Rope
Not only shader settings, but geometry as well. I created small fibers and loose threads on the rope using the Quick Fur tool in Blender. I then refined the result with several modifiers: Trim, Set Hair Curve Profile, Interpolate, Noise, Frizz, and Shrinkwrap. For the material, I used a mix of Transparent BSDF and Hair BSDF, setting the color to match the rope. This subtle detail helped make the material feel more tactile and believable, especially in close-up shots.
Creating a Realistic Camera
One of my real-life hobbies is photography, and I’ve always wanted to have more realistic lens controls in 3D. Over time, I experimented with different methods, including modeling the lens itself with accurate IOR values for the glass. While that approach technically worked, it was incredibly difficult to control and far too performance-heavy for practical use in a real project.
Recently, thanks to a recommendation from a friend, I discovered the Lens Sim add-on for Blender. The add-on offers fully customizable lens settings, chromatic aberration, vignetting, distortion, lens softness, and more. Although it’s still in development and has some flaws, it’s already a very powerful tool, and now I can’t imagine working on a render without it. For the environment renders, I used the Helios-44 preset. It’s a lens I own and really like for its unique character in real life.
The add-on includes a wide range of settings, but for this project, I added lens dirt, a small amount of bloom (0.01), and some glare (0.1) to introduce subtle imperfections. There’s not much technical data available online for my specific variant of the Helios-44, it’s quite an old lens, so I didn’t adjust the individual glass elements. However, I did tweak the Abbe values slightly to replicate the distorted chromatic aberration look. In a previous personal project on ArtStation, I also tried to recreate that same chromatic aberration effect, but instead of modifying Abbe values, I used Custom Ramp settings.
Just like in real life, chromatic aberration in 3D slightly blurs the image, after all, it’s a lens imperfection. However, I still wanted to showcase the textures I created without that blurriness. After a lot of tweaking and test renders, I ended up going with the simple solution: rendering two separate versions of the shot, one with chromatic aberration enabled, and one without. It’s not the most physically accurate method, but as I mentioned at the beginning, I like to keep a bit of artistic control in my renders, and this was one of those cases.
The only downside is that the focus shifts slightly between the two versions, but that won’t be noticeable in the final result. What’s left is to combine those renders, which I will cover later.
