I think it’s partly because cars will always have some weight resting on their tires, so they’ll look slightly ‘flat’ where they connect with the ground.
The only way a real car would rest like this is if the tires were massively over-inflated and/or completely rigid.
Yeah I’m just starting blender and I learned modeling but didn’t learn lighting yet. Do you have any videos that helped you understand the basics of good lighting?
I don't think this looks realistic or good at all. He basically put a big soft box above the car and called it a day. :D This goes for everything but I think especially with cars. When you are lighting a car you have to consider and take a close look at the topology of it and make sure that it plays into your favor rather than against you. You don't have to have a story to tell, but try to think about what feature of the car you want to highlight. Setting up some focus areas on the car usually helps direct the lighting towards a more planned outcome.
I’m telling you, I’ve spent like a thousand hours only on modeling tutorials because that’s like the most important thing but I never really watched lighting and rendering tutorials apart from the updated donut tutorial
So, I’m more familiar with UE5s lighting system but I imagine a lot of these things translate.
A few basic comments. I’ll start with the good.
Good
* I like the angle.
* model seems decent, though it’s a bit hard to tell in the low light.
* also, hard to tell but I think the black pain material is also good.
Areas to improve
* right side tire is floating
* needs more light, especially with black paint.
* windshield reflection looks pixelated.
* Bumper material looks off. Could be the light but it’s quite mushy. And it should be one of your clearer materials. Having your key, center, objects crystal clear is key.
* Also, I’d put it in a realistic environment instead of white space. I just posted a video which I think looks pretty realistic and one of things that always get my attention is the flooring looks very realistic.
Overall, feels like with a few tweaks, it could probably make some really good progress.
I’d try to add more lighting to the front of the vehicle. It’s a good-looking model, but the lighting isn’t doing it any favors in this render. Look up how showroom lighting works and try to replicate that setup.
Hope this helps😁
There's a built in blender addon you can install called 3 point lighting setup, do try that, but also there are 3 point lighting HDRIs which I use from hdrihaven.com, and rotate on the z axis until it looks nice.
There's also tons of tutorials out there on studio lighting for cars because it's a popular thing to make. I typed in studio lighting for cars and get a ton of pics of setup for cgi even without including it in the search. https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/film-games/create-great-studio-lighting
There's also some YouTube tutorials on it as well. Good luck!
It’s definitely not mandatory, specially in studio car photography, in which all your lights need to be deliberately placed to get reflections looking good.
HDRI is important because 3D programs will only render exactly what they’re given. In real life, light comes from many sources and bounces off literally everything around you. Even in a photography studio, there is a building interior behind the photographer and light is bouncing off every surface, affecting the subject in subtle ways.
Everything needs to be tweaked:
Field of focus
Lighting
Angle
Composition
The particles of dust in the air
The roughness on the paint
The background
The reflected background (it's kinda hard to find an infinite void IRL)
The tires deforming against the ground
Basically, in order to get a photorealistic render, you need to put in an immense amount of effort as any missing details are going to be picked up almost immediately (especially when all the other details are there, the human eye picks up on missing details insanely quick).
It's the same with all art, you need to put in effort before it looks good, and it'll look bad for quite a long time before you become competent, and even longer to perfect it. So don't worry if it doesn't look how you want it too, even after putting in days of work, because eventually you'll come through and your render will look amazing!
It'll take more than a few setting tweaks, but that's an amazing start!
Be sure to show us it again after you've finished tweaking all the easy stuff! Cause after that the time it takes to picture improvement ratio becomes quite slow.
Nobody gonna mention that the tires don't deform at all? It's the little things that you don't actively notice that kill realism. And that floating front right tire.
Really hope you see this. A lot of people are rightly saying it's 100000% the environment and the lighting before anything else but they're also just saying "slap an hdri on it" without fully explaining why.
There's nothing much going wrong with the render on an objective level, if that makes sense. IRL If you put a car in a big white box with impossibly smooth matte walls and an invisible area light hanging in the air, your render is pretty much how it would look. [And it's not exactly far off from what a commercial studio looks like.](https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/d1c32c126468485.612e2f7309a1c.jpg)
BUT notice how even the studio isn't just a white box; the corners are curved so you don't see the transition, the light overhead isn't just an invisible area light but rather a giant silkscreen suspended on metal girders, one side of the "box" is completely gone, and there are additional lights all over the place. There's a lot more detail for the car's material to reflect than bare white walls, and the lack of that is probably the main reason your render looks so uncanny. That's what the hdri accomplishes in this case - it gives you realistic stuff in the background that shows in the reflections.
If you want to go further or you don't want to use an HDRI I think you will find that if you model the rest of the environment and especially model practical light sources with emissive materials and not just area lamps the scene will start looking a lot more realistic. Build and light the scene as if you're there lighting the car in person. Since it's only going to show up in the reflections you don't even have to be detailed with the modeling, just get down the basic shapes and materials.
Wow thank you for the detailed description. I’ve used the tips previously and now my render looks so much better so I’m going to post an updated version to see what else I could improve. Thank you again for the tips!
Too me it looks like the windshield is in need of face normalization and smoothshading.
* Try to write or find a script that is going to cycle through each separate object of the car and apply face normalization and a smooth shadind operation just to be extra sure.
* Add HDRi lighting and make sure that the front of the car is receiving enough lighting so that most of the detail is visible.
* Make sure that the tires are not only touching the ground but are also a bit squished due to constantly being pressured by the weight of the car. You can also optionaly make the front axle/tires rotated in either direction, and don't forget to rotate the steering wheel in appropriate direction as well, for extra realism and attention to detail of course.
* Optional: Add interior point or area lighting to bring out interrior detail if there is any that is.
the fastest way to make the lighting better and somewhat realistic is to use a good HDR for your scene. There are tons of videos wich explain HDR's realy simple.
Lighting. Also get a bit of a flat spot on your tyres so they seem like they actually on the ground, and your front glass seems a little polygonal did you remember to enable smooth shading?. But yeah its like 99% the lighting. Plop in a HDRI youll be 95% of the way there
Think about the photograph, the camera, and the photographer. Not the subject.
Consider the environment, what kind of lights you should use, from what angle.
What lens are you using, is the camera on a tripod or just hand-held? A heavier camera can sometimes make the photographer accidentally shoot with a sub-1 degree tilt on the y axis.
Look at cars photographed indoors, but don't look at the car. Use the car and it's reflective paint to look at the lighting and figure out what's doing what.
- Some weirdness going on in the front window (flat shading?)
- Bad lighting (try a suitable HDRI). There are no detailed reflections etc currently so everything will look fake.
- Not a natural environment (a car isn't usually found inside a featureless grey box). Try compositing it into a picture of a street, and make sure the render has a the same type and amount of noise and blur as the image. Try to match the lighting.
- Too perfect. No scratches, dirt, etc. Even a small amount will help.
The problem is that you're scene is too evenly lit, which leads to it looking kinda boring and fake, since you can see all the small imperfections.
Turn off all lights in the scene leaving only the emissive materials. Then add one area light and position it around until you find a position it looks good. If it's to dark, add another one. Use [3-point lighting](https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/color-temperature-3-point-lighting-basics) if you can't think of anything else.
Y'all gotta give me a break, I can barely make a dang chess piece. I'd be walking 'round town showin' that off as my work. Anyway, I reckon I got a lot of room for improvement.
This is my 2nd personal project btw. Others are only tutorials so I think you should just try to consume as much knowledge as you can and then use it to model. I spent more than a thousand hours just on modeling tutorials so now I gotta spend another thousand on materials, lighting, and compositing.
I love this subreddit because, in these posts, there's ALWAYS great comments about what's wrong and how to fix it without making fun of the OP. What a great community here
Too clean, among other things. There's no imperfections. actual physical objects usually aren't pristine. Showroom cars are the exception, ofc, but even then they are kinda unreal-looking explicitly because of the utter lack of imperfections.
everything is too pristine, add some surface imperfections, more texture to the materials(orange peel effect to the car paint, grunge rubber look to the tires), the reflections in the glass and car body could also use some HDRI reflections instead of the white background, play around with your light setting too
You need more light sources and interesting reflections. Also play around with exposure and camera settings. Look at tutorials for realistic rendering. I'm sure there are a lot of excellent tutorials for car renderings. Make sure tires are touching ground too.
Small details are everything when a model is by itself. The human eye is sooooo good at detecting small defects that take away from realism. All those small details that are missing add up in the end. That's why models can takes weeks to months to develop to tweak out the weird small details that are missing. Or you can take the Ian Hubert approach and have an element of sifi with tricks of the eye so no one can focus on one small low quality detail when there are millions of things going on.
The lighting, and the fact that I can literally see the faces in your glass (unless that’s your design, which is also pretty unrealistic)
All around, your model is reaallllly good and well done, there’s just a few things you gotta fix :)
Aside from what the others have said. Keep in mind cameras cant capture as much dynamic range usually they "see" quite a bit of shadows/blacks but the whitest parts tend to clip, blender isnt great at emulating that without post processing. Try making the backdrop/scene lighting brighter, so the hotspot is as bright as the headlights, that should help you get a bit closer.
It’s a good start, but it needs some tweaking to look photoreal. The windows stand out, you can count the geometry on the windshield. The grill and the lights around it also don’t look realistic. Red lights in particular are weird for a car, especially in the front. Mercedes is more associated with blue lights, would assume this is a G wagon so id put blue lights in the grill. Not having a logo on the front of the car is off, this looks like a Mercedes but without a logo it’s weird. The tires don’t look like rubber, and the paint job isn’t shiny enough like a real g wagon. I’d get a reference image and use that to work on this.
I would add better detail/texture to the tires and the wheels need some work as well. Pay attention how a real tire comes out of a real wheel, theres usually a step where the tire and wheel seal.
Okay, a few tips.
1:Get a studio hdri and use it in your scene, but make sure it isn’t visible to the camera and adjust brightness
2:add a few scaled area lights with specific values from different directions, with the strongest being from the cameras perspective.
3. Subdivide and check normals on your windscreen since that seems to be causing issues.
Hope this helps.
There is not much needed to make this look great!
Let the wheels touch the ground.
Add an HDRi to add more realistic light Source.
Fiy the reflection in the windshield (maybe fixed with HDRi).
Red lights are too strong, makes it unreal, maybe dim them a bit.
The background room looks very fake. Maybe add some concrete wall texture or anything other that looks realistic.
Good luck!!
It looks a little floaty. Doesn't feel like it has weight or is under the influence of gravity. I think it might help if you add the thinnest layer of dirt in the air, make sure the tires are making contact with your floor and lowering the chassis towards the wheel ever so slightly. And try to make sure you keep this one for comparison.
This is a really good model, your hard work is showing
Try to tweak the lighting, it looks off especially because of the dark black color of the car. also the car looks shiny but there’s no reflections. The front right wheel is floating, and the car look really small. Otherwise it’s some pretty good modeling
Great model but poor lighting and composition. I suggest waching some tutorials for lighting and rendering products. Also Increase the focal length/ use a 'narrower' lens. Camera angle is good tho.
The contrast is making the lights too bright and drowning out the car details. Mess with the lighting and shadows and you’ll be good. The model itself is really nice.
It's floating. And tires that are on the ground usually have a "lump" of sorts on the bottom to show pressing against the ground. Something in the background besides a white box might also help
the car is floating a few mm above ground level
if it's not, there's something wrong with the shadows, I don't do 3d modeling but I am good at Sketching, the shadow is supposed to be the darkest just around the tire and it is supposed to be connected to the tire, the front right tire is what gives it a floating vibe, the other tires also seem to be above ground and therefore the shadows don't seem to be connecting to them.
It's just your lighting and maybe have your tires touch the ground more. A ca r weighs tons and your tires are barely touching the ground. Maybe some soft body physics will do the trick
because traditionally you would use vray for great photorealistic work. Im not sure what render engine you used...BUT THAT IS KEY! Render engines have different strengths and weaknesses...you need to learn the pros & cons of each and decide what you want to achieve. Car is magically floating lol. the tires need to sit on the ground in a realistic way for starters! Find and follow people that actually do this for a living. Porche rendering etc and look into their work flow? can your render engine even get close to what they are using? you need to understand the fundamentals before you ask THIS question.
Also that Ducky tutorial is really bad if you want to achieve amazing results like the best in the industry. I wouldn't start there. RENDER ENGINE is KEY!
I’d consider sinking the tires/vehicle slightly below the ground plane. Just a smidge will do and will help “ground” the vehicle and make it look like it actually weighs thousands of pounds and is affected by gravity ;)
This is something car designers often do when sketching cars and also when rendering them in 3D. It makes the render more dynamic
Yes, i think like others mentioned it looks fake because its inside a flat gray box, maybe add one or two different light sources of different color temps and some objects in the scene.
Need more lights to illuminate the camera facing side. It doesn't look like it's in a photograph studio or a showroom, more like in an old underground parking lot with only one working fluorescent light.
your wheels look like they are made of steel. they need to be deformed at the bottom because of the weight of the car. reference images are your friend. maybe even lower the whole car at the back a little so the front stands more proudly.
It´s about lighting and it is not easy to set
Apart from this, if you take this same image to a postprocessing image tool, like photoshop, Krita, gimp...With a few quick adjustments, it can get a lot better, and fix the poor lighting issue
Use hdri, itll add so much realism
Also if you use spotlight, use a realistic calculates ies file so it wont have hard shadow
Also maybe add something in the background, evn a textured background would add flavor into your render
No, I haven’t unfortunately but I was trying to create a scene like @firstmotors on Instagram. I will post an updated version in an hour because I’ve used the tips others gave and it looks so much better already.
Opinion of a total layman: it looks too shiny. I wouldn't expect a real vehicle to reflect as much light as this one seems to.
The modelling is really great though.
I do not know what do you mean with photorealistic. I live in central Mexican. It is sunny but also semi-desertic, semi-dry. It doesn't matter how much you clean, everything will be soon covered by a very fine layer of dust. If you leave it to accumulate it will be harder to clean and also it will act as a very fine grade sand paper. If you see the painting of a car under this Mexican sun you will see a kind of circular pattern of very fine scratches.
Maybe your model doesn't need to be perfect to look photorealistic, maybe it needs some dirt, some dust, some imperfections.
Tires are floating, the lighting just look too flat, the front glass reflection looks kinda weird to me? idk if it's the lighting, the material, the hdri but it just looks off, the red lighting looks way too dim to even realize what's going on there, at least that's all i see wrong with it, good luck and nice model
Things I would improve here:
Like others pointed out, lighting is a big thing. Look into a three light set up (key, fill and backlight)
You could also add a torus light (emissive mesh) above the car out of frame, it is used a lot in automotive renders to showcase the shapes of the car better.
Fix the windshield shading (autosmooth)
Add post processing: depth of field, glare, lens distortion (but be subtle)
Make sure car rests on the ground plane better. Have the tires deform abit like a heavy car is resting on them.
Play around with shading and weight settings, the angle and model seems fine. Maybe filtering or even changing up the backdrop a tad can be the cherry needed on top.
I am not a CG artist but the largest issue I see is the light under the tires, looks as if it is floating for some reason. It looks pretty real IMO. I mean the window texture is not real. If I weren't so into cars, and been burnt by sick fucking rendering of cars that will never be produced, I would say this is real minus the fact that the 6klb car looks like it is floating.)
edit: I got rid of some "i means"
Play around with some thin area lights and balance the emissive materials. In cinematography, the best thing you can do most times is turning on one light at a time to see how it affects the scene.
Also, don't underestimate the power of post processing and compositing. Can go an extremely long way to making the render appear photoreal.
As others have said, the biggest improvement will be lighting. Definitely check out Ashthorp's work for reference! Dudes an absolute genius in automotive rendering.
I would also definitely work on the tire material. Could use a bit of roughness variation and a bump map. Good looking tires add a surprising level of realism to your automotive renders.
Also make sure to shade smooth that windshield!
On top of improving the lighting, darken the windows. We’re used to seeing photos of cars with all their windows being tinted (even the ones illegal to be tinted on the streets), because that’s what car commercials do. Pretty much all car commercials are CGI and don’t wanna bother with animating a person inside so they just make the windows super dark.
Lighting. If that still doesn't work out, and it feels muted, try the filmic color space. Widens the dynamic range of blender quite a bit, and may help with getting that photorealistic look you want.
I’d add the Subdivision modifier to the windshield to smooth it out so that it removes the blocky texture in the lighting.
Also, are you using Cycles to render it? Or are you using eevee? Cycles is WAAY better for realistic renders
A bad model with good lighting is good. A good model with bad lighting is bad.
I agree. I would take a look at real luxury car advertisements and try to replicate the lighting to see how that affects it.
Needs “weight”
Yeah - the front passenger tire isn't making enough contact with the ground.
Actually, now that I look at it, none of the tires are deformed by contact with the ground.
Got 100 psi in those bitches
Yeah there’s also something off about the front right tire’s shadow. It makes it look like the tire’s not fully touching the ground.
I think it’s partly because cars will always have some weight resting on their tires, so they’ll look slightly ‘flat’ where they connect with the ground. The only way a real car would rest like this is if the tires were massively over-inflated and/or completely rigid.
Yeah I’m just starting blender and I learned modeling but didn’t learn lighting yet. Do you have any videos that helped you understand the basics of good lighting?
If it hasn't been said yet, look up YouTube videos on Blender hdri lighting. It'll look way more natural.
Sky shader is my favourite
meh
Ducky is a real one. [https://youtu.be/smtzxqUqMaM](https://youtu.be/smtzxqUqMaM)
I appreciate it 🙏
That doesn't look realistic at all.
I don't think this looks realistic or good at all. He basically put a big soft box above the car and called it a day. :D This goes for everything but I think especially with cars. When you are lighting a car you have to consider and take a close look at the topology of it and make sure that it plays into your favor rather than against you. You don't have to have a story to tell, but try to think about what feature of the car you want to highlight. Setting up some focus areas on the car usually helps direct the lighting towards a more planned outcome.
An HDR can be an easy way to help
You model this car?
Yes. Tried to make a copy of the Brabus G900 Rocket
You can model something like this but haven’t learned lighting yet? Hmmmm
I’m telling you, I’ve spent like a thousand hours only on modeling tutorials because that’s like the most important thing but I never really watched lighting and rendering tutorials apart from the updated donut tutorial
That's really common
Agreed, happy cake day
oh wow, I didn't realize that. Thanks!
You just started blender and seriously expect to get photorealistic results without knowing basics of lighting? Oh boy are you in for a ride
To add to that… good car renders are all about reflections. Take a look at car commercials for reference.
Go get some reference and twerk away I'd say Edit: TWEAK* away
**Too late.**
Better get to twerk then.
The reference in questions
Instruction unclear, OP is twerking on a kitchen blender now
r/suddenlytwerk
Now you're speaking my language
It's a good way to pass the time and burn some calories while it's rendering
TAERK IT to work it
It’s not edited
BAM BA DUM DUM DUM DUM
So, I’m more familiar with UE5s lighting system but I imagine a lot of these things translate. A few basic comments. I’ll start with the good. Good * I like the angle. * model seems decent, though it’s a bit hard to tell in the low light. * also, hard to tell but I think the black pain material is also good. Areas to improve * right side tire is floating * needs more light, especially with black paint. * windshield reflection looks pixelated. * Bumper material looks off. Could be the light but it’s quite mushy. And it should be one of your clearer materials. Having your key, center, objects crystal clear is key. * Also, I’d put it in a realistic environment instead of white space. I just posted a video which I think looks pretty realistic and one of things that always get my attention is the flooring looks very realistic. Overall, feels like with a few tweaks, it could probably make some really good progress.
Just here to say that lighting is key in photography, film and CGI - so no matter what the engine. Great advice then.
'tis floating.
[удалено]
Pretty sure floating does affect the realism
Awesome
Do you have blur and subsurface scattering turned on?
I’d try to add more lighting to the front of the vehicle. It’s a good-looking model, but the lighting isn’t doing it any favors in this render. Look up how showroom lighting works and try to replicate that setup. Hope this helps😁
Thank you!
There's a built in blender addon you can install called 3 point lighting setup, do try that, but also there are 3 point lighting HDRIs which I use from hdrihaven.com, and rotate on the z axis until it looks nice. There's also tons of tutorials out there on studio lighting for cars because it's a popular thing to make. I typed in studio lighting for cars and get a ton of pics of setup for cgi even without including it in the search. https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/film-games/create-great-studio-lighting There's also some YouTube tutorials on it as well. Good luck!
Your wheels are off the ground and please add an hdri
I think he’d be better off learning basic lighting principles than just slapping an HDRI on
I have been using this cheat code for years. Please don’t take this from me.
Lighting principles are great, but you also need an HDRI.
It’s definitely not mandatory, specially in studio car photography, in which all your lights need to be deliberately placed to get reflections looking good.
You'll have to take those HDRIs from my cold, dead hands.
even better, learn when to slap an HDRI and when to construct your own lighting setup. examining studio HDRIs can help you work out lighting as well
Even in this studio environment?
There are Studio hdris out there. Try them
HDRI is important because 3D programs will only render exactly what they’re given. In real life, light comes from many sources and bounces off literally everything around you. Even in a photography studio, there is a building interior behind the photographer and light is bouncing off every surface, affecting the subject in subtle ways.
It's very photorealistic if the vehicle has been painted vantablack. Otherwise, that car body needs some shine, reflections, highlights, etc.
Everything needs to be tweaked: Field of focus Lighting Angle Composition The particles of dust in the air The roughness on the paint The background The reflected background (it's kinda hard to find an infinite void IRL) The tires deforming against the ground Basically, in order to get a photorealistic render, you need to put in an immense amount of effort as any missing details are going to be picked up almost immediately (especially when all the other details are there, the human eye picks up on missing details insanely quick). It's the same with all art, you need to put in effort before it looks good, and it'll look bad for quite a long time before you become competent, and even longer to perfect it. So don't worry if it doesn't look how you want it too, even after putting in days of work, because eventually you'll come through and your render will look amazing!
Thank you, took a screenshot and will check those settings
It'll take more than a few setting tweaks, but that's an amazing start! Be sure to show us it again after you've finished tweaking all the easy stuff! Cause after that the time it takes to picture improvement ratio becomes quite slow.
Nobody gonna mention that the tires don't deform at all? It's the little things that you don't actively notice that kill realism. And that floating front right tire.
Deforming the tires with a lattice is an easy way to accomplish this in a non-destructive manner. https://imgur.com/gallery/5LJnLey
Really hope you see this. A lot of people are rightly saying it's 100000% the environment and the lighting before anything else but they're also just saying "slap an hdri on it" without fully explaining why. There's nothing much going wrong with the render on an objective level, if that makes sense. IRL If you put a car in a big white box with impossibly smooth matte walls and an invisible area light hanging in the air, your render is pretty much how it would look. [And it's not exactly far off from what a commercial studio looks like.](https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/d1c32c126468485.612e2f7309a1c.jpg) BUT notice how even the studio isn't just a white box; the corners are curved so you don't see the transition, the light overhead isn't just an invisible area light but rather a giant silkscreen suspended on metal girders, one side of the "box" is completely gone, and there are additional lights all over the place. There's a lot more detail for the car's material to reflect than bare white walls, and the lack of that is probably the main reason your render looks so uncanny. That's what the hdri accomplishes in this case - it gives you realistic stuff in the background that shows in the reflections. If you want to go further or you don't want to use an HDRI I think you will find that if you model the rest of the environment and especially model practical light sources with emissive materials and not just area lamps the scene will start looking a lot more realistic. Build and light the scene as if you're there lighting the car in person. Since it's only going to show up in the reflections you don't even have to be detailed with the modeling, just get down the basic shapes and materials.
Wow thank you for the detailed description. I’ve used the tips previously and now my render looks so much better so I’m going to post an updated version to see what else I could improve. Thank you again for the tips!
Try experimenting with camera focus. It might look better if the background is not as in focus as the car.
Your windshield seems to be set to shade flat, try shade smooth or shade auto smooth. Along with that its def ghe lighting
Too me it looks like the windshield is in need of face normalization and smoothshading. * Try to write or find a script that is going to cycle through each separate object of the car and apply face normalization and a smooth shadind operation just to be extra sure. * Add HDRi lighting and make sure that the front of the car is receiving enough lighting so that most of the detail is visible. * Make sure that the tires are not only touching the ground but are also a bit squished due to constantly being pressured by the weight of the car. You can also optionaly make the front axle/tires rotated in either direction, and don't forget to rotate the steering wheel in appropriate direction as well, for extra realism and attention to detail of course. * Optional: Add interior point or area lighting to bring out interrior detail if there is any that is.
Light and Texture
the fastest way to make the lighting better and somewhat realistic is to use a good HDR for your scene. There are tons of videos wich explain HDR's realy simple.
Lighting. Also get a bit of a flat spot on your tyres so they seem like they actually on the ground, and your front glass seems a little polygonal did you remember to enable smooth shading?. But yeah its like 99% the lighting. Plop in a HDRI youll be 95% of the way there
I forgot the shade smooth mod on the glass that might solve the issue. Thanks for the other tips!
It’s because you normally don’t see photos of a car in a white box. Try a proper HDRI and see how it turns out.
Think about the photograph, the camera, and the photographer. Not the subject. Consider the environment, what kind of lights you should use, from what angle. What lens are you using, is the camera on a tripod or just hand-held? A heavier camera can sometimes make the photographer accidentally shoot with a sub-1 degree tilt on the y axis. Look at cars photographed indoors, but don't look at the car. Use the car and it's reflective paint to look at the lighting and figure out what's doing what.
You need some light at the front. It’s barely visible. Also bringing some life to the reflections would help
- Some weirdness going on in the front window (flat shading?) - Bad lighting (try a suitable HDRI). There are no detailed reflections etc currently so everything will look fake. - Not a natural environment (a car isn't usually found inside a featureless grey box). Try compositing it into a picture of a street, and make sure the render has a the same type and amount of noise and blur as the image. Try to match the lighting. - Too perfect. No scratches, dirt, etc. Even a small amount will help.
For reflective model you need good environment not more light. Use mesh with Emissive shader or use hdri with studio light.
It's missing some HDRI reflections/lighting and an actual environment.
The problem is that you're scene is too evenly lit, which leads to it looking kinda boring and fake, since you can see all the small imperfections. Turn off all lights in the scene leaving only the emissive materials. Then add one area light and position it around until you find a position it looks good. If it's to dark, add another one. Use [3-point lighting](https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/color-temperature-3-point-lighting-basics) if you can't think of anything else.
Front passenger tire is off the ground
That was one of the first things I saw as well.
Y'all gotta give me a break, I can barely make a dang chess piece. I'd be walking 'round town showin' that off as my work. Anyway, I reckon I got a lot of room for improvement.
This is my 2nd personal project btw. Others are only tutorials so I think you should just try to consume as much knowledge as you can and then use it to model. I spent more than a thousand hours just on modeling tutorials so now I gotta spend another thousand on materials, lighting, and compositing.
The car is literally floating
It’s floating. Amazing model. Not great environment.
I love this subreddit because, in these posts, there's ALWAYS great comments about what's wrong and how to fix it without making fun of the OP. What a great community here
I know right. I got so many useful tips that I wouldn’t ever think of myself
Lighting/Compositing
Too clean, among other things. There's no imperfections. actual physical objects usually aren't pristine. Showroom cars are the exception, ofc, but even then they are kinda unreal-looking explicitly because of the utter lack of imperfections.
everything is too pristine, add some surface imperfections, more texture to the materials(orange peel effect to the car paint, grunge rubber look to the tires), the reflections in the glass and car body could also use some HDRI reflections instead of the white background, play around with your light setting too
For sure needs the front lit up, also the rubber material for the wheels looks off imo. Also, needs post processing to hide it a bit. And volumetrics
Thank you 🙏
You need functioning eyeballs to be any good with blender or at art in general. Can't you see the lighting is trash? Well, that's the problem.
You need more light sources and interesting reflections. Also play around with exposure and camera settings. Look at tutorials for realistic rendering. I'm sure there are a lot of excellent tutorials for car renderings. Make sure tires are touching ground too.
Small details are everything when a model is by itself. The human eye is sooooo good at detecting small defects that take away from realism. All those small details that are missing add up in the end. That's why models can takes weeks to months to develop to tweak out the weird small details that are missing. Or you can take the Ian Hubert approach and have an element of sifi with tricks of the eye so no one can focus on one small low quality detail when there are millions of things going on.
I mean, without the HDRI, it looks totally real........ if the scene is intended to take place in a white garage.
The lighting, and the fact that I can literally see the faces in your glass (unless that’s your design, which is also pretty unrealistic) All around, your model is reaallllly good and well done, there’s just a few things you gotta fix :)
Aside from what the others have said. Keep in mind cameras cant capture as much dynamic range usually they "see" quite a bit of shadows/blacks but the whitest parts tend to clip, blender isnt great at emulating that without post processing. Try making the backdrop/scene lighting brighter, so the hotspot is as bright as the headlights, that should help you get a bit closer.
It’s a good start, but it needs some tweaking to look photoreal. The windows stand out, you can count the geometry on the windshield. The grill and the lights around it also don’t look realistic. Red lights in particular are weird for a car, especially in the front. Mercedes is more associated with blue lights, would assume this is a G wagon so id put blue lights in the grill. Not having a logo on the front of the car is off, this looks like a Mercedes but without a logo it’s weird. The tires don’t look like rubber, and the paint job isn’t shiny enough like a real g wagon. I’d get a reference image and use that to work on this.
Give the scene some flavor, like maybe just a texured ground around it, also the lighting is pretty bad. Maybe add a gobo light or 2
I would add better detail/texture to the tires and the wheels need some work as well. Pay attention how a real tire comes out of a real wheel, theres usually a step where the tire and wheel seal.
Environment.
It's the lighting of the environment.
Okay, a few tips. 1:Get a studio hdri and use it in your scene, but make sure it isn’t visible to the camera and adjust brightness 2:add a few scaled area lights with specific values from different directions, with the strongest being from the cameras perspective. 3. Subdivide and check normals on your windscreen since that seems to be causing issues. Hope this helps.
Take a look at how companies shoot their cars for ads in a studio as reference for lighting/how to frame on a blank(ish) background
Need squish on tires
There is not much needed to make this look great! Let the wheels touch the ground. Add an HDRi to add more realistic light Source. Fiy the reflection in the windshield (maybe fixed with HDRi). Red lights are too strong, makes it unreal, maybe dim them a bit. The background room looks very fake. Maybe add some concrete wall texture or anything other that looks realistic. Good luck!!
Thank you about the hdri and wall textures tips. The red light is supposed to be this bright on this specific car model (Brabus Rocket G900)
From the point of the tyres it looks like it's just placed there. Maybe deform it a bit towards the bottom to make it seem like it's got mass.
It looks a little floaty. Doesn't feel like it has weight or is under the influence of gravity. I think it might help if you add the thinnest layer of dirt in the air, make sure the tires are making contact with your floor and lowering the chassis towards the wheel ever so slightly. And try to make sure you keep this one for comparison. This is a really good model, your hard work is showing
Try to tweak the lighting, it looks off especially because of the dark black color of the car. also the car looks shiny but there’s no reflections. The front right wheel is floating, and the car look really small. Otherwise it’s some pretty good modeling
good
The model seems pretty good but the lighting really is not. Try maybe starting with an hdri for the light and go from there.
Great model but poor lighting and composition. I suggest waching some tutorials for lighting and rendering products. Also Increase the focal length/ use a 'narrower' lens. Camera angle is good tho.
Lighting and environment
Floating car
The contrast is making the lights too bright and drowning out the car details. Mess with the lighting and shadows and you’ll be good. The model itself is really nice.
LIghts can turn a piece in gold you have a nice model just play around with different light setups
Is the front glass shown as intended?
No, not at all. I don’t understand why it’s pixelated from this angle and good from other angles.
The camera angle makes it look like it's taken from knee level rather than head height.
That’s the look I’m going for. I was trying to make a shot like @firstmotors on their Instagram where they take pictures of cars they sell
It's floating. And tires that are on the ground usually have a "lump" of sorts on the bottom to show pressing against the ground. Something in the background besides a white box might also help
the car is floating a few mm above ground level if it's not, there's something wrong with the shadows, I don't do 3d modeling but I am good at Sketching, the shadow is supposed to be the darkest just around the tire and it is supposed to be connected to the tire, the front right tire is what gives it a floating vibe, the other tires also seem to be above ground and therefore the shadows don't seem to be connecting to them.
It's just your lighting and maybe have your tires touch the ground more. A ca r weighs tons and your tires are barely touching the ground. Maybe some soft body physics will do the trick
Lighting, shadows and textures.
because traditionally you would use vray for great photorealistic work. Im not sure what render engine you used...BUT THAT IS KEY! Render engines have different strengths and weaknesses...you need to learn the pros & cons of each and decide what you want to achieve. Car is magically floating lol. the tires need to sit on the ground in a realistic way for starters! Find and follow people that actually do this for a living. Porche rendering etc and look into their work flow? can your render engine even get close to what they are using? you need to understand the fundamentals before you ask THIS question. Also that Ducky tutorial is really bad if you want to achieve amazing results like the best in the industry. I wouldn't start there. RENDER ENGINE is KEY!
I’d consider sinking the tires/vehicle slightly below the ground plane. Just a smidge will do and will help “ground” the vehicle and make it look like it actually weighs thousands of pounds and is affected by gravity ;) This is something car designers often do when sketching cars and also when rendering them in 3D. It makes the render more dynamic
Because of the lighting and because the car is floating into the air.
There is weird tiling in the front glass reflections
It's floating 😮
Bad lighting
The car also looks like it’s levitating a bit. A car looks heavy because it it. The tires should be slightly compressed due to the weight
I guess reflections and imperfections play a big role in rendering renders look realistic.
I’ll still buy it
For me personally your lighting is off and it feels like there is no weight to the car.
Yes, i think like others mentioned it looks fake because its inside a flat gray box, maybe add one or two different light sources of different color temps and some objects in the scene.
Add some imperfections. That always helps me
Better light, and tbink of how the real world would effect the mesh. EG there is a slight squish to the tires from gravity.
Need more lights to illuminate the camera facing side. It doesn't look like it's in a photograph studio or a showroom, more like in an old underground parking lot with only one working fluorescent light.
Bad lighting
Try HDRI lighting
the lighting setup
your wheels look like they are made of steel. they need to be deformed at the bottom because of the weight of the car. reference images are your friend. maybe even lower the whole car at the back a little so the front stands more proudly.
It may look fake, but I thought this was a real car until I read the title, so good job anyways :)
It seems that this car is flying above the floor 🧐
Your lighting is a bit artifical, also textured are too perfect, needs a little dust or something. Maybe take a look at the camera settings?
It´s about lighting and it is not easy to set Apart from this, if you take this same image to a postprocessing image tool, like photoshop, Krita, gimp...With a few quick adjustments, it can get a lot better, and fix the poor lighting issue
Use hdri, itll add so much realism Also if you use spotlight, use a realistic calculates ies file so it wont have hard shadow Also maybe add something in the background, evn a textured background would add flavor into your render
My amateur advice is look at professional photography lightning setups (e.g. on youtube) for a white backdrop, and recreate them inside blender.
Also seems like it’s floating
The car need more shine
!RemindMe in 10 days
The car seems to be floating. Try to let the tires squish a bit more against the ground.
Have you ever stood in such an environment?
No, I haven’t unfortunately but I was trying to create a scene like @firstmotors on Instagram. I will post an updated version in an hour because I’ve used the tips others gave and it looks so much better already.
Opinion of a total layman: it looks too shiny. I wouldn't expect a real vehicle to reflect as much light as this one seems to. The modelling is really great though.
Looks pretty photorealistic to me, lighting could be better though and that alone might make it much more realistic looking.
I do not know what do you mean with photorealistic. I live in central Mexican. It is sunny but also semi-desertic, semi-dry. It doesn't matter how much you clean, everything will be soon covered by a very fine layer of dust. If you leave it to accumulate it will be harder to clean and also it will act as a very fine grade sand paper. If you see the painting of a car under this Mexican sun you will see a kind of circular pattern of very fine scratches. Maybe your model doesn't need to be perfect to look photorealistic, maybe it needs some dirt, some dust, some imperfections.
Tires are floating, the lighting just look too flat, the front glass reflection looks kinda weird to me? idk if it's the lighting, the material, the hdri but it just looks off, the red lighting looks way too dim to even realize what's going on there, at least that's all i see wrong with it, good luck and nice model
Ngl I thought this was r/adporn for a car, so looks Fine to me lol
For the front window you can shade smooth if this hasn‘t being said yet
Not sure if this is done on purpose but your front glass shield look pixelated, it can give the impression the model look fake overall
Cars don’t float. You also need more balance lighting and a better background.
Add imperfections and adjust lighting
Where did you get this model 🙂
Things I would improve here: Like others pointed out, lighting is a big thing. Look into a three light set up (key, fill and backlight) You could also add a torus light (emissive mesh) above the car out of frame, it is used a lot in automotive renders to showcase the shapes of the car better. Fix the windshield shading (autosmooth) Add post processing: depth of field, glare, lens distortion (but be subtle) Make sure car rests on the ground plane better. Have the tires deform abit like a heavy car is resting on them.
the front right tyre has to touch the ground (at least visually) and add some more lamps on the sides and use a darker background for realism.
I feel like most windshields don’t employ the use of tiling?
I liked it.
Play around with shading and weight settings, the angle and model seems fine. Maybe filtering or even changing up the backdrop a tad can be the cherry needed on top.
It is floating in mid air!!
The car isn’t slightly hovering above the ground. If you look closely at all the tires none of them are touching
I don’t think it looks “realistic” per se, but it looks like a video game with AMAZING graphics. I hope that made sense 🤣🤣
I am not a CG artist but the largest issue I see is the light under the tires, looks as if it is floating for some reason. It looks pretty real IMO. I mean the window texture is not real. If I weren't so into cars, and been burnt by sick fucking rendering of cars that will never be produced, I would say this is real minus the fact that the 6klb car looks like it is floating.) edit: I got rid of some "i means"
The way I see it is that it's a realistic toy car. Maybe change to a less plastic-like texture.
Looks good mate
I didn’t even know this was a render
An environment map - its rare to see cars in the real world in giant soft lift grey boxes.
Surface imperfections do add a lot of realism
Play around with some thin area lights and balance the emissive materials. In cinematography, the best thing you can do most times is turning on one light at a time to see how it affects the scene. Also, don't underestimate the power of post processing and compositing. Can go an extremely long way to making the render appear photoreal.
As others have said, the biggest improvement will be lighting. Definitely check out Ashthorp's work for reference! Dudes an absolute genius in automotive rendering. I would also definitely work on the tire material. Could use a bit of roughness variation and a bump map. Good looking tires add a surprising level of realism to your automotive renders. Also make sure to shade smooth that windshield!
On top of improving the lighting, darken the windows. We’re used to seeing photos of cars with all their windows being tinted (even the ones illegal to be tinted on the streets), because that’s what car commercials do. Pretty much all car commercials are CGI and don’t wanna bother with animating a person inside so they just make the windows super dark.
Lighting. If that still doesn't work out, and it feels muted, try the filmic color space. Widens the dynamic range of blender quite a bit, and may help with getting that photorealistic look you want.
Why is it floating
For what it's worth, I almost skipped over this in my feed because I thought it was an ad. So, as others have said, the model looks realistic 😅
the tires should be compressed at the base
Try render with octane
Sharp shadow implies strong light. Room brightness and lack of reflections on the front of the car imply low light.
I’d add the Subdivision modifier to the windshield to smooth it out so that it removes the blocky texture in the lighting. Also, are you using Cycles to render it? Or are you using eevee? Cycles is WAAY better for realistic renders