Hi everyone! This is my first complete modeling project after about a week of learning Blender. I decided to make a retro PC.I modeled the PC, keyboard, and mouse and also tried working with materials, lighting, camera placement, and Eevee rendering.I'm still very new to Blender, and I feel like the final render looks a bit dull/flat.Could you give me some feedback on why it looks dull and what I should learn or change to improve the lighting, materials, and overall render?
a bevel modifier would help, it helps the object catch the light on the edges and stops things looking so mechanical / sharp. if it acts funny make sure the scale of the object has been applied first you could set the screen to a glass BSDF material or just create that effect in Principled BSDF I guess and turn on the thin wall setting throwing on a plastic texture from ambientcg or something would help create some surface noise and stop it looking flat. the way I'd do that is download the plastic texture off the site, put it in a folder, then get the node wrangler add-on in blender, that way you can create the material and just press ctrl + shift + t on the material node in the shader tab and select all the textures you downloaded and it'll apply them all for you, then put the texture coordinate generated into the vector slot, set the projection on the image texture from flat to box for all of the textures, then adjust the scale on the texture coordinate, like so aside from that it'd just be lots of little things. the mesh looks like it's floating ever so slightly above the surface. the wires could have some shape variety, like if you added a load of loop cuts along the length of it and scaled some of them in to create a vacuum tube sort of look, make the main wire into the keyboard dangle down rather than being propped up in the air, scale the surface so it looks more like a desk and add a brown material to it or a wood textureusing reference would probably help a lot too. maybe check out the technique where you extrude from imported image planes, like Ian Hubert does. Cycles is generally better for rendering, though it dependsyou could add in an HDRI for lighting, experiment with using it as an ambient light and using a classic 3-point lighting set up (main, fill light and rim light) hopefully none of that is overwhelming and all makes sense. really just do whatever is fun for you
>>1031470Thanks a lot for feedback! This is really helpful, especially the bevels and material suggestions. I’m still very new to Blender, so I haven’t learned Cycles much yet and I don’t really have a powerful GPU for heavy rendering, which is why I’m using Eevee for now. Is it possible to get a more realistic result with Eevee only or any other modelling feature or tools which didn't discover yet? I’ll definitely try the bevels, better materials and 3-point lighting you suggested.
>>1031493Advice from oldfag, right?
>>1031466I think it looks flat because it is flat, theres no bump/normal map. A little white noise goes a long way
>>10314661) Study general photography/design/art principles.2) Study how real cameras, lights and materials work.>Could you give me some feedback on why it looks dull and what I should learn or change to improve the lighting, materials, and overall render?I'm not sure if you were going for a stylized or realistic look, but in any case the biggest problems with this render are the lighting, background and colors.You can keep the model as is, use some simple NPR shaders in Eevee or even just flat colors with outlines, play with the color scheme, lighting, background and composition a bit and it should make for a nice stylized render.Don't forget to switch the View to "Standard" in the Render->Color Management settings for NPR work.Here's a quick render, I tried to achieve an '80s product photo vibe. You should be able to reverse-engineer it.
>>1031606Yeah that's right, I forget about NPR colour management settings now it is much better but still learning how to use lighting and materials colour shaders.
>>1031466i know nothing other than i've used 'puter way too much over the years, my thoughts are you've made good progress for learning in a week, at this stage you should consider texture/bump mapping to allow the object to look like a real-world object, and now would be the time to get the proportions perfected (cable, keycaps) so the objects also appear more like real objects. a bumpy plastic texture for the case, glass for the screen, no cartoonish proportions, rubbery flaccid coiled for the cables and it will be looking a lot more real. figure out what common office lighting was for the era and dial in the lighting characteristics to match the color temperature.
>>1031798there are any websites which have high collection of pbr textures to download free? most sites have small amount textures only
