Major Project: Scene Cleanup & Lighting / Texturing Tweaks #3

I've continued working to clean up my room shots so they are prepared for final rendering. This has been a long process, as I was struggling to get the bricks to look the way that I wanted. In my previous post, I mentioned using smooth tangents to fix the faceted appearance that some of the bricks were getting.

For some reason, in some of the shots it made the bricks appear almost flat - their specular highlights were much more faded or gone and darker shadows/marks appeared. I wasn't quite sure why this was, and after a whole day of rendering yesterday, trying out settings, and reading articles... I was ready to just settle on it. I'm unsure if it was just a bug, other things running on my computer interfering with the renders, or something odd in the file causing interference with rendering.

However, after I was ready to just settle on it I found a thread online discussing normal maps in Arnold. Someone said that normal maps don't work quite so well in Arnold, so I decided to return to my scene and remove the normal maps since I know that there is an auto-bump option in the displacement settings. I also purchased the high res versions of my textures so I can use a 4k map for the height to get more detail for the bump as well.

This seems to work better and results seem to be less faceted than using a normal map, despite it working fine in some other shots. For example, the shot below looks fine with the normal maps and without, but I like how the shine on the bricks and overall lighting looks in the non-normal map version more.

 I'm going to continue to look into this, but as long as I achieve the look that I want it's fine. Again, the other shots that I am rendering looked fine when I tested out the test frames frames, but I'm sorting this out early enough so if I do need to go back and re-render I have time. I'm going to be going back to my previous room shots and check if they look better without normal maps too.