I’m looking to make a medieval city primarily using high quality textures and materials.
I’m having trouble with a few things: it comes out looking like a game, even with 4k textures, I’m not entirely certain what I should do about that, I’ll upload screenshots soon, but any suggestions help! I’d like it to be photorealistic, like you felt like you were walking through medieval England or something, bustling with peasants and rich folk alike, I tried to take inspiration from Assassin’s Creed II, III, and Unity, but I wasn’t able to capture the realistic feel.
Yoyomike, usually the lightning is important for realism. I haven’t tried to go the ultra realistic approach but with most 3d rendering lightning is a major factor to realism. It has to do with a subconcious spotting the difference in lightning which makes it look real or not. Your mind knows if lightning is off even if you don’t realise t yourself. It can prove usefull read some articles online. This should be a good start: http://buildnewgames.com/lighting/
Another thing to keep in mind is the uncanny valley for your humans, just google it.
Also the details of your scene will play a big role. Like all the little things that could be lying around on the floor. Just general clutter usually helps to break up a very uniform looking scene. If something like the Assasin’s Creed games are realistic enough for you, you’ll have a long way ahead of you, but if you’re pushing for actual photorealism then you might want to keep the scene a bit simpler and smaller, considering how much more effort that’ll take.