Hey drowsy, any chance I can get you to take a look at this scene and give me some pointers on how to improve it? I tried playing around as per your suggestions, but I want to know what to do to make it better. I'm still not happy with the shading, particularly around where she's sitting on his lap. Just doesn't look right. Plus I think the brightness settings are too high, but I lose the shadows if I drop it.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated. (Anyone else want to comment, please do).
Thanks for the request. I liked your original, and it's difficult to know what you're going for. Still, I gave it a go:
1. In F5>Settings, changed Rendering Path to Deferred. This makes the lighting "fixed", not varying depending on camera position. It also looks better overall, imo.
2. I liked your lights, but they were a bit strong (especially with deferred rendering). And, I don't use the camera/studio light, so I disabled that. So, I had to add a new directional light, which I made the key light (maybe should've been a rim).
3. Moved the other lights, added another pair of fill and rim lights to better capture both of their faces/bodies. The principle I followed for lights was just to retain depth (shadow/highlight) but make sure that legibility is somewhat good on both.
4. Changed the saturation of lights, so the result looks a bit more grey but imo more realistic. Personal preference obviously. Also, I had to alter the bias of the lights to remove issues with unnatural shadows.
5. Reduced the Reflection Probe intensity to half. In a scene like this, with a flat background, the reflection adds an artificial outline/sheen to bodies, so it seemed better to reduce it. With a map or cubemap, its colors reflect onto the characters.
6. Added depth of field effect. As discussed in previous page of this thread, though, it looks very subtle in renders.
Other than that, if this was my own scene I'd do a few things differently, like using other shader/skin on the characters and hair (for subsurface scattering and 4k/8k textures), and a graphics settings preset I've tuned over time. I'd also add a cubemap background or a map, but of course that depends on what your project/context is (f.ex. if you want renders with a transparent background, in which case what you've got is good). Edit: I added a final render from after I did a few more changes, applying Hanmen shaders and changing the key light to a spotlight (making one of the rims directional instead).