Am 15.01.2012 00:10, schrieb The Pseudonym:
> hi guys any tips on how to make this model look realistic? ive been tinkering
> with old Moray for materials and i always come up with render thats either too
> dark or too bright, and now this looks too cartoonish.

 From my experience, Radiosity is /the/ one most essential thing to use 
for a realistic look - it makes one hell of a difference.

If you have any notable reflecting surfaces in your image (e.g. glass), 
second most essential thing is to give them something to reflect. It 
often doesn't even matter /what/ - a HDR light probe is a good idea 
there if you don't care to model a detailed environment for your item to 
live in.

At third place I'd rank area lights. No light source comes even close to 
a perfect point, even the sun isn't (it's far away, but also pretty 
large), and every observer unconciously "knows" it.

If you have any lights nearby, make sure they use realistic fading. 
That's a fade_power of 2, and a fade_distance something around the 
actual size of the light source. Don't use fade_distance to control the 
brightness - you have the light source color for that, which you can 
simply multiply by a scalar factor (expect to need surprisingly large 
values for that).

Which brings us to another important topic: Do get your gamma homework 
done right! (I wouldn't be surprised if this was the reason why you were 
struggling with the brightness.) I strongly suggest using POV-Ray 3.7 
(RC3), which is designed to handle gamma properly out of the box 
(provided you use #version 3.7 and assumed_gamma 1.0). POV-Ray 3.6 may 
need manual preprocessing of texture images to get it right.

Some slight focal blur may also do some good, especially for objects 
that are supposed to look small. A good aperture size is about whatever 
0.5 cm would be in POV-Ray units. Even if your object is large, you can 
add something in the foreground to get some good effect from the focal blur.

Apropos blur: If you have any surfaces that are neither perfectly dull 
nor perfectly shiny, you should consider using blurred reflections 
(which can be achieved in POV-Ray e.g. via the so-called "micronormals" 
approach). Be careful to balance them well with highlights.

(BTW, what people usually don't realize is that highlight intensity is 
/not/ necessarily in the same range as reflection brightness. For very 
tight highlights (which is what you should use to complement non-blurred 
reflections) it should be set surprisingly high. There's a formula I 
have somewhere to realistically relate reflection to highlight intensity 
depending on roughness and phong_size, respectively.)


Another thing often underestimated is beveling of edges. It's a hell lot 
of extra work, whether you use a mesh model or CSG, but it can make or 
break an image. Adding one flat extra facet at each corner may suffice, 
but for best effects use rounded edges. (Did I mention that it's a hell 
lot of work?)

Speaking of edges, so-called "proximity pattern" macros are good for 
adding rust or dirt to crevices, or giving edges a worn look, all of 
which adds to the credibility of the image. They /might/ also help 
faking beveled edges, though I've never seen anyone try yet; a simple 
moderate brightening of the texture close to the edge could do the trick.


(As an added note, if you're rendering small objects, or materials with 
notable translucency, subsurface scattering can make some difference. 
It's still experimental in POV-Ray 3.7 though, and this particular model 
won't need it anyway.)

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