Anyone fancy bringing this thread back to life? I feel having read through much of this, a lot of things have changed since 2014. Namely, raw renders can look like a photo stand in car in the framebuffer these days, and the post work done on a render shouldn’t be to make it look real anymore (that should be a given) but it should be as in photography where you’re combining different captures / beauties. For eg. on set the photographe might shoot their hero at 5pm, but have been capturing shots all day to use for different highlights to use in comp. I feel that’s where we are now in CG. Its easy to get a real looking car in the framebuffer and it feels much closer to photography now.
These days we are trying to get most stuff done inside the renderer. The less post work is needed, the better. We had jobs where we only relied on the RGB image instead of render passes. Often we also bake in a calibrated LUT of different DSLR’s into the image. You lose the dynamic range, but it just looks so much better! A linear EXR can be very hard to get looking right, it totally depends on the skill of the retouch artist. A lot of things can get messed up in post.
Also render times are so quick these days (high-res interiors being an exception), you can easily render different sets of lights, reflection etc. and comp them together, just like you would do with real photos.
Totally agree. If you are going into photoshop, and your lighting matches the reference car, then I don’t see the point in rendering fully linear (unless you’re going into Nuke). If I don’t need glare and glow in the framebuffer I’ll fully tonemap with reinhard / exponential, and if its a headlight / tail light shot with a full range HDRI, I’ll even clamp everything at 1.0. I don’t need anything over that in Photoshop. I’ll bake in DOF, motion blur, everything. I also work only on beauties. I cant remember the last time I used the render elements in a photoshop comp to rebuild the beauty. I’ll use them to supplement and maybe boost highlights, but that’s it.
So, it’s been another 3 years since the last post. Anything I missed in the meantime?
Do you make any use of the Lightmix, perhaps in creative ways?
Hey Lele,
no, not yet. I wanted to test the lightmix features on a studio shot, but we don’t do a lot of those lately…