Unity3D photorealistic rendering (also with substance)

Hi guys,

I have a question for really experienced users:
What is the best way for realize a photorealistic product visualization scene with Unity3D?
What are the basic elements (shaders, lighting, hdr, effects...)?

I want to propose a practical example, take a look at these stove examples:




How can I realize a photorealistic rendering of object only (without the scene) in Unity3D?

Any further advice to use substance material for this?

Any idea and suggestion is very useful for me, thanks in advance.
Kenshin

 

I say add cubemaps, great textures, ambient occlusion, and great normals maps.

 

Those are offline raycast based renderers. Unity has no way to aproach that, it is designed to achieve interactive content, not static image rendering. Some lighting fx from those renderers you will never be able to reproduce in any game engine.

 

It is possible, just make such render in some app like 3dsmax,maya and bake textures after that just import to unity. One guy made that months ago. It was very photorealistic.

 

That + Beast.

That.

Lightmap baking is one if the most important parts, second are realistic textures, and cubemaps.

 

this,
Parsimonia walkthrough video
http://vimeo.com/27669302

 

Thanks for all answers... I want to go a little bit in deep!

Yes, I know that this is a static render and my goal is to reach a very similar quality in a realtime rendering!

This is exactly what I am searching for in general

I agree with you about beast lightmap but for the environment.
In my case I want to focus only on the object the stove/fireplace.

How I can generate good and realistic cubemaps?

What about hdr?
Is this useful for my situation? ...Unity3d 3.5 came with hdr but I am not skilled enough to use and test it (I need a good tutorial)

 

Hdr helps very good for better realism, and you dont need any tutorial to use it.

 

Frankly just some really good diffuse textures will get you 90% of the way there.

Really nailing the specular and gloss values is the main thing to get things looking properly realistic. If you plug those into a physically-based shader (with gamma correct rendering and proper diffuse/spec lighting) you should be golden.

HDR probably won't do a whole lot for you if you're just focusing on that one object rather than a full scene.

 

A thing to keep in mind if the placement of focus, the room/environment is the key problem here- artistically remove the environment from focus (depth of field, or have nothing). The use of lighting and sets of different shaders (paint shader etc) will be important, but never forget you UV unwrap, surface normals and fun with topology (they are really the key to good realtime models).

hope you have good music because your need it for nice unwrapping

 

+1 for this
For the specular and gloss maybe you want to use HDRcubemap (idk if this possible already in 3.5, haven't tried it yet) approach, create a photography studio scene with the background and softbox light rig bake it into cubemap. And don't forget to make the softbox light bright enough so it can create reflective glossiness illusion into the product. And maybe you want to create some custom reflective shader to mask the luminance channel of the cubemap (to extract the brightest part from the cubemap, it usefull to creating an illusion of HDRreflection).

 

Explore the 'Transfer Maps' functionality of mental ray. It is what will allow you to do this.

I've been creating content for design visualizations like this myself, done properly, the results are indiscernable from a raytraced image, unless you zoom in quite a bit.

 

You could bake all stuff with vray ?

 

A while back (2-3 months?) someone got some really nice looking scenes in unity by baking lighting info in another program. Yes, it's possible : )
(And I don't remember what the topic was, maybe someone has)

 

Are you talking about this thread:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/100533-Parsimonia-1st-Floor-Walkthrough

Just take a look at that video...it looks amazing for me!

 

Thanks, we made this in Maya Mental Ray and brought the fbx and light maps into Unity. It can actually look even more realistic if you do renderings in Linear space instead of Gamma Space. 3.5 supports that now.

 

Yup, exactly that one, thunderent : )

 

In general thanks for all useful hints!!!

Congratulation, your work is really cool!

Sure I will check it... but do you think that for a product visualization without environment will be useful this methode?

Is there any good "metal paint shader" or "car paint shader" that I can use to realize the red metal coating material?

 

Having the object and no environment scene... how I can generate good cubemaps for fake reflection?

Is there any good software or library for this?

 

Absolutely. Read about what it does, it is the ideal method to use for making a single object that looks photorealistic. You take a high poly object, with shaders and textures and all, then project its rendered surfaces onto a low poly object.

 

"never be able to.." never say never. It will come.
I think the best approach is making sure you spend some time on creating some great textures to the models and environment.
As GPU's get faster and faster it will happen that real-time rendering for GI and raytracing will be possible. One thing we have to be aware of is some people can't always afford the most expensive latest GPU card.

 

Or you could just do what I did!

No, but the serious point to take is to pre-bake EVERYTHING. From lighting, displacement and normals to environment maps. The key to this method is the depth of the illusion against the breadth of the illusion. So from one point of view like mine you could quite easily turn the whole thing into an image. Adding more points of view(breadth) means more data for the computer, time per frame for the user and work for you. So if I made this a 2D game then I could separate out the Image into layers and use parallax. And by adding even more breadth, 3D, Makes this a much harder place to be.

Or in my case, just use an antiquated GUI system to do the work for you.