Camera and Sun

[Vizioen]

BTW, I can easily correct things by tweaking the camera or sun intensity, however, that isn't the point. I wonder if everyone plays with the camera exposure until it looks correct and the issue isn't being addressed, or people stopped talking about it.

I've never experienced these things, The VraySun and the HDRIs I use for interior and exterior have always been in range of realistic camera exposure settings for a range of scenes. As Lele says its quite important to use the right albedo values and in my experience reflection as well. My whitest white is 180 and I tend to have good results with these. Photos like your example are almost always tonemapped and for an interior most likely even overexposed.

[glorybound]

I need to stop being so busy and set aside some R&D time to dig deeper.

[^Lele^]

I need to stop being so busy and set aside some R&D time to dig deeper.

Provided it doesn't lead to starving your family, make it a *recurring* priority.
It will save you (if it will work as it did for me...) countless hours of frustration and puzzlement.
But you won't ever be able to do it all in one go, so you'll need to set aside some time every so often, to keep abreast of changes in the market as a whole, and simultaneously dig deeper in the stuff which is most relevant to your work.
I won't take responsibility for kids shrunk to 25.5% of their size, though!

[Grigio18]

I need to stop being so busy and set aside some R&D time to dig deeper.

I find absurd that there are still this kind of questions from users with years of experience behind.
These explanations have been given to us over and over again over the years.
If we succeed in getting good renders with old and wrong methods it does not prove that things have been done the right way, but only that we are able to make up for our technical deficiencies artistically, and that's fine, until we complain.

On the other hand I believe this is a symptom of how little attention has been paid to inform users towards the correct use of tools in the past.
Most of us carry with a lot of errors of approach, shortcuts and settings of the software that instead of helping us, create fences from which we often fail to get out.

As far as I'm concerned I haven't had any of these problems for years, since I started thinking about my work more as a virtual photographer.

- Use only real high quality hdri for lighting (or sun and sky).
- work on all your materials from scratch, using references, don't use shaders collections ( follow lele's suggestion about albedo vlaues)
- Re-check all the materials of the models you buy.
- Use realistic exposure values
- your render in the vfb without corrections has to look washed-out, to have a good preview of the final render always use a S curve correction o better use a good quality linear lut that simulates camera cc.

Maybe you'll became less productive for a while but it's worth it.

[Vizioen]

- Use only real high quality hdri for lighting (or sun and sky).
- work on all your materials from scratch, using references, don't use shaders collections ( follow lele's suggestion about albedo vlaues)
- Re-check all the materials of the models you buy.
- Use realistic exposure values
- your render in the vfb without corrections has to look washed-out, to have a good preview of the final render always use a S curve correction o better use a good quality linear lut that simulates camera cc.

Maybe you'll became less productive for a while but it's worth it.

Exactly my two cents. About the productivity, you'll lose some time in the beginning, but your renders will look beter and over time you'll regain the time you lost because you won't have to fiddle with wrong values anymore.

[^Lele^]

These explanations have been given to us over and over again over the years.

Hey, i need to justify my wage! ^^