Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
This article is the result of a work made by Emanuele Amelio and me, Ciro Sannino.
Thanks Emanuele for all the time you spent to work on this!
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We purchased a scene of Bertrand Benoit (BBB3viz), a superb artist that everyone of you know for sure! Just to be clear, this article is not to debate on his skills, we’re not crazy!!! This post is to prove that not all complexity are to directly connected to the final result.
LET’S START
This render below is the result of download and render. No one parameter has been modified:
The lighting is very nice and materials are realistic. A very beautiful image!
[ Render time 7h 43′ ]
Simplificating
Exploring the materials, we encountered very complex materials. Watching this users usually think: “wow I want to learn how to create such materials!!!”, but we ask you: Are materials arranged in this way really useful? Do they really make the difference? Then, we simplified a lot each one.
Below some examples: In the red box you have the Starting material, and in the green one our simplification. We tried to keep only the relevant maps, deleting what we considered simple redondances.
GOLD
MARBLE
WALL
(*) Each material has been rearranged following the lessons in our 5SRWcourse
We applied the 5SRW final settings, and there’s the result [ Render Time just 1h 38‘ ] :
The lighting is still very nice and materials also. The image ia still a very beautiful image!!!
Plus, avoidibng too much complex materials I can reduce so much the render times:
[ Render time 1h 38′ / before it was 7h 43′ ]
Of course the images contain differences. Actually we didn’t try to make them exactly the same, this is not the point! Someone could also prefer 5SRW version, but this is not the point as well.
The point is: complexity really worth it?
COMPARISON:
Are you still checking them to understand what’s the orignal and which is the one rearranged? :)
[ Update ]
We also tried to render with the original render settings, just simplifing the materials:
Render Time: 2h 52 mins – Clearly complex materials kill the computation, without relevant changes
So, what creates ‘beauty’ in our renders?
The more power we waste into tecnicisms, the less power we will have for what really make the difference.
What really produce “beauty” is Proportions, Composition, Lighting and Colors, if we use correctly these 4 elements, 99% of the work it’s done. Think about, we didn’t change these characteristic here, that’s why the impact remains substancially the same.
No problem an artist arranges materials this way here, anyone follow his own way to work! But teaching is different and my goal is helping you addressing all your energies on relevant things and 5SRW is my tool. Following this philosophy I realized my work ‘Gravity‘ and I was selected to be part of the promotional campain of V-Ray 3. What amazing result for a ‘simple’ approach!
By the way simple does not mean ‘beginner’, actually as the genius Leonardo said:
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication