Rendering - more photorealism

[nitishgautam]

recently..ive been trying to make a jetbike and no matter how much I tweak the settings, the renders just don't come out realistic enough...
Heres one of my renders - http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/5343/jetbikesk3.jpg
I used these settings - http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/7...ettingslg2.jpg
I went to the setting called PRODUCTION and enabled caustics and global illumination and final gathering on....thats why its custom..and i set primary to raytrace because results seemed better there..
this is not realistic to me..ive seen so much better renders than these..im sorry but this is true...what am i doing wrong?
I am inspired by renders like these (http://fc01.deviantart.com/fs15/f/20...by_sabaman.jpg)

I dont know if my expectations are too high I am learning maya and would like to know (before I take on serious projects) can I

model more realistically using mental ray?

people say their renders took 23 hours and blah blah.....why does mine only take 5 or so minutes?......I am willing to give my

computer more time for rendering I just need to know the settings for really high quality photorealistic rendering....

any help would be appreciated......

[bajicdusko]

Rendering with mental ray will make your scene more realistic. Use Depth map shadows, enable photon emision. Try to rendering Fine trace or Final Gather,Caustics.... experiment.

Best Regards

yeah... its not all just mental ray, you must use the shaders and edit them... use bumps, noises, speculars, lights, cameras... there is a good tutorial in this site about shading in maya section...:
Welcome to 3DM3.com - World's Computer Graphics Community
its kinda big, but covers the basics well.
you wlil find more easy to render cars, because maya has an default material that works well by itself (but for perferction you will need more tweaks), its in: window -> rendering editors ->HYPERSHADE ->"create mental ray nodes" -> materials, and finally "MI_CAR_PAINT_PHEN" you can give it a try

but remember, to be realistic you cant have just an object, must have the placement, have a nice ambient for it, make it all real.

[gannonroader]

Just a note, i'm pretty sure the image you said inspired you isn't even 3D. Looks like it was done in illustrator, but I could be wrong.... Anyways, yeah as they said, try using mental ray, but also, something i'm just finally starting to play with is Ambient Occlusion, and a sharpen filter in photoshop. Really a big difference with some renders. Also you might wanna try messing with some alternate materials. Hope that helps.