First upload - trying to make my exteriors photo-realistic

[JezUK]

I'm not too bad on interiors, but my exteriors are a struggle - so I thought I'd 'try harder' on my next exterior from a client.

I could play around with this forever but this is what I had time to do before presenting it as 'ready'......

(the best exterior I've done to date)

Constructive criticisms please

[Macker]

• Compositionally, I think the image needs room to breathe. The building takes up the entire width of the frame, either bring the camera back more or try a wider angle lens.
• The door return would be timber, not brick (minor point I know, but if realism is what you're after...)
• The tarmac/asphalt looks more like gravel that has been painted because of the displacement. You could probably get away with using just a bump map for it. If anything I'd give the lines on the surface a couple of mm of thickness, but that's being picky.
• The timber is weathered/old, but the brickwork is new. Is this intentional?
• Add variation in colours of trees. Difficult to do if you're using anything other than Forest Pack Pro, but still worth doing in photoshop, if nothing else.
• Glass canopy, a little too green.

On the plus side: despite is being very diffuse I actually like the lighting and think if you were to bring a little more sky in to the shot it would add quite a lot. The stone slab material looks great tool; I've never managed to make a decent one really. No noise, so whatever your settings are they are working.

[joconnell]

The trees in the background seem to be a little unnatural in the shade of green, if it's a photo then might need a hue swing.

Overall a bit too saturated on my monitor but it looks pretty good. The lighting is that horrible, boring overcast type of day but the render looks spot on!

[Macker]

What I would say about the lighting is that it could do with a hint of "directionality". Perhaps adjust the gamma of the HDRI to bring out the sun direction a little more?

[JezUK]

• Compositionally, I think the image needs room to breathe. The building takes up the entire width of the frame, either bring the camera back more or try a wider angle lens.
• The door return would be timber, not brick (minor point I know, but if realism is what you're after...)
• The tarmac/asphalt looks more like gravel that has been painted because of the displacement. You could probably get away with using just a bump map for it. If anything I'd give the lines on the surface a couple of mm of thickness, but that's being picky.
• The timber is weathered/old, but the brickwork is new. Is this intentional?
• Add variation in colours of trees. Difficult to do if you're using anything other than Forest Pack Pro, but still worth doing in photoshop, if nothing else.
• Glass canopy, a little too green.

On the plus side: despite is being very diffuse I actually like the lighting and think if you were to bring a little more sky in to the shot it would add quite a lot. The stone slab material looks great tool; I've never managed to make a decent one really. No noise, so whatever your settings are they are working.

Thanks Chris,

All valid points - the gravel look was due to hiking up the quality settings for final render (looked great on the lower quality settings I'd used), I simply didn't have time to redo so left it as that - valid point though and I would redo again another time (not sure bump map would cut it though).

I also would have loved to put a couple of mm on the lines - I was chuffed enough that I learnt how to do that much (using a composite map, a first for me.....).

Thanks for the advice - all agreed.

[JezUK]

The trees in the background seem to be a little unnatural in the shade of green, if it's a photo then might need a hue swing.

Overall a bit too saturated on my monitor but it looks pretty good. The lighting is that horrible, boring overcast type of day but the render looks spot on!

No, all from Forest Pack Pro - I'm a relative new user of that software and just trying to change (actually, understand) how to change the hue of the leaves PER tree, well, I didn't crack that did I !

Lighting ? I was going for a typical British overcast look......

[MoonDoggie]

Comments:

Most of my comments are directed at texture problems. It's easy to make a bad model look great via textures alone, but you can easily ruin a great model with a bad texture. Spend some more time on each of the textures.

- The wood doesn't look very good and seems to have baked in lighting, or a very contrast-y grain.
- Parking lot asphalt needs the most work, it's very flat. Experiment with composite maps to multiply in some large scale noise to break up the values in the lot, and add special touches around the edges where it meets the sidewalk. Add in faint oil leak spots where cars would park. If it's a drizzley (copyright, me) day (like seattle) consider adding small puddles or spots of rain water in the lot. I like the look of this asphalt: http://bocung.com/uploads/2010-10-26...V__720_%5D.jpg
- The hue of the green parking stalls and the scale of them look crazy to me (but I don't like in the UK). They look 1.5x too big overall.
- Grass looks overly big, lacking in color variation
- Tree colors too uniform

Overall, you're getting there.

[JezUK]

Thank Colin,

I agree with the Grass height & tree colors, I *really* must master FPP, more-so than the basics that I do know.

Size and colours of parking areas are correct (disabled parking and corporate green).

Thanks for all the feedback - I'll experiment some more.

[MoonDoggie]

No worries. I know it's tough to ask for feedback sometimes, but you're definitely getting there. Adding uneven-ness to the asphalt texture via a multiplied composite material and small things like that always help a ton. Also, spending more time in post-production will pay off dividends.

I've tried to capture the mood a bit better and bring small touches of life to the render. I used photoshop for 15m and drew masks quickly.

I completely understand that most clients don't really want the type of result I've provided. I have had those clients to, but you asked for advice to make exteriors more "photo realistic" so that was my mantra when photoshopping.

Major points I did:

1. Separated the background trees from the foreground (levels, drag up the black point at the botton to lessen the contrast of far away things), with this sort of weather there are a lot of water particles in the air that light will reflect off of and lessen contrast quickly the farther away you are.

2. Add small details of water, and a new asphalt texture, to better reflect the environment

3. lots of small color corrections, I referenced this image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KxcCEKzpWN...0/DSC_0029.jpg
to see the overall colors, the nature of the photo is low contrast, no directional light, lots of cyans. I added some procedural photoshop clouds and broke up the hues of the brick texture as well.

[rjohnson33]

I'd say the tarmac is certainly a good focus for an improvement here. It does catch the eye first over everything as the displacement appears fairly unnatural. I agree that the de-saturated version that Colin has just posted with more texture variation is a good direction but still think the tarmac could do with rendering over again with a less aggressive displacement map (it looks to have very sharply contrasted peaks on the surface as it is).

A fairly quick tweak to enhance realism would be to bring the horizontal line of the brickwork recesses above the windows into level just above one of the mortar joints in your brickwork texture so you don't have cut bricks above and below the line of the recess. I'd just shift the geometry to suit this detail rather than try and do anything with the mapping as you've already set that up well to suit your ground level, windows and such.

On a more subjective front, I feel that pigeons on the ground give the impression of an annoyance rather than a complimentary presence. It's nothing to do with them visually though, they do sit in quite well.