effects of the variables therein. 
 

-B

[mikeakar]

I don't have much time to produce renders and model details. As you can tell I didn't even have time to model the lights that are emitting those light values. So do you think using a different software would be better for realism when you don't have the time to model details?

[bcd]

Modelling details is typically VWs forté. It looks like your surfaces are already thoughtfully textured. Renderworks is great - but you'd be pleasantly surprised by the speed & results of some of the alternatives.

[Jeff Prince]

42 minutes ago, mikeakar said:

So do you think using a different software would be better for realism when you don't have the time to model details?

 

If you don’t have time to model details, how will you dedicate the time necessary to learn and maintain another software package?

 If you are only doing a 1-6 renderings a year, I would recommend getting very good at VWX or outsource your renderings.

 

 If you are doing 1 or more high quality renderings per month, it probably makes sense to get a specialized rendering solution and maintain the libraries of assets to make things look good.  At that point, you aren’t an architect anymore and have become more of a visual artist.

 

i think people convince themselves they can just buy software and hit an easy button to make beautiful renderings.  It doesn’t work that way.  The last 10% of efforts to make a rendering look great takes excellent lighting design, materials, and entourage.  It also takes an eye for what looks good in terms of framing a shot and taking artistic license to make it work.  Most of us have to stop at 80% to use renderings as a design “explainer”, not having the budget to get to 95% or beyond.  Then, you need the photoshop, etc skills to polish things off.  It’s a full time job with specialized knowledge with a limited shelf life.

[Jeff Prince]

Or you can just play AI roulette until it kicks something passible out 🙂 

[mikeakar]

10 minutes ago, Jeff Prince said:

Or you can just play AI roulette until it kicks something passible out 🙂 

Jeff, thank you for your thoughtful replies. I am looking into what you mentioned. I'm not familiar with AI apart from the one built into photoshop. What is an AI software to look into for rendering? Would you just be able to write prompts with this image as a reference?

Edited December 18, 2024 by mikeakar

[Jeff Prince]

28 minutes ago, mikeakar said:

Jeff, thank you for your thoughtful replies. I am looking into what you mentioned. I'm not familiar with AI apart from the one built into photoshop. What is an AI software to look into for rendering? Would you just be able to write prompts with this image as a reference?

I'm the wrong one to ask as I’m staunchly anti AI when it comes to art or creative design.

[Matt Overton]

5 hours ago, Benson Shaw said:

Final Quality Renderworks is not the highest quality available in vwx renders. Use the Custom option and explore effects of the variables therein. 
 

-B

Agree and would start with lighting options.

if the OP gets that right then how much set dressing required will reduce a lot. 

 

I think the image would have a big win with the right global illumination to get a proper dynamic range and logical shadows.

 

your eyes always want a proper white point and a black point. No white point and your brain reads it as gloomy or fake. Glare can be your friend to push the eye to what you want to them to see.

 

[MogTheSmilingCat]

I use Enscape - it's effectively a plug-in which gives you a somewhere-near-photorealistic (terms and conditions apply) window into your VW model. It's an investment, but then it's *incredibly* useful; I don't just "do renders" with it but my workflow (mainly domestic, mix of new-build and alterations/retrofit with individual clients) incorporates it as much as possible. So - once I've got initial sketch proposals I'l get clients in front of the screen and walk them through them using Enscape, which gives textures which feel familiar and realistic, gives accurate daylight/sunlight etc, and hence a much more understandable (to the untrained eye - eg the average client) environment.

 

This isn't knocking Renderworks (which as the OP shows can give impressive results) but to applaud the way VW works with Enscape to allow a combination of accurate modelling on screen with immediate opportunity to make changes and see them in the visualised  result.

Edited December 20, 2024 by MogTheSmilingCat

[Jesse Cogswell]

There's unfortunately not an easy "make this look good button" in Vectorworks when it comes to rendering.  It takes a lot of trial and error to get the settings dialed in and those settings can greatly vary from drawing to drawing depending on the lighting situation and the desired intent.  Unfortunately, it also can take a hell of a lot of time to render a viewport only to discover that one of these settings isn't set or that you're missing a class or layer.  I recommend setting your Sheet Layer DPI to something fairly low, like the default 72dpi to get the settings all dialed in before ramping up to 300dpi for final renderings.

 

As others have mentioned, realistic lighting is difficult to achieve but very important to avoid the "uncanny valley" effect.  Adding some Ambient Occlusion will help a lot, shadows tend to "collect" in corners and Ambient Occlusion mimics that effect.  Also make sure that you have Indirect Lighting established to catch realistic bounce lighting.

 

Texturing in Vectorworks is also very tedious but very important.  Wood textures can be a killer to get grain direction lined up properly while also trying hard to not repeat too often.  It doesn't help that most of the wood textures in the VW library are pretty awful and difficult to wade through.

 

Here are some bits of advice for your particular rendering, in no particular order:

• As others have mentioned, I never use the Final Quality Renderworks setting.  I usually do either a Redshift or a Custom Renderworks depending on what my light sources are and how much time I have to do the rendering.  When using Custom Renderworks, I usually start with all settings set to Medium, upping the things that I most care about for that particular rendering (such as Curved Geometry, Indirect Lighting, or Displacement Mapping).
• Try adding some subtle reflection shaders to your wood and concrete textures.  When editing the texture, set the Reflectivity shader to Image, then select Reuse an Image From Another Resource and This Texture's Color.  You'll want to keep the Reflection % fairly low and/or the Blurriness % on the mid to high side to prevent straight mirror reflections, but this will add "finish" to your wood textures (and by using the texture's image as the base of the reflection, can also help "pop" the grain) and help the concrete floor read as less "flat."
• One thing that is striking me is that the image appears to be "too yellow".  A lot of that is because VW has its "white point" set to be fairly high be default.  Viewports and Cameras behave much more like actual cameras than eyeballs and you have to specify what color temperature will be rendered as "white".  Not to get too deep in the weeds, but color temperature works slightly backward from what you might be expecting, the lower the temperature, the "warmer" the color.  2700K is the average temperature of an incandescent bulb, "bright white" LED and fluorescent bulbs are typically 3500K, and the dreaded "cool white" bulbs are usually closer to 5000K.  Daylight is typically 6500K or so.  So you'll want to consider the light sources you are using when setting the base color temperature.  My guess is that the sources you have chosen are between 2700K and 3000K, both lower than the Vectorworks default.  To change this setting, open Lighting Options, and set the White Color Temperature setting to Custom.  Then set the custom value to something closer to your source.  I tend to push for 3000K in my designs, which is fairly white with a hint of warmth, so I usually set my custom value to 3100.
• Your glass textures are reading as too "cloudy" and not reflective enough.  I have not been happy with the default glass textures in VW, so I usually leave the Transparency shader to Glass, but up the Transmission to 95% and set the Index of Refraction depending on the rendering method, 1 for Redshift, 1.5 for Renderworks.  I change the Reflectivity shader to Mirror instead of Glass, I've found that I can get it more realistic, and it actually works in Redshift (Glass Reflectivity shaders do not).  The other thing to check when your glass textures are looking to exterior daylight scenes is to go into the texture's Indirect Lighting Options dialog and check the Portal option, though it's mostly for using the Physical Sky and Panoramic Image backgrounds, neither of which I've had huge amounts of success with.
• As for your background, there are a couple of things that I would do to it to help it be more realistic and less "washed out"
  • Rather than applying it to a rectangle, I would apply it to a curved surface for more of a panorama effect.  The flat surface you have it applied to gives it a slightly distorted effect that triggers the uncanny valley response.
  • To add to that, I would give the background object a little more distance between it and the windows.  I understand that this can make the texture mapping tricky, as you don't want to "bottom out", but it would help with the distortion.
  • If you haven't already, add a Glow shader to the Reflectivity of the texture.  Outdoor scenes with daylight are usually much, much brighter than interior lighting.  Your brain knows this, and in your current rendering, the exterior scene doesn't read as a light source, where it absolutely would be in real life.  I usually start with the Brightness set to 200% and make sure Emit Light is checked.  Then you want to press the Indirect Lighting Options button and make sure that Override Indirect Lighting and Emit Light are both checked.

Here's a rendering with a background built with the way described above:

 

 

 

This is from a couple of years ago, in hindsight it's a little on the "blown out" side.  I would dial down the brightness of the glow shader a tick, and I would mess around with the Image Effects on the Color shader to reduce the exposure and increase the contrast.  I also probably went a little heavy with the reflection on the wood of the ship.  The actual wood was finished and fairly reflective, but the model was an untextured mesh object when I received it, and getting any kind of grain on the texture without remodeling it entirely proved impossible.

 

[Dave Donley]

Nice tips @Jesse Cogswell 

The milky glass can be fixed by using a black color for the glass texture, or a very dark color.  Renderworks camera effects like vignetting, and/or image effects like desaturation/contrast could be used.  I think more dynamic range (with GI like Matt mentioned) could help.  You could try Redshift Interior Fast/Final styles and see if you like those better.  Ambient is often overused, turn it off to see what the lights are contributing to the rendering.  If you want the reflections from the floor dulled set the roughness for the mirror to blur them out.  Also some of the Arroway textures in the texture content library are concrete floors with reflection maps included; patches of the concrete show as a little bit shiny.

 

 

[Ross Harris]

You couldn't pay me to waste time waiting for the offline renderer in vectorworks... I highly recommend enscape, as it has the unique ability to put its assets in the VW model - so when you open enscape, everything is there - almost gives you the feeling of not leaving vectorworks... Plus there new ai enhancer is actually darn good.

Twinmotion is also awesome and free - the attached pic is a Twinmotion render.

Enscape and Twinmotion have learning curves, but the near instant results and image quality are 1000% worth it IMHO.

 

 

Edited December 21, 2024 by Ross Harris

[Claes Lundstrom]

What I miss more than anything in Renderworks is realtime rendering, that is, the ability to show the result of actions almost instantly, or at least giving a hint where things are going. This is especially important for me, as I typically generate huge volumes of product presentation images and simple videos, where I usually spend less than ten minutes on preparations and renderings per object to get a decent result, and perhaps twenty minuts on a five second animation. Such a fast workflow makes a huge difference. That is why I very seldom use Renderworks.

[Dave Donley]

If you haven’t yet, choose Redshift Exterior Interactive, or Redshift Interior Interactive render styles.

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

@mikeakar  First of all, let me say "nice work".   There is nothing really wrong with your rendering, more than it could be stepped up a notch if that was required.  Certainly good enough for most, but I realize this may be for your own personal learning curve.

 

Interior renders are significantly more difficult than exterior.  Normally exterior can be solved with a single setting in many applications.

 

As natural light bounces a million times a second in real life, it is difficult to recreate.  In programs like CINEMA 4D, you can put in many bounces, and GI lights with different settings, Ambient Occlusion, and a personal favourite of mine "Diffusion".  Diffusion would pop those bricks out.

 

But, you can achieve much, if not all of what you want by using a lot of point lights with limited strength.  There are many tricks (more than I know) to get realism.  One is build your own textures in Pshop for specific walls, so it appears like ambient occlusion.

 

There is an image below that is a quarter century old.  it was mostly modelled in VW's 8.5 and 9, except for the ornate column tops.  It was then transferred to C4D via. the DXF out.  It only uses many point lights as I spoke of.  What appears like Ambient Occlusion was built into the textures.

 

Edited December 21, 2024 by VIRTUALENVIRONS

[bcd]

1 hour ago, Dave Donley said:

If you haven’t yet, choose Redshift Exterior Interactive, or Redshift Interior Interactive render styles.

Yes, these are designed for interactive preview of the rendering as it progresses.

Use these to get a feel for where the rendering is going then stop before it completes and make adjustments as needed.

Then use the same settings just turn off IPR in the settings to get a faster result for the final render.

 

[Jeff Prince]

Here is the first, and only, interior rendering I ever did in Vectorworks...

Someone here on the forum posted this photo (and only this photo, no dims, nothing else) and wanted to make it 3D:

 

 

Here's what I baked up in a half day, from scratch, using two lights... in Renderworks.  Admittedly it is severely underlit, but it's only using 2 lights. 

 

 

 

 

I bet if I spent another few days with Renderworks, I could polish this turd up to the point where you would not be able to distinguish it from reality.  It just takes more lights, roughening up the textures, fixing the stained glass, finishing the 3D detailing work, and adding entourage.  At that point, I think I would know enough about Renderworks and have enough lighting setups to replicate the effort fairly easily.  Or I could just lighten and rough it up in Affinity Photo and call it a day, if it was actually a project 🙂

 

I guess my point is, If a landscape architect can get to this level of quality with no training or experience in Renderworks in 1/2 a day, what could you achieve with a week's worth of learning, building lights and materials, and testing setups?  I imagine Renderworks is far more capable in the right hands.

 

 

[Elite Exhibits]

@mikeakar Fake it ...

 

Look at the attached Photo - found as a quick look on the WWW

    Why is it realistic ? - Lighting  / shadows / reflections...

 

For added realism, we often take and use real photos (as you mention) for textures. Brick photo, not the built in brick texture. Take this photo, for example and work to create a brick wall Image from it. (Used in the Color Shader component of a Texture). Do this Outside VW. You will get the brick, the lighting and the shadows without the need to create and test those items in VW. (Your talents would need to be in the photo editor). In VW, controlling / modifying an Image Texture is easier than the work needed with lighting.

 

Use reflections sparingly. Table Tops only, for example, while the vertical sides are a simple color. Even the bricks could have a different texture for the front / back surfaces vs the left / right. Duplicate the Brick Texture and apply there. Darken this brick image texture with the Filter Color - Use Chosen Color option.

In VW you are able to imbed (ie:Fake) the Reflections inside the texture.

 

@cberg has it right with black - we use an image for black, not a color and it is usually a dark grey - looks real, while all black textures disappear. In general we use an image of a solid color, vs a color from the attributes pallet. It helps when attempting to match a client or sample color, Screen shot, even a tiny one, does the trick.

 

Another easy trick texture plain items. Utilizing a basic image in the the texture plus a color - in the carpet for example - where one may think it is visually uniform. Use a photo of cheetos. Turn it into a B&W image and use in the Texture - Color - Image. Then adjust the desired color with the Filter Color - Use Chosen Color option. Inside VW the Image Effects also allow for additional control (This is one great feature in VW !). Adjust the Texture Size if needed.

   We find that nothing in reality is free from some sort of texture.

 

Always use (... and play with) the Ambient Occlusion - 

 

Peter

[mikeakar]

Thank you all for your time and thoughtful replies! I really appreciate it!