Simply Maya User Community

Good to see more Arch Viz stuff around! Ok, so my critique is rooted in the assumption that the goal is photorealism since that’s usually the case with Arch Viz. For the sake of brevity, I won’t get into too much detail and focus purely on the areas that could use improvement (so this is not me trying to be harsh).

Image1 (the dining room with the seated woman)
Image2 (the living room and TV scene)
Image3 (white sofa and drinks)

Generally, there are some things to keep in mind when going for realism.

- Generic models regardless of theme and inspiration (1950’s retro, Victorian, contemporary etc) need to look like designers created them not only to function but also to attract a buyer, it helps make an object look believable. And organic pieces need to look like they exist. So real world proportions and consistent measurements come into play here, keep references handy.

- Textures need to have as little distortion as possible (the pattern on image1’s window). Maya now has a checker texture preview function in the UV Editor. Textures also need to be high enough quality to survive camera angles and image output resolutions and be applied with the proper scale (the floor in image2 is scaled too big and blurry).

- Same goes for materials, there should be no confusion as what an object is made of (always check references). I see a lot of solid colors, uniformly shiny surfaces and some that have zero reflectivity and the surface materials could be more descriptive. I don’t know if the sofa is fabric or leather. Of course, this ties in with texturing.

- Lighting is a huge deal when it comes to realism. If you’re using the Maya color management and you’re using physical lights, then you’re on the right track. Each light that is created needs to have a purpose and that purpose will decide it’s color, intensity and general behavior (sunlight, TV screen, candle light etc). I don’t know the setups you’ve used. Image2 and image3 have flat lighting and there is a lack of contact shadows and depth. Image2 is also overly bright so there is some loss of detail on the sofa. Provided that you’ve rendered out an image with a high enough bit depth, there is always the option to alter the highlights, midtones and shadows to balance out the light and get rid of the overly bright spots.

- Compositing/Framing. Image3 has the most interesting framing, try more of that. The other two renders don’t really lead the eye anywhere. It’s tempting to try to show the view all the work that went into the scene but it doesn’t have to be squeezed into the same shot (I’ve been guilty of this myself). You can get multiple interesting shots from the same scene so don’t feel like you’re constrained to one. Check out some tips on photography too.

- Quality settings. I see jagged edges where there should be clean straight lines so the anti-aliasing values need some adjustment. This is affecting all three images.

I've rambled on enough!