et me ask you something, when you slave away for hours in Blender, what are you

trying to achieve?
To make cool stuff? Nope. Think bigger.
Give up?
Whether you realize it or not, the sole purpose of all 3d art is to make somethi
ng look believable.
That s it. There are no exceptions.
If your image doesn t relate to the real world in some way, the audience will feel
disconnected and become disinterested. It doesn t matter if your rendering an arc
hitectural fly-through of a house or an orc warrior fighting his way out of a vo
lcano, you are still taking something that exists in your mind and producing it
as a picture and hoping the audience believes it.
You re doomed, unless
Let s say you spend hours intricately modeling each and every nail of a door frame
, you piece together textures to create flawless materials, and you spend a soli
d week on the lighting setup. Well guess what? If you hit render now your scene
is still going to look fake. The reason for this is simple: You haven t added cam
era imperfections.
It sounds like a joke, but it s absolutely true. Photography is the single most im
portant thing to understand when it comes to learning 3d, but for some reason mo
st artists choose to ignore it.
When you take a real photo with a real camera, do you realize how many flaws are
being built into the photo?
Just to name a few:
Chromatic Abberation
Vignetting
Soft Glare
Light rays
Reflecting glare
Bloom
Lens Flare
Glare burnout
Ghost glare
Depth of Field
Motion Blur
Lens Distortion
Lens dust, scratches, sweat, fingerprints
Film developing artifacts
Color grading
Now guess how many of these flaws occur when producing a computer generated imag
e?
NONE. ZERO. ZIP. NADA.
When you hit F12 you will produce a perfect still. Every. Single. Time.
For example, take a look at this image by the talented artist, Marek Denko:
Aside from the perfect lighting, flawless modeling and impressive materials. Wha
t else has he incorporated?
Effects. And lots of them.
Depth of field
Chromatic Abberation
Lens scratches, dust & dirt
Color Grading
Bloom
Reflecting glare
These are all things are done outside of the 3d viewport and added in post produ
ction. That means that after he slaved over every piece of detail in the scene,
he flipped to the compositor and continued working. That is what pushed this sce
ne over the edge.
Have you ever wondered how Pixar achieved that authentic film look in Wall-E?
This was actually the result of many months of work. Before they began working o
n the meat of the production, they focused entirely on trying to replicate the l
ook of live footage in their 3d software. They even went as far as to consult th
e Director of Photography from No Country for Old Men, on tips for creating real
camera and lighting setups.
We rented some equipment and used the live-action DP [Marty Rosenberg] who eventu
ally shot some of the live-action elements. He helped us do some lens tests. Our
depth of field, our cameras never look as we expect them to.
Life is nothing but imperfection and the computer likes perfection, so we spent p
robably 90% of our time putting in all of the imperfections, whether it s in the d
esign of something or just the unconscious stuff. How the camera lens works in [
a real] housing is never perfect, and we tried to put those imperfections [into
the virtual camera] so that everything looks like you re in familiar [live-action]
territory.
-Andrew Stanton
(source: AWN)
The result was a very slick, very believable environment for Wall-E to explore.

Why using the compositor is crucial to your artistic success

The most common question people ask is, why would I want to incorporate camera f
laws into my renders? After all camera flaws are exactly that, flaws. So wouldn t
an image that is clean from these flaws look better?
Nope. Let me explain why.
When you look at a white car sitting in the hot sun, your eyes expect to see a r
eflecting glare. When you look closely at your spoon during breakfast, your eyes
expect the bowl of cereal in the background to be out of focus. And at night ti
me when you look at a street lamp, your eyes expect to see rays of light.
I could go on, but I think you get the picture.
Our eyes have become so accustomed to seeing these imperfections that it looks o
dd when they aren t there.
Now don t get me wrong, lighting, materials, textures and lighting are all importa
nt and I m not pretending they aren t. But unless you learn to take camera effects s
eriously, you can kiss believability goodbye.
If you are interested in exploring this topic further, I have written an eBook c
alled The Wow Factor, which you can purchase here: http://wowfactorbook.com