They had to reflect light in a particular way, you had to feel like they were embossed in some placed and cracked in others, they had to match Cali’s work precisely, etc. The paintings had to show all the particularities that they have in real life. Note: this part is a bird’s-eye view of my shader setup - there aren’t many details so it’s mostly for people already familiar with 3D rendering, texture maps, lighting and normals… (To give you an idea, the final full-sized result took less than a day and a half to compute!)Īt that point, I felt like anything was possible, and so I went on to tackling the technical pièce de résistance: making the paintings as realistic as possible.

It was a game-changer: by using the new denoising feature, reducing light bounces and heavily cheering for my brand new NVIDIA-GPUed laptop, I managed to get very very decent render times. That’s until I luckily stumbled upon this excellent tutorial by Andrew Price (from Blender Guru) about how to speed up Cycles rendering. I started to fear that it would take me months to get the entire sequence…

The initial tests took a long time to get rendered - way too long. So I switched engines, I worked on my modelling a bit and then, I did some renders.Īnd that was the start of the real journey… Step 1: Freaking out when faced with the rendering timeĪs is always the case when you use Cycles and have no prior knowledge in its inner workings, I’d actually missed out on a lot of interesting parameters at first.

Compared to the internal and new EEVEE engines, Cycles is physically based and therefore specifically designed for lifelike renders. How to get a realistic render in Blender?įirst of, to get a realistic render style, I knew I had to use Blender’s Cycles render engine. Once again, that’s what I love about 3D - you can easily move a wall, replace a door, scale everything up or down… it really helps with conceiving credible and pleasing ambiances! We actually managed to sketch the overall movie pretty fast, but then we had to improve the technique to get a better rendition of the paintings. Cali Rezo’s sketchbook #3: the textures (color maps, specular maps, bump maps)Īfter we had both roughed out the subject, we started to make some low-res small-sized renders to get a feel for the room.

3d painting blender