Pacifica electric guitar, photo-real?

…so no, not really photoreal. I think my render looks quite good but it has a cartoonish feel to it and lacks the fine details required to make it look like a photo. I put loads of work into the materials on this project so that is what im really keen to hear feedback on.

I used masks for things like the guitar ware to give the paint a shiny feel to and the wood a rough one (similar techniques throughout). Crazybump was used for normal mapping.

Any comments and feedback is appreciated. What is braking the realism for you?

I visit this forum often so if you want any feedback in return just drop me a link and I will leave you a comment.

Cheers, Dom


1 Like

Hi Dom, nice work! The modelling looks awesome and very precise.
The thing that bothers me is the varnish: your guitar looks worn out (maybe a bit too much) but the varnish doesn’t look old. It has the reflectiveness of a new guitar in the parts that are not scratched. It should maybe incorporate more microscratches and be less sharp. this is the way the varnish on my older guitars is. Also, the parts where the wood appears should not be reflective.
In the same way the mechanical parts should look more aged, maybe incorporate a little bit of rust?

Looks great! I think that the Guitar is a bit too old, or worn out you could say I guess. The guitar stand looks too new and perfect also: There are no scratches, no nothing. You should try to add some imperfections to it. Maybe the guitar should have a old worn out leather strap, but that is just preference. The metal part that holds the strings in the bottom of the image looks perfectly new, but really it should be as old as the guitar. Try adding some rust and scratches. The image has some fireflies, so you should probably fix that. The background is pitch black, I think that a maybe a dark gray or blue, or a background with other stuff out of focus. Also, I didn’t get why you used masks. You said it was to give the guitar body a shiny look, and the wood a rough one, but you don’t really need masks for that, and, this is a question, does the masks affect the bounce lighting, because if it does, the n I wouldn’t recommend it for this scene.The speaker also looks a bit too yellow. Other then that, great modeling, the lighting looks good and the texturing of the guitar body is also great, maybe just too strong.

Looks good to me. I agree with the shiny finish where it is in tact. Maybe a slight mask for dullness very slight. To sell it a refection of something in the varnish. Like a person standing taking the photo, but very, very faint. Looks good, I bet if shown one would think it is a pic and not a model unless asked to guess

Very good work overall, but there should not be any reflections from the worn out wood part, and also background, even if it is out of focus it makes everything a whole lot more realistic in my opinion

Thanks everyone for all your comments! All very good points, some of which I never spotted myself. I am moving on to a new piece of work now and will take into account everything I have learned from this project.

Its good to see such a helpful community that’s willing to critique work in such a positive way.

Very nice Job.
The guitar and amp are looking very believable to me. The guitar is maybe globally a little oversaturated colorwise. The cable and the floor are looking too clean/brand new. When you ad some signs of age to these parts, as the guitar and amp have, will improve the whole pic I guess.

It’s close to photorealism… but perhaps it’s past that point? XD Looks great! Excellent job! :smiley:

Really great scene, modelling and lighting.
There are two (small) things that might be missing to make your scene photoreal:

  1. believable surroundings. Give the floor a texture or something. (Or mimic a photostudio)

  2. More Photoeffects. CG-Renders are perfect while photocameras add many errors to the pictures they take.
    Therefore if you want to make a photorealistic picture you have to add those errors to your render to mimic the photocamera.
    You can just add those errors in postproduction, though I think a little bit of simple colorcorrection will do wonders for your render.
    On Blenderguru you can find a list of possible flaws a photocamera adds to the picture:
    http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/the-1-reason-your-render-looks-fake/

Do your materials have fresnel?

As far as I know they don’t …then again I don’t know what fresnel is. Could you expand on what you were thinking?

You can look up some tutorials online about giving cycles material fresnel reflection (fresnel and layer weight material nodes); and in internal renderer it’s in the mirror tab, it’s just some sliders. Basically when you look at the surface, the more direct you’re looking on to the surface the less it will reflect, and it will reflect more when the surface is facing away from you.

Think of like the surface of water, a shiny flat marble floor, or car paint. Some materials exhibit fresnel a lot more strongly than others, but all real-world materials inherently have it, even rough diffuse surfaces.

If you have a BlenderCookie account, check out Kent Trammell’s Pancake Hobo series.

Hi ! To add realism to your lighting, you might want to use an environment texture. It’ll act as a global illumination (it can be invisible to the camera, if you don’t want to see it in your render) and project variations in the reflections of your shaders. To do that, you can go to the world property panel and change the “Background” setting to “Environment texture” and then add and HDR image.
Nice model, by the way :slight_smile:

ditto. a little too shiny, red paint could be gradually more dull towards the worn edges, good stuff though.

Agree with the shiny red and I think maybe desaturate the neck texture a bit. The necks on my guitars aren’t so vibrant and the worn spots are more grey then yellow. Just a thought. It being so vibrant may be giving you the cartoony feel. Overall though it’s really good and you are very very close.