Eyeball Soup Part 6: Rendering

Yesterday was spent rendering the scene. I set up the lights and the first thing I noticed is, they had no effect on the scene. After a quick google search I realized why: I did not scale down my objects enough. My soup bowl has a diameter of 3 meters and the standard light has one of 25 centimetre with a couple of hundred virtual watt. So, I scaled up my light and the wattage up into the thousands. The lighting might look a little less realistic, but good enough for me.

The lights are a spotlight from above with a yellow tint, a sort of oil lamp, and a white point light to hint at a window or some other source of natural light, just to add variation. In front of the spotlight I put a simple plane with holes in it to approximate the mesh of a lamp and to add some oppressive shadows.

When I first rendered it, I used Eevee, which being a real-time render engine was quick but the results also less detailed.

Changing to the Cycles render engine was a world of difference, but I did get this strange noise in my soup.

The solution I found online was to increase sampling of the render and add a denoiser. The results look fantastic.

However, it takes around 40 minutes to render it, so I might need to optimise that in the future.