Blender Cycles render is a little bit sharpened, whereas other render engines render more soft and precise shadings. (Biased ++)
Do you guys also notice this? I believe this almost difficult to solve through post processing. Node shaders/procedurals can only go a long way. I hope we can find a solution to this in not so far distant time.
Making blender lean more to biased rendering implementation could probably help improve some of these issues. I am not too familiar to where most render engines lean more, although they might declare their programs to be unbiased I have read an article that states most render engines technically do lean more on biased programming.
chaosgroup.com/blog/the-truth-about-unbiased-rendering
Big appreciation and respect to all the blender dev team. Have a good day.
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What is actually the issue you are bringing up? Reading "sharpness" I thought of pixel contrast, something you can easily tweak with "Pixel filter" radius in Properties>Film panel. But then you say precise shadings, and I lost myself
* @ Lsscpp * That is also part of the problem. I am having a hard time pointing it out clearly. I have tried a lot of things I know to optimize a render in order to make it look more realistic but certain elements of shadings that cycles produces doesn't go away easily. I would encourage you to render a simple hard surface model that both cycles and luxcore render supports, compare them and if luxcore renders output turns out to be more realistic; post process it with all the necessary tweaks it needs. After all these steps there could be a probability that luxcore's out of the box render still looks realistic compared to cycles. That is why this brought me to the point of thinking that the issue mighrot be just in the settings, node combinations, or even compositing. The issue might be coming from a deeper source, it could be the algorithm that blender depends on. Blender needs to adopt more of the biased rendering. Some say most of the good render engines although they tend to be called unbiased, technically an expert stated that they are more biased programmed.
Blender's render results looks normal on dark scenes or high contrast compositions because the dark effect covers up the issue. It would ve difficult to pin point the shadings that makes it look less realistic because the dark scene is hiding some of the detials. But when you try to render something with a bright environment or fully lit setting like studios, the issue starts to become noticeable and almost all of blenders render in this format, even if accompanied with all post processing techniques, those critical tiny details that makes it less realistc is still obivious/present.
I hope you won't see as being negative. I am a blender supporter, and this is one way of me to share my thoughts on helping blender grow as a good render engines and not just a 3d modelling pipeline for big industries. Still images would benefit from it, motions graphics would highly be improved. Motion graphics even in stylized mode needs a good render engine that creatres realistic shadows and shadings. One good example is cinema 4d, the top render engines that it uses produces those kind of result and I am hoping that the blender team wouls get what I am trying to get in to. I just don't know what it is specifically but generally I believe it could be the render engine algorithm blender is currentlly basing it to. It would be critical to start this as early as possible it would be a little challenging if this would be put on notice for a another year from now. A slow transition to a more biased leaning render could probably be a game changer for blender and its future on mograph/animations.
* @johnpdelacruz28 * Interesting observation. :) It would be more informative if you could include E-Cycles( blendermarket.com/products/e-cycles ) in the comparison.
* @DONG HOON KIM * E-Cycles has the same issues that regular Cycles has, since it uses the same shaders and same light-solving algorithm. Mostly what changes afaik is the tile management and a different sampling pattern. I might be missing some other tech, but I feel it's not what johnpdelacruz is talking about.
* @johnpdelacruz28 * Cycles is (can be) unbiased, meaning that its light-solving algorithm converges to the "correct solution". Biased vs unbiased doesn't translate into realistic/unrealistic though. </br>Another difference I can easily spot between Cycles and Luxcore is that the latter is a so called "spectral renderer", meaning that while Cycles operates with R-G-B channels calculations, Luxcore operates with the whole spectral range of light emission, which along more visible and known light effects as dispersions in refractions, gives also subtle nuances in color bleeding. </br> Anyway, after your long explanation, still I don't get what you define more realistic. A quick 2 picture comparison might help. Or, in the posted picture where is the issue??
* @ Lsscpp * Of all the things I have stated, one way to metigate the issue is to have a tone mapping feature under the camera settings.
This could highly compensate for the time and quality control. I have stated some of the benefits of tone mappinh in pre production in this post. Please upvote it if you support the feature. Thanks. blender.community/c/today/wlfbbc/