- Aug 2, 2017
- 75
- 311
I see a lot of new games where the renders feel very lifeless and bland. Majority of people who are making games here are using the same assets so i'm going to give some tips on making yours stand out from the rest. I'm going to walk through the steps of how I would personally improve a very basic render. I'm going to create a medieval fantasy scene using assets iv'e found in this site and some other sites like this.
This is the starting render. Just a ground plane with a brick texture and some modular medieval buildings with a basic hdri. Aside from the background feeling out of place, notice how empty it is. not much detail. There are a ton of assets you can find online so there really should be no reason not to add some to your scenes. I'm going to start with adding some basic assets to give it a little more detail.
I took care of the background by adding a castle wall in the background. I added some crates and barrels to the buildings and of course the tree in the center. The crates add more meaning to the buildings like they're actually being used. Next i'm going to add a little more life to the render by adding some plants. I'm going to add some bushes into the ally ways to get rid of some of that emptiness and bring the attention more towards the foreground.
The bushes helped fill that void where the ally ways are and I added some vines to the buildings. Plants help a lot especially with outdoor scenes when it comes to bringing it to life. Compared to the first image, this is already feeling alive. But we still have more to do so next I am going to add some characters to the scene. Since this is a medieval town, there should be quite a bit of people there. Obviously we cant add a ton of genesis figures to the scene because it will take up too many resources. To solve this problem I am going to use billboards. Billboards are a way of adding background characters to a scene without impacting performance. All they are is a plane with a png slapped on it. If setup throughout the scene correctly, they will look 3d.
Adding these billboards didnt affect my render times by more than a few seconds. Now we have a scene that went from a few empty buildings to a little town thats inhabited by elves and dwarves. But looking at the render it still seems very dull. The last step to make this render complete is in the render settings. This is by far the most important thing to any render.
in your render settings go into filtering and turn the pixel filter radius down to 0.85 from 1.50. This will make your final render less blurry.
For the last step we are going to increase the saturation of the render. Go into tone mapping and turn the saturation up from 1.0 to 1.5. This will make the colors a lot more vibrant. All scenes are different and depending on the lighting you may have to lower or raise this value to keep it from being too saturated. Now after all that lets take a look at the finished product compared to the starting render
This is what we started with.
This is what we finished with. The render setting i mentioned above are the most important thing to having a sharp and vibrant image. Other than that all you have to do to improve your bland renders are to add some extra details. Make the world you are created feel lived in by your characters. I hope this helps some of you on your projects
This is the starting render. Just a ground plane with a brick texture and some modular medieval buildings with a basic hdri. Aside from the background feeling out of place, notice how empty it is. not much detail. There are a ton of assets you can find online so there really should be no reason not to add some to your scenes. I'm going to start with adding some basic assets to give it a little more detail.
I took care of the background by adding a castle wall in the background. I added some crates and barrels to the buildings and of course the tree in the center. The crates add more meaning to the buildings like they're actually being used. Next i'm going to add a little more life to the render by adding some plants. I'm going to add some bushes into the ally ways to get rid of some of that emptiness and bring the attention more towards the foreground.
The bushes helped fill that void where the ally ways are and I added some vines to the buildings. Plants help a lot especially with outdoor scenes when it comes to bringing it to life. Compared to the first image, this is already feeling alive. But we still have more to do so next I am going to add some characters to the scene. Since this is a medieval town, there should be quite a bit of people there. Obviously we cant add a ton of genesis figures to the scene because it will take up too many resources. To solve this problem I am going to use billboards. Billboards are a way of adding background characters to a scene without impacting performance. All they are is a plane with a png slapped on it. If setup throughout the scene correctly, they will look 3d.
Adding these billboards didnt affect my render times by more than a few seconds. Now we have a scene that went from a few empty buildings to a little town thats inhabited by elves and dwarves. But looking at the render it still seems very dull. The last step to make this render complete is in the render settings. This is by far the most important thing to any render.
in your render settings go into filtering and turn the pixel filter radius down to 0.85 from 1.50. This will make your final render less blurry.
For the last step we are going to increase the saturation of the render. Go into tone mapping and turn the saturation up from 1.0 to 1.5. This will make the colors a lot more vibrant. All scenes are different and depending on the lighting you may have to lower or raise this value to keep it from being too saturated. Now after all that lets take a look at the finished product compared to the starting render
This is what we started with.
This is what we finished with. The render setting i mentioned above are the most important thing to having a sharp and vibrant image. Other than that all you have to do to improve your bland renders are to add some extra details. Make the world you are created feel lived in by your characters. I hope this helps some of you on your projects
