Options for rendering

[Mimsy]

Recently I've been doing renders of kitchens, bathrooms and similar for a building company and joiner team who have been doing a lot of renovations - I design the cabinetry and some extras in GDL, then mainly use the ArchiCAD library for fittings. I've been using the 3D images produced by ArchiCAD and also doing some in Twinmotion, but the builder has approached me and enquired about the possibility of more photorealistic renders. Twinmotion is dead easy to use, but the quality of the pictures could be a bit better.
I had a look at my options, and there seem to be a lot of rendering software applications out there. Are there any major problems with plugins and software difficulties when exporting from ArchiCAD 24 that I should be wary of before dipping my toe into the options?

[Carstenem]

Hi, is it possible you show us an image you created?

The reason I ask is that to get great realism out of a render Software you need to be a pretty good 3D Artist.
What I mean with this is not just knowing how to use the Software but how to get the best out of it.

Twinmotion can produce pretty good internal images if you know how. It is not like vray of course which is currently still the industry standard for most 3D Digital Architectural Artists but is a lot more sophisticated, hence a longer learning curve.

[Mimsy]

Sure thing - here a couple of a basic bathroom for a current client done on Twinmotion.

[Carstenem]

Thanks for showing us the images.

I hope it is ok to give you some critical feedback.

- Please don't get this the wrong way but these images are not looking very good because of lack of knowledge, not because of the Software.
- I suggest you go through some lighting tutorials for Twinmotion, there are some basic free ones on the Twinmotion Youtube site. They are not in depth but will give you a better understanding on how to lighten a scene.

- First turn off automatic exposure ( if it is off you need to turn down the sun intensity under settings, as it is set on maximum when automatic exposure is on)
- In the bathroom with very little natural light you need to use aerial lights.
- Add an aerial light in front of the window pointing horizontal into the room. Make sure it fits the window size. - Add another aerial light pointing from the entry door inside the room. This is a little bit cheating but will help the overall lighting of the scene. This light needs to be very low, like a tiny bit or you can see you "cheat"
- Add a reflection probe to improve the quality.
- make sure you turn on parallelism for the camera so the walls look straight.

If you work on this, the images will improve quite a lot.

There is much more to create a really high quality image but for this you need to be a 3D Digital Artist for a while, just like in any other job. With experience comes quality.

I have attached a work in progress image of an interior course I am producing. You can see that TM quality is pretty good if you know what you are doing. Not as good as vray as I mentioned before but I think most clients would be more then happy with this type of quality.

Should you be interested to get a really good foundation for TM including the 3 key elements - 3D model - texturing - lighting of a scene, then check out the info about my Twinmotion Masterclass for Archicad users here: https://www.asmtechbase.com/twinmotion-course-more

Carsten

[Mimsy]

Thanks very much! I don't mind critical feedback at all, especially if it helps me improve.

I'll look into everything you have suggested.

Thanks again

Mimsy

[Erwin Edel]

If you look at quality interior photos of nice interiors it is not uncommon that they used extra light to make the interior look bright and shiny. (You know those things that look like umbrellas)

As such it sometimes helps to put a light source behind the camera to help brighten your renders, rather than endlessly tweaking the actual light fixtures in your scene to get things to look nice.

I see a lot of renders from clients for their kitchen / bathroom done by showrooms and the quality of those is certainly not Vray, so I would say to hit that benchmark is very much possible in Cinerender or Twinmotion. Though I have no experience with Twinmotion other than installing and concluding my GPU is underpowered for it.

[Mimsy]

Thanks for the tip, Erwin. I will experiment with the lighting to see what produces the best result.

[Carstenem]

That is the right attitude good luck with it, I am sure it will improve your images!

[Mats_Knutsson]

Would be nice to see som "after" images when you're done .