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Hi,

My name is Bernardo. I am trying the Maxwell plugin for arhicad for the past 2 weeks. There is a great improvement from the previous artlantis renders we were producing before, but far from Photorealism. What am I doing wrong?


Maxwell for Archicad


Artlantis 3
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I would say its a combination of everything, sorry if that sounds too negative...
I cant see what is going on outside the window but I would suggest putting an hdri there rather than the sun and sky, even if it is just for a comparison...
From what I can see everything is a bit too square and smooth, I take it the model is nurbs... I would suggest bumping the materials up a bit but use high res maps (Behind the tv looks a bit odd)
in the real world nothing is really that flat or smooth or consistent even if you think it is.
Personally I like to add a bit of natural variation to the materials, this can be done subtly by creating a duplicate of a materials layer, changing the settings very slightly, and then using a texture map with a bit of variation as the opacity map, though this is not always desirable.
Nothing on the planet is as flat as that tv, even adding the most subtle curve or distortion to it would help.
Also try using multi layer materials to simulate coatings and micro-bumps, try two bsdfs instead of one, but blend like 60% / 40% weight with slightly varying roughness between the two. Or just use an additive reflective layer.
What kind of emitter did you use for the lights? how is it modelled inside?
Sometimes you can help achieve photorealism by boosting some of the reflective properties of a material.. e.g use a boosted reflectivity map to bring out the wood texture.
Add some variation and falloff to the reflectivity of the carpet, Again its a bit flat.
Finally, Although there are some good material on the website, there are some REALLY crap ones. Make all your own materials with nice high res texture maps!

Hi,
I think you should decide what is your main light source (sun or lamps).Try to setup lights using multilight

Thanks for the comments. I forgot to write that I did turn off caustics reflections and refractions because it was adding a lot of rendering time to the scene. I don't know how much contribution it would do since I don't have any real glass, water, etc on this set.